Oldest Anime Films Discovered and Restored

[wayshway]

Two silent anime short films from 1917 and 1918 have been found and restored by Japan's National Museum of Modern Art. The two films are believed to be among the oldest anime films ever made, and were discovered in an antiques market in Osaka last year. The first film, Jun-ichi Kouchi’s Namakura-gatana (”An Obtuse Sword”), is from 1917 and tells the tale of a samurai who is tricked into buying a blunt sword. The second film, Seitaro Kitayama’s 1918 Urashima Taro ("Taro, The Sentry: Submarine"), is a re-telling of a classic Japanese folktale of a fisherman who is invited to an undersea kingdom after rescuing a sea turtle.

The films will be screened at the Museum's National Film Center on April 24, 2008.