I’ve been watching this film over at youtube, and it’s utterly intriguing and yet has me scratching my head. I dithered over whether I should post a link to it here, because it’s a longish film and it’s chopped up into 10 parts. I watched the first bit as a bit of idle entertainment and ended up watching the whole thing. Probably no one else will watch it, but just in case someone had some intelligent remarks to make, I’ll go ahead and link to it.
Here’s a link to part 1.
It’s the sweetest bit of Hello Kitty-esque animated propaganda as I’ve ever seen. Japanese solders arrive at a tropical island, which has been joyfully cleared to prepare for the arrival of samurai officers, and the soldiers are sent to battle. They gain victory over the duplicitous, fear-struck American (or British?) enemy.
It’s a very well done and weird little film, which explains why I couldn’t stop watching it. But it’s dated 1945 - didn’t the war in the Pacific theater end before then? Who were they showing this to?
If it were 1945, I’d wonder if it were part of the propaganda effort that the Japanese military was starting to make for the civilian population to fight any invasion of the home islands to the last person, a la Saipan.
As for fighting - there were still several battles fought in 1945. Iwo Jima and Okinawa come to mind.
The war between the allies and Japan ended in August of 1945, with the Japanese surrender after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So the film could have been made in 1945 any time before that.
The film is called “Momotaru, Uni No Shinpei”. It was made in 1944, and released on April 12, 1945.
Momotaur is a Japanese folk hero, who according to legend, defeated an island of evil ogres, and in this movie, he saves the forest creatures (i.e. the people of Asia) from the evil ogres that are invading (us).
Thanks for that link, Peter Morris. A user at IMDB comments:
“. . . (Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors) this, the first full length animated Japanese film, was a propaganda cartoon commissioned by the Navy to spread morale among youngsters. It was premiered just weeks before the surrender. . . .”
Interesting stuff. Now it all kind of falls together - the film was made late in the war to inspire upcoming young kids to become soldiers, showing them that victory was certain. Unfortunately, about the time it was released, it was too late.
Looks remarkably like the ‘movie within a movie’ of Macross, don’t you think? In structure. Or like Macross in general.