Did the Japanese make films, animated or otherwise, during World War II (for propaganda purposes and the like) or were they too busy fighting? If so, have any been discovered?
url="[www.imdb.com"]IMDB has 11 matches.
url="[http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0034591/]There Was a Father
url="[http://us.imdb.com/Title?0036484]Song Lantern, The
url="[http://us.imdb.com/Title?0034298]The 47 Ronin
Need the rest?
Apparently, the Netherlands Institute for Image and Sound has a filmography of Japanese propaganda films shown in Indonesia during the occupation.
Here’s the website (in Dutch)
I win bad coding of the week award :wally
Ikira Kurosawa’s The Most Beautiful (1944) and The 47 Ronin are the two notable Japanese features made during World War II.
Walloon writes:
> 1931-1915
It’s not well known that the Japanese discovered time travel in the 1930’s. How did we ever manage to defeat them? Sure, we had the atomic bomb, but all they had to do was go back in time and change history.
Oops, that should be 1931-1945.
During the war, the Japanese government built huge state-of-the-art animation studios that churned out propaganda. I’ve seen some of the films and they’re… eerie. Imagine Leni Riefenstal working for Walt Disney. One scene I remember had little cuddly bears parachuting from airplanes. The odd thing is that the SDF still use cute manga characters for recruitment. Check out this page from the Self Defence Forces’ own web site!
The presence of these studios after the war allowed creators like Tezuka Osamu produce high-quality movies, which kicked off the huge Japanese Anime trend.
Well, that little factiod should bust the bubble of a few otaku…anime was once used against us!
At least they didn’t finish their giant robots before the war ended.
In fact, Japan’s first full-length anime movie, Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors was released just before the war’s end, in 1945.
My copy of “The Anime Encyclopedia” notes that the few lines spoken in English—by British “ogres”—sounded like they were performed by native English speakers…possibly prisoners of war. :eek: :dubious: