AW: Oldest Japanese Animation Found

[Roland Domenig]

>In the article, Matsumoto distinguishes between "doga" and the newly
>discovered film's technique of drawing directly on a strip of gento
>film--known as "kappaban." Tsugata also raises the question of if this newly
>discovered film qualifies as animation [anime] in the current sense, since
>it wasn't made by photographing one drawn image at a time.


Selfmade animation films seem to have been no rarity among children before (and after) the war. They made them for their gento devises. A Japanese collector of magic lanterns once showed me such selfmade animation ?films?, presumably made in the 1920?s or 1930?s by one or several kids. They used the transparent covers of the Iwanami paperback editions cut into slices and glued together to a long strip on which scenes from chanbara films were drawn. I don?t know whether they?ve actually been projected (the heat of the lamp must have been quite dangerous for the delicate strips), but at least they?ve been part of a magic lantern set that the collector bought together with the gento device and other slides. Unfortunately with time the stripes had become very porous and some of them can?t be unwind without damaging them. 

Roland Domenig
Institute of East Asian Studies
Vienna University

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