Momotarou: Umi no Shinpei

Yes it's a wartime propaganda film, but one that spends as much time with cute animal soldiers packing and eating their bento lunches as it does with any fighting. It's only in the last fifteen minutes of runtime that there's any War at all. There are also extended scenes of singing alphabet songs, hanging laundry and feeding birds.

The animation is amazing, of course continuity is a little jumpy which considering the conditions of it being made make sense, so a lot of the scenes have little jumps and skips in the motion. Still the movement is remarkably three dimensional, and the characters have very expressive ... facial expressions.

When compared to the Disney wartime movies, these one lacks the coherent plots and punchy action and quick gags. It's all rather hallucinatory, slow moving and brilliant in its own way, but definitely not one for all tastes.

Overview:

I have a new laptop and now I'm back to befoul MAL with more silly reviews of bad, obscure anime that nobody asked to be reviewed. Let the universe howl in despair for I have returned! Time to review Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors!

Background:

The year is 1945 and Japan is very rapidly losing the war in the Pacific. The Japanese navy has been utterly decimated and is simply unable to keep up with America's manufacturing strength and output. Japan's resources are running bone dry and most of the Japanese merchant fleet has been sunk by American submarines. All of Japan's best pilots were trained in ... Germany and now virtually all are dead. Germany has been knocked out of the war, so no new quality pilots can be trained. The Soviet Red Army is now steamrolling Japan's Army in China and Korea. By the summer of 1945, all Japan can do is try make the predicted American invasion as slow and painful as possible. Hopefully, the Americans will accept something slightly less than absolute surrender so Japan can lose the war with some honor intact.

With all this going on, a branch of the Imperial Japanese Navy decided to force a Japanese Communist to make a propaganda cartoon against his will in which a bunch of furries conquer America! This...is that story.

Plot:

Hey kids! Did you know the Imperial Japanese Navy is awesome? It's true! They are all very handsome and dashing and have HUGE cocks. My big brother is in the navy and he says they have the best ships EVER! Seriously, the first 30 minutes of this film are a bunch of woodland creatures endlessly praising the navy. We're off to a great start when I'm immediately reminded of Brazil's Ratatooing, where the CGI abominations won't stop praising the food. I love that at no point in the movie does it say anything positive about the Japanese Army. Fuck those guys! They can make their own stinking movie!

Part 2 of the film is where the little animals decide to sing the Hirigana alphabet...for 10 minutes. This segment is the direct Japanese equivalent of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz6OGVCdov8

Now we enter the final act and it's FINALLY time to wipe out the American Navy located at the "Devil Islands". The Japanese forces are all drawn as furry animals besides the folktale character of Momotaro, who is leading the Japanese forces for some reason. The American troops are all portrayed as humans and have no folktale characters like Paul Bunyan fighting for them, so they have no chance! The Japanese Furry forces slowly parachute down onto American ships, which don't fire at them for...reasons. The Americans at Devil Island surrender immediately without a fight and this causes the entire country of America to surrender right away. Some animal school children play games and the movie ends.

Art:

This was filmed in black and white despite most animated feature films being in color by 1945. I'll give this movie a LOT of slack though because Japan couldn't afford to waste a lot of money on this film. It's a miracle that it turned out looking as good as it did. I can only imagine the horrible working hours and conditions that went into the making of this film. What's interesting is that it doesn't look anything like American cartoon films of the 40s like Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Song of the South, etc. Instead it resembles Max Fleischer cartoons from the 1920s. In case you don't know your animation history, that's the guy who inspired all the art from Cuphead.

Sound:

Screaming children and one of the most annoying songs I've heard in a children's movie. One thing I will say is that the English used by the Americans is shockingly some of the best English I've heard in an anime! That's because they used Japanese ambassdors that actually spoke English instead of professional voice actors who are sounding out their lines phonetically. Amusingly, most seemed to have learned English with a British accent. So you have American characters voiced by Japanese who sound like Brits.

Overall:

I'm not just giving this a low score because it's Axis propaganda. I'm giving it a low score because this is one of slowest, most joyless children's films I've ever sat through. When I found out the director really didnt want to make this film and was forced, it made perfect sense. That's exactly what it feels like. The best part of this film is seeing the ending credits roll. At least Japan can rest easy that their Axis partners Italy and Germany have both made even worse cartoons. Italy made all the animated Titanic films, while Germany has Dingo Pictures. That's one of the nicest things I can say about Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors. At least it isn't a Dingo cartoon. Although now I really want to see an edit where the Japanese Furry Force is visited by their ally Obersturmbannführer Wabuu!

MID 2 to LIGHT 5. I found some aspects okay but dislike others.

Well, that was something. I've never watched feature-length propaganda, nor have I watched much pre-60s animation. This was a new experience for me, and, in both the propaganda and animation aspects, the movie was morbidly interesting.

As a Pinoy, well... I think it should be obvious how I feel about the propaganda. Although, I want to note a caveat in my take.

The way they depict themselves liberating the natives from those nasty whites sounds similar to nationalist propaganda in my home country. The somewhat messy relationship between the natives and the white men ... is a relationship heavily played upon in politics and rhetoric here, and I believe most Filipinos agree that being free from the Americans was approximately a good thing. *cue that famous Manuel Quezon quote*

Of course, Japan being the one to bring that liberation? Not at all true or justified. In many ways, the Japanese were worse occupiers than the Americans. (Not that America did nothing wrong, but Japan was brutal, to put it mildly). And we WERE getting independence soon anyway, so Japan's "well-intentioned intervention" was not needed at all. (I am being a bit overly specific here because the rhetoric also includes other Southeast Asian colonies that weren't due for independence).

Also, uh... "Devil's Island"? Really?

That said, watching propaganda is a very intriguing experience. The way they glorified industrialization and deforestation... The way they censor the violence in trying to make war appealing to children... The way the English/American officers spoke during the surrender negotiations about how "the war is on their side already" as if Japan was self-aware that she was losing... I feel like I have a more nuanced view on WWII Japanese ideology after watching this movie.

Not that I'll raise the score for this. None of this historical and academic value arises from the film's quality itself.

The production itself is amateurish but interestingly so. It looks like they were still trying to figure out how this "animation" thing is supposed to be done. Most of the movement is slow and takes far too many frames. Its sound design is messy. (I'm not talking about the static caused by old microphones. I'm talking about how the sounds don't consistently change with the cut, how the camera should've changed position but the ambiance sounds unchanged). The child actors suck (but in a kinda adorable way). Animation errors and missing frames aplenty. The facial animation is... morbidly fascinating (a.k.a. creepy AF).

However, I did unironically enjoy a few things about the flick. Here and there, there were a few hints of that early cartoon charm with all the singing and dancing. I liked how the film's overall premise is just a bunch of animals dancing and having fun with their *wartime* routines (until they go and stab some white men). It reminds of animation shorts I used to watch when I was younger which were pretty much just a bunch of fun kids and animals dancing and playing. The film accomplishes this appeal somewhat well, and while it's not the best at it, it achieves a state of fun bliss in a few scenes. Enough to make me rate some moments a light 5.

Animation-wise, the background art looks fine, some of the larger crowd shots have some dynamic compositions and animation, and the music shared the orchestral energy of all those old cartoons. Despite most of the movie feeling like the animators were still learning how to do everything, they got some things right.

The movie surprised me when they managed to get actual English voice actors to star. I don't know why they'd agree to such a role depicting them as horribly cowardly. Either that or they got REALLY talented Japanese voice actors, but I find that hard to imagine. Maybe I just don't watch that much propaganda. This might be a common occurrence if the pay was hefty enough to justify this humiliation.

To conclude, it's still propaganda, as you'd expect. However, you might learn some things on how the WWII Japanese viewed themselves, others, and their place in the world. As an animation though, it does have some charm to its aesthetic, despite the animators obviously still learning the craft.

Oh jeez, where do I even start with a film that has such a difficult history? While not technically the first anime, this was the first feature-length anime film. And it's WWII propaganda. There are two ways to approach a film like this: as a piece of entertainment or a historical artefact. Depending on which you opt for, you'll have two very different experiences.


Viewed in isolation, purely on its own narrative merits as a piece of entertainment, Momotaro doesn't hold up. That's not necessarily a failure on its part because its primary aim is to indoctrinate as much as entertain, ... but there's not much left for an audience where the propaganda aspect is anachronistic. Also, the expectations for an animated film have changed so much in the decades since. The Disney influence on this film is obvious, and that extends beyond the animation style. When you think of early US animation, the likes of Snow White or Bambi are the ones that come to mind, but between Warner's Merrie Melodies and the likes of Saludos Amigos it was just as common for them to just be a string of song-and-dance routines. Momotaro sits somewhere in the middle. Very little happens narratively for the first hour of this 75-minute movie, with the emphasis being more on songs until the assault on the subtly named Devil's Island begins. The strong nationalistic angle of these songs makes for uncomfortable viewing, especially the one where the army teach the alphabet to a village of 'savages', which was clearly intended to have children singing along.


If you view Momotaro as an artistic work, however, there's more to appreciate. This was decades before Tezuka defined the signature look of anime, and it offers a glimpse into a different evolutionary path that could have been. As Japan's first animated feature, it's not only surprisingly accomplished, it uses advanced techniques that would all but disappear until long after. Most striking are the depth-of-field effects, which must have required a multi-layered rostrum. There's also complex parallax scrolling, characters moving in and out of shadow, and one stunning shot at a waterfall where it transitions from one painted background, through a fully animated camera angle shift, to a different painted background. The overall atmosphere of the visuals also changes drastically in the final 15 minutes, taking on more realistic lighting while the paratroopers wait inside the plane.


The overall feel of motion is completely different from the stylised look of later anime. There's a realistic sense of weight to much of it, undermined only by the languid smoothness of having such a high sheet count throughout. Particularly impressive is the attention paid to air flow on fabric, with the collars of sailor suits catching the wind, and parachutes filling and collapsing in a convincing manner.


This is a hard one to give a score out of ten. If you watch it for entertainment, it's a 3/10. If you watch it with an academic eye, it's a 7/10.

This is the first ever feature length animated movie to come out of Japan - and it is an overt propaganda film sanctioned by the Imperial Navy during the peak of the Pacific theatre of the second World War.

Imperial Japan was being embargoed by most of the world's manufacturers at the time - primarily the US, UK and their colonies and resources in the Island Nation were difficult to come across. This was increasingly so in the case of precious goods like celluloid or chemical dyes used for feature length animated films. It was one of the primary reasons why most of the works of ... this period in Japan, both before and after the war were relatively short in length ( budgetary imitations were another constraint).

Post War analysts have consistently portrayed the Imperial expansionists as delusional and optimistic about a war they were inevitably bound to lose and boosting morale had become a primary thrust to sustain the war effort. Animations were seen as the perfect tool to sustain this level of fervent propaganda, and as such the Imperial Navy provided (for those times) a carte blanche in terms of budget.

Yet, the Momotarou films both turn out incredibly insipid in their contrivances and their motivations. The military thought it was a good idea to coerce an open communist sympathizer who they had forcibly arrested and tortured earlier and drafted into a war effort he did not personally agree with, into the making of a propaganda film serving to justify it.

Even for its time, these propaganda films seemed like poor works of arts compared to some of the experimental stuff Japanese animators were doing privately on their own. A look at the facial expressions of the anthropomorphic characters shows how effort to detail was minimized and a working copy could be produced. The irony of the entire work is that it released when the Naval Flagship was dramatically downed by the American Navy and a death blow to the Japanese War effort.

The movie has some good background art, but character designs and plot details are pretty lackluster. The aforementioned lack of celluloid ensured that such a length movie could not possibly have a single theme for the entire runtime, and thus we end up seeing an anthology of disparate ideas and stories strung together to provide the complete propaganda buffet to the audience.

This film is constantly cited as a huge influence for Osamu Tezuka, which I personally find hard to understand - especially given how the creator of this work disowned it himself as an exercise in bonded labor. There are several other works both before and after this one that accomplish much more with much less on hand.