Studio: Kobayashi Shōkai
Short Synopsis
A self-appointed samurai, more swagger than skill, wants a sword so he can prove himself by attacking passers-by in the street, the practice known as tsujigiri. A merchant sees him coming and sells him a blade that turns out to be blunt. Armed with his useless sword, the samurai lurks by the roadside and goes after random townspeople. Each attempt backfires. A masseur he picks as an easy victim fights back and knocks him down, and in footage found only in 2017 the masseur pulls a mocking face at him afterwards. He hides in the shade of a tree to ambush a courier, and that attack also ends with the would-be swordsman beaten and humiliated. The joke is the gap between his warrior's pose and the comic damage he keeps taking.
Why It Matters
- It is a very compact piece of comedy: a stock figure from period drama, a jidaigeki, cut down to size with simple cut-out animation and broad physical gags, many of them still funny because the samurai is such a pompous fool.
- It is the oldest surviving Japanese animated film released in cinemas, made in the very first year of Japanese animation. It was long believed lost, until a film historian found a copy, together with a toy projector, in an Osaka antiques market in 2007. The National Film Archive of Japan restored it and screened it in 2008.
Notes and Trivia
- The 2008 discovery turned out to contain only the second half. The first half was found in 2014 in a collection already donated to the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and the two were joined into a longer restoration. More footage turned up in 2017.
- A 35 mm print owned by the collector Gorō Sugimoto was destroyed in a fire in 1971.
- Kōuchi was a newspaper cartoonist; he was one of the three pioneers who began Japanese animation independently in 1917, alongside Seitaro Kitayama and Ōten Shimokawa.
- See also: Urashima Tarō (1918).