Shin Saru Kani Gassen

I give this a short film a 7, not because I think its worth watching by today's standards, just in comparison to all of the other 1930-40s anime that I've seen. Anime from this era are silent and all black and white. Many of them were poorly preserved, but this one looks ok. Its basically created to teach a moral lesson, as you would expect anime of this time to do. The story is about crabs who are taken advantage of by a monkey. It teaches that its ok to share with some people, as the crabs did with the bees, but there are some ... people who will take advantage of you. Its actually a pretty cute animation, and if you want to try 1939 anime this may be a good starting point considering its not confusing war propaganda and its also fairly well preserved over the years.

Unfortunately, this particular work did not survive the archival process intact. a lot of these works were developed during the height of the second world war and archiving for posterity wasn't a major priority for media at that point in time. The copy that I got to view was poorly recorded and faded out from the celluloid, making it difficult to observe a lot of what was going on. The story is pretty barebones and not a particularly interesting one. This one was clearly directed towards children. the mediocrity shows both in the details of the art as well as the relatively empty backgrounds.

I'd ... say this one isn't worth checking out. you can skip this since this doesn't provide any interesting context even to historians as a pure piece of art it isn't particularly noteworthy. Only recommended for completionists.