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.

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.