REFPACK 041
August-September 2021
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Every other month, members of Animation Resources are given access to an exclusive Members Only Reference Pack. These downloadable files are high resolution e-books on a variety of educational subjects and rare cartoons from the collection of Animation Resources in DVD quality. Our current Reference Pack has just been released. If you are a member, click through the link to access the MEMBERS ONLY DOWNLOAD PAGE. If you aren’t a member yet, please JOIN ANIMATION RESOURCES. It’s well worth it.
Lately, Animation Resources has been researching the early history of Japanese animation. We have been searching out video copies of 1960s anime to add to our Animation Archive, and we have accumulated dozens of complete series— hundreds of hours of rare television programs. We will be will be sharing some of them with you in our Reference Packs. Our members have asked us to share complete films and publications with them, not excerpts, so we will be sharing complete half hour episodes with you. We don’t claim that everything here is great. But there are great bits. You can sift through them and discover the gems for yourself.
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SD VIDEO:
Early Anime Batch 01
"Sabu & Ichi’s Detective Stories" / "Fight Da Pyuta" / "Space Ace"
Japanese animation blossomed on television in the mid-1960s. Many different kinds of series were produced. Some were serious and were aimed at an older audience, some were goofy to entertain kids, and some pioneered the concept of the animated superhero. In this and upcoming Reference Packs, we will be sharing a variety of different episodes from this seminal era.
Like many early Japanese animated shows, Sabu & Ichi’s Detective Stories was adapted from a manga series. Created by Shotaro Ishinomori and published in the Weekly Shonen Sunday beginning in 1966, the series focused on the adventures of Sabu, a young shogun and his partner, the blind master swordsman Ichi. Set sometime in the Edo period of Japan (the 17th through the 19th century) the duo travel across Japan helping the common people by solving mysteries and righting wrongs. Sabu is engaged to the daughter of his boss, a police officer in the Tokugawa shogunate.
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This series is animated in an animatic style with very sparse animation. It resembles the title sequence of the American TV show, Wild, Wild West. The show has the feeling of what we now call an "animated web comic". The drawings are rough, but extremely expressive, and the posing reveals great understanding of human anatomy. The layouts are well composed and the background paintings match the drawing style perfectly. But the really important aspect of this show is how it handles action scenes. With only a few drawings and careful spacing and timing, extremely complex movement is perfectly conveyed. Note for instance the fight scenes at 00:21:32 and 00:22:40. Creative use of blur effects occasionally enhances the animation as well, see 00:06:12. The limited animation is actually used here as a strength to convey the feeling of the original manga.
MP4 Video File / SD / 25:48 / 271 MB Download
The next early Japanese TV animation we are sharing is called Fight da!! Pyuta. It was created by Tsunezo Murotani and directed by Tameo Kohanawa in 1968. The year is significant, because it puts the show two years after the debut of Ralph Bakshi’s Mighty Heroes. The debt to Bakshi’s series is obvious. The show had to have been influenced by it.
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Instead of mining Japanese folklore, like Sabu & Ichi’s Detective Stories, Fight da!! Pyuta takes a Western approach, employing pop art and imagery from American comic books as well as an underscore that features surf guitar and jazzy latin bongos. The backgrounds are often psychedelic and the sound effects are expressed in bam-balloons with English lettering, like in a superhero comic. Astronauts from various countries are represented by caricatures of world leaders, a speech by Lyndon Johnson is even slipped into the soundtrack at one point. Cultural stereotypes and references to pop culture media are milked for humor as well.
This series is very unique. We haven’t found any other Japanese shows that are remotely similar. In fact, it most closely resembles "wacky" cartoons from the early 90s, like "Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures" and "Animaniacs". There are some wild takes in this show, and the anthropomorphizing of inanimate objects to make them resemble the characters is very clever. I imagine this might have appeared to be a little too "American" for Japanese audiences, but it makes the show very accessible to we Americans.
MP4 Video File / SD / 25:35 / 386 MB Download
The last series we will be featuring this time is called Space Ace. Based on a manga series created in 1964 by Tatsuo Yoshida, the creator of Speed Racer, Space Ace hit the television airwaves very quickly the following year.
Wikipedia describes the show like this… Space Ace is the story of an alien young boy named Space Ace (or Ace for short), given to homesick stargazing with the faces of his loved ones ghosted across the heavens. His tool of preference is the galaxy ring, a flat white hoop he can produce from his fingers to be thrown or ridden upon. The supporting cast includes Dr. Tatsunoko, who is almost a father figure to Ace, and his daughter Asari, Ace’s love interest. Providing the show’s comedy relief is crusading investigative reporter Yadokari, who usually bursts on the scene riding his jet skycycle at the worst possible moment, screaming for Ace to give him interviews and so on. One of the show’s most important characters is "Ebo", Ace’s imagined projection into the night sky depicted as a humanoid robot.
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This particular episode is titled "Haunted Space Ship" and it is a great example of a bunch of totally different ideas being mixed together for maximum fun. The show starts out with skiing, then suddenly takes a turn towards science fiction when a space ship lands. The interior of the space ship turns out to be like a haunted mansion. The action becomes more and more surreal until an alien brain in a glass helmet is revealed. A flying dog shoots gum into Ace’s mouth like a Pez dispenser and the candy makes him powerful enough to destroy the alien brain. There’s wonderful James Bond style music and some truly amazing explosion effects. You really don’t need to speak Japanese to appreciate this show.
In the 1970s, the crush of production necessitated a more "assembly line" approach to production and design. Instead of every show having its own style, the designs began to consolidate— character design, background design and effects animation became standardized. This made it easier for artists to move from show to show, because they didn’t have to learn a new style for every job they worked on. Formulas of how facial features, hair or proportions should be rendered saved time and streamlined the whole Japanese animation industry. While this allowed for the production of many more hours of animation to feed the demand, it took away some of the spontaneity and originality that had flourished in earlier years. Anime from the 80s and 90s is well known in the United States and it has been widely available here for many years, but the early shows from the 60s are very hard to find. These are the ones we will be focusing on in our Reference Packs.
MP4 Video File / SD / 26:05 / 474 MB Download
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