Studio: Yokohama Cinema Shōkai
Short Synopsis
The old folk tale. A crab finds a rice ball and a monkey finds a persimmon seed; the monkey talks the crab into swapping, eats the rice ball at once and leaves the crab with the seed. The crab plants it, and in time has a tree heavy with persimmons but cannot climb; the monkey offers to pick them, eats the ripe ones himself and throws a hard green fruit at the crab, killing her. Her children swear revenge and enlist allies, a chestnut, a bee, a mortar and a cowpat, who lie in wait in the monkey's house. The chestnut bursts from the hearth and burns him, the bee stings him, he slips on the cowpat and the mortar falls from the roof and crushes him. Murata's cut-paper figures act the story straight, with the crabs' campaign as the climax.
Why It Matters
- Murata's cut-outs are crisp and comic, with the monkey's greed and the crabs' sideways scuttle caught in a few movements, and the household objects turned assassins are drawn with the deadpan that the tale needs. It is among the best-preserved Japanese cartoons of the 1920s and still looks sharp.
- Yasuji Murata was the most prolific Japanese animator of the silent era, making dozens of educational and folk-tale films for Yokohama Cinema, and Saru Kani Gassen is one of his earliest and best-known. The tale itself has been animated in Japan at least half a dozen times since; this is the version that started the tradition.
Notes and Trivia
- Saru Kani Gassen is one of the five "great" Japanese folk tales taught in schools, alongside Momotarō and Urashima Tarō.
- Murata later made Japan's first talking cartoons for Yokohama Cinema in the early 1930s.
- See also: Burglars of Baghdad Castle (1926), Momotaro: Sacred Sailors (1945).