Why We Fight
The mood turns dramatic. A reconnaissance plane brings aerial photographs of an entrenched British colonial base on the other side of the island. The sailors switch from general combat practice to parachute training. The monkey, bear cub and puppy join the parachutists, while the pheasant becomes a fighter pilot. Commander Momotaro completes his plans. A rather artistically-jarring "why-we-fight" history lesson in cut-out silhouette animation shows 17th-century Dutch "pirates" conquering the independent Malay sultanates and imposing European rule over the East Indies. The sailors don their paratroop gear and board the transport planes. After a flight through a storm a British base comes into sight. The troops parachute out and capture it after a violent but brief battle. Commander Momotaro presides over the surrender conference, where the cowardly British officers each try to avoid taking the responsibility for signing the surrender. (The British voices sound authentic--inmates of a prisoner-of-war camp?--speaking in English with Japanese subtitles, in the feature's only major scene with considerable dialogue.) The ending shows the animal civilians back home getting the news of the Navy's victory, while children play at being paratroopers and jump down upon an outline map of the United States-- presumably suggesting the next goal; but since this movie was released barely four months before the war's end, this must have been too exaggerated for even wishful dreaming by then.

Momotaro Umi no Shimpei is a black-&-white film, about technically equivalent to the American theatrical cartoons of the early 1930s. The art style and direction show a greater Chinese than Western influence. The film is extremely slow paced, and there are many "artistic" shots emphasizing the beauty of falling rain, or comparing parachuting soldiers with drifting dandelion seeds.

But while the story is more dramatic than those of America's cartoon comedies, the movie is about equal in racial stereotyping. The animals that depict the Japanese are all handsome and intelligent. The East Indies animals, although friendly, are carefree "happy but simple natives" (including a humorously grotesque proboscis monkey, an orangutan and a long-armed gibbon, in ethnic dress) who caper about foolishly. They are treated in a clearly patronizing manner by the sailor animals. The British are drawn as humans but with exaggerated Western characteristics: they are either tall and gangly or short and Colonel Blimpishly stout, with pop eyes and great noses. They also each have a single demon's horn on their heads: foreign devils. If our own propaganda cartoons look embarrassing to us today, we can take relief in the knowledge that ours weren't any worse than were the Axis'.

*According to History of Japanese Animation Films (a booklet published by an early Japanese animation magazine, Film 1/24, Tokyo, June 1977; co-edited & translated by Edward D. Herscovitz), Mituyo Seo was born on September 26, 1911. He created eight short anime films between 1933 and 1939; he directed the two Momotaro films released in 1943 and 1945. His final film, a musical featurette, Osama no Shippo (The King's Tail), was released in 1947. He then became an author and illustrator of childrens' books, and was apparently still active in this field in 1977.

Fred Patten has written on anime for fan and professional magazines since the late 1970s. He currently writes a regular anime column for Animation Magazine. An earlier version of this article appeared in Get Animated! January 1986.