Urashima Tarō (film) explained

Urashima Tarō
Director:Seitaro Kitayama
Based On:Urashima Tarō
Country:Japan
Language:Silent

is a Japanese animated film produced by Seitaro Kitayama in 1918. The film is an adaptation of a folk tale Urashima Tarō about a fisherman traveling to an underwater world on a turtle.[1] It premiered in February 1918,[2] making it one of the earliest anime films.[3]

It is a lost film; it was thought to have been discovered at a flea market at the Shitennō-ji temple in Osaka in 2007, but the discovered film later turned out to be another unknown work because a plot description and a series of stills of the 1918 film that differed considerably from the discovered film were found in a contemporary magazine.[4]

Notes and References

  1. News: Japan finds films by early "anime" pioneers . 27 March 2008 . Reuters . 6 July 2013.
  2. Web site: Some remarks on the first Japanese animation films in 1917. Frederick S. Litten. 2014-01-02.
  3. News: Two Nine-Decade-Old Anime Films Discovered (Updated) . 29 June 2019 . . 2008-03-27.
  4. Watanabe. Yasushi. July 2017. ja:北山清太郎制作『浦島太郎』の新資料発見について. NFC Newsletter. ja. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. 132. 12. https://www.momat.go.jp/fc/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2017/08/NFC132_p12.pdf. 2019-07-10. 2022-09-05. https://web.archive.org/web/20220905134443/https://www.momat.go.jp/fc/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2017/08/NFC132_p12.pdf. dead.