Studio: Jiyū Eiga Kenkyūjo (Free Film Research Institute), Noburō Ōfuji
Short Synopsis
A thief in an Arabian Nights Baghdad schemes to steal from the castle and win the princess, in a story that answers Douglas Fairbanks's The Thief of Bagdad, the Hollywood spectacular of 1924 that had been a sensation in Japan. The burglars' plots, the chases through the palace and the magical turns of the tale are told not in drawings but in cut-outs of chiyogami, the patterned Japanese paper used for dolls and crafts, which Ōfuji animated against painted backgrounds, so that the figures' robes are printed textiles and the palace is a collage of pattern. The film is one of the earliest surviving works of its maker and runs longer than most Japanese cartoons of the decade. Detailed scene-by-scene accounts are scarce; the outline follows the catalogue descriptions and the film's known source.
Why It Matters
- The chiyogami technique is the attraction: nobody else was making animation out of patterned paper, and the richness of the surfaces, with every costume a different print, gives the film a decorative beauty that drawn cartoons of 1926 could not approach. Ōfuji developed the method into his own form of silhouette animation in the 1930s.
- Noburō Ōfuji is the first Japanese animator to have won an international reputation, and this film, with his other 1926 works, is the start of that career; his later films were shown at Cannes and Venice, and the Mainichi Film Awards' prize for animation has carried his name since 1962. Burglars of Baghdad Castle is where his style begins.
Notes and Trivia
- Ōfuji set up his own small company, the Free Film Research Institute, in 1925 after studying under Jun'ichi Kōuchi.
- His Kujira (The Whale, 1952) was praised by Picasso and Cocteau at Cannes.
- See also: The Story of the Monkey King (1926), Monkey and the Crabs (1927).