Suggests: HFA Prewar and Wartime Animation, Part One

While TV anime and Ghibli films dominate the image of animation from Japan, the country’s animated past runs much deeper. Though much of that history is inaccessible—some film historians estimate that over 98% of all films made in Japan before 1930 are lost—Planet has always invested considerable energy into retrieving and making available some of Japan’s wondrous early animated films. Creating ghosts, fantastical creatures and a huge assortment of shape-shifting phantasms, early Japanese animators initially played to the strengths of animation’s ability to showcase marvelous transformations and stretching the limits of the body. By the mid-1930s Japan’s increasingly militarized public sphere left its mark on animation as well; while retaining an often whimsical tone and an experimental drive, animators also participated in the fantasies of Japan’s imperial project.

Planet’s founder, Yasui Yoshio, edited one of the pioneering histories of Japanese animation, History of Japanese Animated Films, as early as 1977. Since…