Anime Industry Celebrates 100th Anniversary

[Daniel Eagan]

press release:
Anime Industry Celebrates 100th Anniversary by Streaming Oldest Works With Subtitles
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/20 ... es/.112554" target="_blank
(includes instructions for accessing films)

website:
http://animation.filmarchives.jp/index.html" target="_blank

[fredhedges]

This is some fascinating historical stuff. Thanks for your post.

[Battra92]

Awesome stuff! My two big fandoms have almost no crossover but it's really nice when they do.

[All Darc]

I'm curious to see a photo of a animation workstation in the very early days of animation. Not just the drawing tables with the pin cut paper for fixation, but the statiuon with the animation cell and the camera.

[silentfilm]

http://animation.filmarchives.jp/en/index.html

The Japanese Animated Film Classics website is now available in English and Japanese. The films are available with and without subtitles.

[boblipton]

Link, please.

Bob

[Daniel Eagan]

Don't mean to grouse but I reported this back in February: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=23745" target="_blank

[silentfilm]

I saw the link because someone from the project posted it on Facebook. I've merged the new thread with Daniel's original post.

[Christopher Jacobs]

I watched about a dozen of these today, spanning the teens, 20s, early 30s and late 30s, all silent except for one with sound (which was very reminiscent of Harmon-Ising cartoons of the mid- to late 30s). Some were scanned from 35mm, others from 16mm, and others from 9.5mm home copies. Some use cell animation, others cutouts and/or silhouettes. Many of them have a bit of samurai action at some point. One peculiar 1933 release has a man in 1932 (who believes he was killed during the world war in 1942) visited by a descendent from 2032 who takes him back to the future for a trip to Mars. The streaming copies are all pretty low resolution, which also makes the subtitles often hard to read, but they're fascinating to see and some are quite beautiful. I was surprised to see that Japan was still using Kinemacolor in 1935, some 25 years after its heyday! There's another color film that's a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the cell animation for another color film, ending with a clip. It appears to be some sort of very effective red-green two-color process, yet the film it's about says it's a "Kodachrome" test reel, which would have been full-color. It would be fantastic if this collection were ever to get a Blu-ray or DVD release.

I made sure to watch all three of the "Momotaro" one-reel adventures from 1928, 1931, and 1932 (the first being a straight fairytale/folk tale, the other two heavily militaristic if allegorical/metaphorical in nature) as preparation for watching the new FUNimation Entertainment Blu-ray of the feature-length overt propaganda cartoon MOMOTARO'S SACRED SAILORS (1945) once it arrives (which also includes an animated short from 1943).