While TV anime and Ghibli films dominate the image of animation from Japan, the country’s animated past runs much deeper. Though much of that history is inaccessible—some film historians estimate that over 98% of all films made in Japan before 1930 are lost—Planet has always invested considerable energy into retrieving and making available some of Japan’s wondrous early animated films. Creating ghosts, fantastical creatures and a huge assortment of shape-shifting phantasms, early Japanese animators initially played to the strengths of animation’s ability to showcase marvelous transformations and stretching the limits of the body. By the mid-1930s Japan’s increasingly militarized public sphere left its mark on animation as well; while retaining an often whimsical tone and an experimental drive, animators also participated in the fantasies of Japan’s imperial project.

Planet’s founder, Yasui Yoshio, edited one of the pioneering histories of Japanese animation, History of Japanese Animated Films, as early as 1977. Since the beginning, Planet has created new film prints of dozens of historically important animated treasures, allowing for a much more comprehensive view of animated film from Japan. It has even been part of retrieving some of the earliest Disney cartoons thought no longer extant. Roughly divided into a focus on the early 1930s and the late 1930s, these two programs present some of the highlights from Planet’s invaluable archive of animated works. We can clearly discern the transition from celebrations of modern life (A Day in Life of Chameko, 1931) or fantastical themes (Bandanemon – The Monster Exterminator, 1935) to more inclusion of elements from a colonial and racial imaginary (such as Taro Overseas, 1938), and the Pacific War leaves its metaphoric mark in a sports competition between teams of dogs and monkeys in Human Rugby Bullets (1943).