Anime did not take off in the west until the late eighties and early nineties, with big name cinematic releases like Akira, and some Studio Ghibli releases, and the premiere of Japanese animated series in the west, such as DragonBall Z and Sailor Moon. During the late 90s and early 2000s, it began to explode in popularity, though unless it was a major franchise like Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh or something similar, it was still a pretty niche thing in the west until the 2010s. I feel as though we here in the west have a very skewed perception of anime, especially considering a lot of people know very little about the history of anime. Most early anime has been lost due to natural disasters, and a lot of anime has been heavily inspired by western comics and cartoons, which brings it around full circle since a lot of American cartoons are now inspired by Japanese comics and cartoons. Being someone who loves media history, I have had Momotaro: Sacred Sailors, the first feature length Japanese animated film that we know of, on my watchlist for some time. I happened upon a copy at a mixed media store, and like I did with The Thief and the Cobbler, I took it as a sign to review this movie as soon as I could. I enjoy having the chance to watch historically significant movies, but the question I always have to ask is, outside of the significance, is it any good?
Momotaro: Sacred Sailors is, and I feel I must stress this first, largely propaganda. I don't know if this movie was meant to entice kids to consider joining the Japanese Navy, or if it was just to invoke a feeling of nationalistic pride, but the movie is largely propagandistic. Momotaro was commissioned by the Japanese Naval Ministry, That is going to be the first major hurdle to overcome watching this movie. Propaganda has a reputation, and frankly a deserved reputation. The other major hurdle is that this movie doesn't really have much in the way of plot or characters. There is a plot, it follows four young men as they join the Japanese navy and are sent on a special mission, we see them say goodbye to there families, we see the construction of headquarters, we get some backstory about the mission and the island they're landing on, and we see the final battle. It all goes by quite quickly, and rather abruptly. Scenes change sporadically without much transition. One scene can be a character sitting quietly and then suddenly it's a loud crowd of people bustling about, then it's some form of educational style film that just feels spliced into the movie. The plot does also move slowly at points, I don't want to say it has a lot of filler, but I do think a lot of the scenes, if this movie was made today, would have been rewritten or cut entirely.
Character wise, we don't actually have that many. We start this movie with four young men, who are anthropomorphic animals, we get to see their family life and possibly some inside look into one of them, one of the characters watches some dandelions float off in the air and he imagines military commands, I was honestly kind of anticipating the dandelion seeds morphing into parachutes, but I digress. Besides that, we get a lot of time with minor background characters, there's this captain we also spend a good amount of time with, and that's about it. It's kind of tough to really talk about this aspect of the movie, since it is hardly an aspect of the movie. I could see this as the crew leaving the characters as blank slates so the audience could see themselves joining the naval forces, but that would be conspiratorial of me to say that.
I think a big part as to why the characters are such non-entities is because at least eighty percent of the dialogue is background singing. Of all the singing in the movie, only one song is actually sung by the characters on screen, and it's an alphabet song. Honestly that would have come in super handy when I was learning Japanese in High School. I can't say the songs are bad, they definitely feel like propaganda songs though, it's like, "We are strong, we are hard workers!" like, I can see that in a less iffy context, but knowing that this movie is propaganda, I mean. Now would probably be a good time to mention that yes, the companies who own rights to this movie do not hold the views of this movie, or from this time period. Likewise, I do not hold any grudges to the Japanese people, I'm just reviewing this movie as it is, and it being propaganda is a major part of it, so that is going to hang over this movie like an annoying bee that just won't go away.
That being said, the animation has its charm. The characters are definitely designed rather cute, and when we see the western soldiers they are drawn more like a traditional American rubber hose cartoon. One of the soldiers is literally Popeye, not even a character that looks like Popeye, literally Popeye. Popeye was also used as propaganda so it makes some sense. He even drops an empty can of spinach, like how is that imagery not on the nose? That being said, the animation is rather flawed. Some of the expressions and designs didn't look right to me, but I figure that's just a taste thing. Some animation didn't look right either, like a really choppy GIF, but what I really noticed were the moments of some characters being unfinished and disappearing for a split second. In regards to the former, I feel this is just an upscaling issue, like the characters didn't need to be drawn fully because the part of them that was missing wasn't meant to be on camera, and as for the characters vanishing for a frame or so, I imagine this is partly because our visual senses are used to higher frame rates than film in the forties, so a vanishing character or object might not have been noticeable at the time. However, I'm not watching this in 1945, I'm watching this in 2022, and it makes me wonder why they didn't fix these issues? The back of the box says "Restored" so I can assume there was some clean-up done for the film. A part of me wants to shout lazy, but at the same time it could also be a cost and materials thing, like these issues don't happen often enough to warrant the cost of fixing them, or the materials just weren't available for whatever reason.
So, what is my final verdict on this movie? I mean, it isn't terrible. However, I feel like you're really only going to get any enjoyment out of this movie if you are into film or animation history. Otherwise, you're probably not going to like it that much, it's like that Gulliver's Travels movie from 1939, I would only recommend watching it if you are into media history. There is some value to saying you've watched the oldest movie in whatever category. That being said, I really can't say this movie was terrible, at no point was I ever appalled or infuriated by the images on the screen. I guess because we are so far removed from 1945 as of now, it's kind of hard for me to feel uncomfortable watching this kind of movie. It isn't really good, I can't say it's harmless, but if film and/or animation history is your thing, or you really just want to be the hipster weeb amongst your friends, hey, check it out.
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