Understanding Japan Through Its Cartoons

February 13, 2008

What kind of world do we live in when the Japan Society dedicates three months to "The Genius of Japanese Lacquer" and only four days to its amazing "Dawn of Japanese Animation" film series? Between today and Saturday, the Society will present dozens of short animated Japanese films made in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s for the first time in America, with English subtitles.

Many of the films will be accompanied by the live narration of Midori Sawato, Japan's most renowned benshi (live narrator), giving them the feel of loopy bedtime stories. Each day of the retrospective is devoted to a different genre, capped by a similarly themed live-action movie: Wednesday night is dedicated to "Chambara Action & Adventure"; "Horror & Comedy" unspools on Thursday; "Propaganda" is set for Friday, and on Saturday, it's all "Music & Dance."

Though animation arrived in Japan in 1907, Japan Society's series picks up with the second wave of animators. Japanese animation embodied the spirit of the Taisho era, when Japan was sucking up trends and ideas — two of them being socialism and animation — from overseas, then custom fitting them to Japanese culture.

The shorts in this series exhibit the same fascination with anthropomorphic animals that Walt Disney and Max Fleischer had, leavened with a near-pathological obsession with tanukis. These shape-shifting raccoon dogs are prototypical slackers, living only to eat, drink, and slap their enormous bellies like drums while driving everyone bananas. They're relatively harmless, however, which makes the ending of "Danemon's Monster Hunt at Shojoji" (1935) even more bloodcurdling, as the titular hero unmasks them as the monsters haunting the local spook house, then grabs a couple, bellowing, "Tanuki soup tonight!" The similarly hyperactive "Hatanosuke and the Haunted House" runs only 77 seconds, but it, too, ends with its hero giggling, "Raccoon dogs were the monsters!" before heading off, presumably, to roast one.

In the years following World War I, Japanese animators made up their own rules. They were technicians first, not storytellers, so they stole folktales and popular songs to use as frameworks for their films. They certainly weren't above stealing from American movies; Mickey Mouse goblins with spaghetti necks and Betty Boop geishas who transform into rotting zombies make appearances in the films on offer.

But Japanese animation speaks its own language. During the same time, American animation was preoccupied with movement, placing an emphasis on squash and stretch. Animated bodies changed shape like rubber, their wiggly arms and pliable bodies bending and distorting before snapping back into shape. Ballet was a major source of inspiration for American animators, with its focus on continual fluid movement and the flexibility of the dancers' bodies. Japanese animation, by contrast, was influenced by Japanese dance, nihon buyo, which focuses on the stillness between movements rather than the movements themselves. The result is a quieter, less mobile school of animation. The legacy of Japan's classical visual arts, in which balance and symmetry are more important than perspective and depth, lent a flat, graphic quality to its animation, the result being a completely unique filmmaking vocabulary.

The director who used it most eloquently was Yasuji Murata. His earliest film in the series, "The Stolen Lump" (1929), is a stunningly beautiful series of simple line drawings that employ a relaxed sense of life — a far cry from the hectic American animations of the time. "Our Baseball Match" (1931) demonstrates a beautiful economy of line in depicting a precisely detailed baseball game between a team of rabbits and a team of tanukis. The characters are missing the rounded, child-friendly shapes of American cartoons, and are portrayed instead with the straightforward economy of a James Thurber drawing.

Many of the shorts in this series are little more than pointless, herky-jerky vignettes designed to show off the latest technical trick, but Murata (1896–1966) designed the movements of his cartoon creatures to betray their psychology. "The Bat" (1930) depicts a war among the different animal species, and we recognize turtles, mice, cats, and pigs not because they're drawn to look like those animals but because they fight, run, and talk like we'd imagine these animals would. While other animators were doing little more than frantically jumping their interchangeable cutouts through increasingly elaborate hoops, Murata could hold his audience's attention by sitting two dogs down to have a drink. The fascination stemmed from the fact that they moved and interacted with one another as humans presumably would.

Unfortunately, the relatively liberal Taisho era ended in 1926 and animation slowly had the life choked out of it by Japanese nationalism. Cartoons instead became a delivery vehicle for military propaganda, instilling in children the belief that other, weaker countries populated by helpless seals needed Japan's wise dogs and monkeys to fly over and save them from invading eagles. The animation in Japan Society's series chronicles the last gasps of true creativity in Japanese animation before the invasion of China in 1937 and the long march to World War II. With that in mind, it's refreshing to watch these movies, which remind us that, regardless of time and place, a samurai fighting an octopus will always be funny.