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- the regression caused by Tezuka's Astroboy.

With the American theatrical failures of "The little prince and the eight headed dragon" and "Gulliver's Space Adventures", TOEI animation decided to abandon their typical fare of imitating western animation styles and adapting folktales. Bolstered by the success and glut of weekly animated tv shows featuring Cyborgs and Robots pioneered by Osamu Tezuka's Mushi Productions with Astro Boy and its myriad imitations, TOEI adapted a similar Shounen Manga about a cyborg troupe - Cyborg 009 as a feature film.

The reduced budget as a result of financial pressures on the studio is clearly visible in this movie. The animation is ... pretty lackluster and more reminiscent of budget constrained factory assembly techniques that the fluid and pastel like animation TOEI had come to master in the 60s. The narrative is genuinely schlocky and the characters are all paper thin. Everything serves only as foil for the constant stream of combat and violence, the scale and scope of which strains credulity at moments.

A lot of scenes were identically lifted off or poor imitations of some of TOEI's own excellent animated work. The dramatic and eery animated masterpiece of a battle scene between Susanoo and the Yamato no Orochi is reskinned into a fight by cyborg 009 against a horde of Brontosaurus styled robots, only much worse in quality and almost no complex choreography.

Japanese animation was going through a period of great change at this moment, as questions arose over the profitability of the theatrical model as the bread and butter of the animation industry. Mushi Production's success in TV with Astro Boy showed a much cheaper and more profitable alternative - the paint by numbers villain of the week model that eschewed narrative cohesion for a dedicated fanbase and character identification. The industry would be forever changed by this move, not just creatively but also in terms of economic prospects for Japanese Animators, who've ended up with slave like wages and overworked to this day.

I think I prefer Tezuka's shorts when they don't verbalize their thoughts and use music and visuals to tell the story he wishes to narrate. For when the narrator does open his mouth to elucidate on the temporal unreliability of memory and the inconsistencies of the human mind storage system, the exploration is pretty surface level and tinged with an objectified view of women that would be widely offensive today.

Memory is clever in short bursts - mostly when it uses the animation to play with double entendres and misidentify objects with the narration to achieve a comical effect - but in terms of substance, the ... short is quite weak and perhaps even vacuous.

I got to add that I love the sound design in these shorts. I love how the Hyoshigi are used to create the distinctively percussive sound that substitutes for tempo and rhythmic pacing of the animation - which relies primarily on contrasting still images. It gives these shorts a distinctive Japanese, yet experimental identity.

"Mermaid" is a delightful little experimental short by Osamu Tezuka's Mushi productions that subverts the themes of the famous Hans Christian Anderson fairytale. We follow an unnamed boy who plays with a fish he considers a pet, only to discover the fish transform into a mermaid. After a montage where the mermaid takes the boy to the ocean and the two bond, the boy convinces it to return with him to land. Things only deteriorate from there, because it turns out that the boy is the only one who can see the mermaid. Other people are implied to only be able to see a simple ... fish.

Thee contents of the short are quite simplistic, but the themes are quite interesting. What initially appears to be a standard fantastical tale turns into an exploration of mental illness and a critical look at the treatment of the mentally ill in the sixties. The story is set to an ambient score of chamber Jazz by Isao Tomita that accentuates the moments underwater as opposed to on land. An interesting and short curio worth checking out.

Pretty terrible. This felt like a lazy low budget imitation of Disney movies and actually has the dubious recognition of being the first work where Miyazaki is credited as an animator. The voice work and sound design is particularly terrible in this one, egregious even. The entire thing felt like a throwaway production designed to fill some quota.

Its the story of a dog trying to take revenge on a tiger for killing its mum. The tiger is notable for it seems like an inspiration of the likes of Sher Khan and Scar, or perhaps its the other way around. This movie is so terrible, I ... don't even feel like looking that up.

I just checked this out for the purposes of satisfying my curiosity. As the first anime revolving around a robot and I suppose being the progenitor of the mecha genre, its an interesting artifact to take a glance at. The episodic nature of the show isn't particularly suited to my taste, but it is certainly an interesting glimpse back in time to what people perceived the major scientific problems of the day were - radiation (cold war), polar exploration (another competition centered around a clash of political ideologies) and a forward looking scientific idealism and obsession of robotics that continues to this day in Japan. ...

Scoring this after a single episode doesn't make much sense, but it wouldn't allow me to post the review otherwise.

- A Masterclass in describing motion through tempo.

Osamu Tezuka's second experimental short, and his first of some considerable length is a delightful bag of goodies that slowly reveals its contents the deeper you decide to dig in.

Tales of a Street Corner is an experimental animated film that describes a microcosm of a world encompassed within a street while reflecting on the most broadest of metaphysical meanings of life itself - the journey from the optimistic awe that is conceived by innocence to the nadir of nihilism wrenched out by the hidden realities. It could also be seen on a more literal level as the reflection ... of war - a reminiscent experience of Tezuka's own childhood being upturned by the second world war. At some moments, there were hints of a subtle criticism towards the regimentalism that pervaded Japanese society following the Meiji restoration and the rebellious struggle of art and artists.

This silent film explores the thoroughfare of a certain street in a nameless city through the tedious lives of a certain eclectic group of animals, trees and inanimate objects - primarily composed of wall posters, a spider's web and a shattered lamp post. Their merry and interactive life is upturned when the military, ominously represented by the trudging boots that repeatedly make their presence felt on the street, replace the posters with identical ones glorifying the purpose of war, swallowing everything else in its path and ultimately ending in tragic consequences for all involved.

In both "Male" and "Tales of a Street corner", Tezuka establishes a stylistic choice to embrace minimalism in his motion. The animation style often involves still but contrasting frames that linger for moments - generating music using the music as the leading coordinator. The setting of the various wall posters were perfect to employ this technique and accentuated by the vibrant pop aesthetic in the coloring.

Given how this film eschewed any veneer of mass appeal, I found it quite interesting how cinematic the movie was at points. Shifting perspectives provided the illusion of a moving camera - particularly emphasized when the posters of the two musicians fly chaotically in the flame kissed skies and the perspective constantly shifts to accompany the driving music and sound effects of the bombing.

While it was slow to begin, I found that it added more to the film than it took from the experience by the end. By focusing on a microcosm of the world - not just at the street level, but at the thematic level, a lot is left for the imagination to conjure up. We do not see the chaos being wrought in other streets because of our microscopic focus, but we can conjure up the possibilities because of the looming doom.

While not a conventional animated film, this certainly rings the bell of a masterpiece in my books.

After five films trying to imitate the whirlwind success of Disney for Japanese audiences that disappointed my expectations in one way or another, TOEI doga finally find their footing and discover a unique identity that would lay the seeds for modern anime, dramatic and complex battle choreography and perhaps most modern Kaiju movies.

Susanoo and the Yamato no Orochi sets its sights on portraying the creation story at the center of Japanese myth itself - Susanoo's search for his mother, the female creator of the Island Nation, Izanami, who departed into heaven. Susanoo is a herculean individual who fails to comprehend the vastness of his own ... physical strength and how it puts him at odds with the relatively fragile world around him. At the same time, a veil of innocence shields his mind from the deeper truths of the world and bolsters his bull headed optimism.

The writers of this movie finally managed to crack the code of the perfect balance in narrative progression and the need to water down the ideas for younger audience. The Disney inspired background characters that have been a forceful addition to most of the previous TOEI doga films take a backseat and Susanoo ends up with just a single animal companion, whose presence does not interfere with the broader narrative focus of the film.

The story is constantly fixtured on Susanoo himself, and the journey of his increasing collection of companions until he encounters the titular Yamata no Orochi - a Japanese mythological demon with some physiological similarities to the hydra. The reveal of this particular demon itself, was one of the most amazing sequences ever brought to realization in Japanese animation. A long sequence in poorly lit dusk lingers on the vast shadows of the eight gigantic serpent heads as the battle music reminiscent of world War 2 propaganda films slowly builds tension and emphasizes the sheer scale of this tyrannical opponent.

i only managed to find the dub for this one. Sindbad's adventures was a much needed change of pace from the same old character designs TOEI was employing - direct imitation of Disney movies of the time with much poorer production value and quality, unfortunately. You even see some experimentalism make a return here, especially with how some effects for the ocean and the treasure were animated using sand.

Unfortunately, the characters continue to remain paper thin and uninteresting. while their designs are quite a detailed improvement from the paper motion humans in the previous TOEI doga films, there is little depth to them. The movies ... continue to feel like a stitched together tapestry of disparate scenes that are unrelated to each other, rather than fostering a single contiguous narrative. This unfortunate feature continues to undermine the potential of these early age films and the narrative limitations of the artists working in the space at the time.

Once again, there are some scenes that would breach the realms of appearing psychedelic, almost approaching the brink of horror - only to pull back into the familiar territory of a figurative children's playground of a perfect world of idealism and adventure. The movie, like others of its ilk often threatens to break out of the mold created for it by its meta realities like its audiences contrasting with the artistic frustration of the creative team.

Like most other TOEI doga films of the period, Shounen Sarutobi Sasuke or Magic Boy, has a lot of issues. Its major distinguishing factor is that it was the first Japanese animated feature to be exported and dubbed into the US. But when it comes to quality, the story is a leap backwards. Again.

The animation quality has regressed from the highs of Hakujaden, a feature film produced by the same studio just a year earlier. While the repeated reuse of frames and tepid background art does not reach the blatant low levels of "The Littlest Warrior", it is still far below the standards the studio ... set for itself with some stellar animation with Hakujaden and Sayuuki.

I watched this film two ways. First the original Japanese version with fan made subtitles and secondly the official English language localization made for American audiences in the 60s. I have to say that in this case the English localization was actually superior to the original voice work in Japanese. Neither are particularly good, which in itself points to the half hearted effort made when it came to the original sound design.

A lot of scenes feel empty and devoid of life, because there is no music or sound effects to bolster what is happening on screen. The various characters all sound almost the same - often speaking in an inchoate fashion - clearly because the animators couldn't bother animating scenes long enough for suitable dialogue to be used.

Once again the imitation of Disney character designs of the animals, which seem to be lifted straight out of the other TOEI doga films without any modifications whatsoever, add little to the plot and serve to bog down the pacing. While the animals and their antics are cute to observe, they fail to add any context to the overall narrative only become impediments in the otherwise rather dark human character stories.

The only reason I'm grading this better than the Littlest Warrior is because of the rather dark and psychedelic final battle with the witch and the rudimentary training montages with increased my enjoyment of the film by a notch. The ending battle was the one section of the movie where it felt like the studio was actually experimenting with the medium and taking risks, inserting some horror elements into a children's animated story.

To me, this felt like a step backwards even for TOEI movies in the sixties. The animation quality has gone through clear reductions in quality, especially when contrasted against something like Sayuuki. The story is premised to be an interesting tragic tale, but is constantly undermined by ill placed Disney stylized replica animals that have no place in the story and only serve to bog down the narrative. The character designs suffer from a lack of inspiration and there is a return to designs more reminiscent of nascent Japanese animation around thirty years its predecessor than the standards TOEI set for itself in the previous ... decade.

Unfortunately, the story isn't well fleshed out either and the continuing problems of poorly drafted storyboarding and a bloated runtime continue to persist in these movies. This time around, however, unlike previous works like Hakujaden or Sayuuki, there isn't any gorgeous animation and excellent sound design to elevate the rather tepid material.

The more I watch the TOEI movies of the late 50s and early 60s the more I feel that Japanese animation had already taken a turn for the soulless mechanical trope style factory like production cycle that's comes to resemble the modern animation scene. TOEI studios seemed to have hit on a formula of making quasi-historical Disney style feature length animated works at a production level to great success - and in the process the spark of imagination and creativity that propelled the Japanese animation seemed to be stagnating.

It wouldn't be until Mushi studios came out with Astro Boy, did we see the first quantum leap in Japanese animation and a true discovery of its own identity, scaping from the clutches of imitation that TOEI is engaging in here. The Littlest Warrior is another movie in the increasingly long line of disappointing "could have been better" Japanese animated films of the era.