Studio: Kitayama Seitaro (released by Nikkatsu)
Short Synopsis
The film adapted one of Japan's best-known folk tales. A young fisherman, Urashima Tarō, rescues a turtle from children who are tormenting it. In gratitude the turtle carries him down to the Dragon Palace beneath the sea, where he is welcomed by the princess Otohime and spends what feels like a few happy days. When he wants to go home she gives him a lacquered box and tells him never to open it. Back on shore he finds that centuries have passed and everyone he knew is gone. In despair he opens the box, and he turns instantly into an old man. A contemporary magazine published a plot description and stills of Kitayama's version, but no copy of the film is known to survive, so how closely he followed each step of the tale cannot be checked.
Why It Matters
- What can be seen today needs a warning. Circulating videos under this title, with underwater coral scenes, a fisherman riding a turtle and two figures seated in a palace, come from a reel found at an Osaka flea market in 2007. They are worth watching as a very early Japanese cut-out fairy tale, but researchers concluded that the reel is a different, unidentified film, because it does not match the 1918 magazine stills.
- Seitaro Kitayama was one of the three founders of Japanese animation in 1917, and he set up the first studio in Japan devoted to animation. Urashima Tarō was among his best-documented films, and its loss, along with the mistaken identification, is a reminder of how little of the country's earliest animation survived the 1923 earthquake and the war.
Notes and Trivia
- The flea-market reel was found together with The Dull Sword (1917), which was genuine; the mix-up was discovered only when researchers compared it with the magazine coverage.
- The folk tale has been animated many times since, and its time-slip ending is often compared to Rip Van Winkle.
- See also: The Dull Sword (1917).