Three years after Paul Terry introduced his Aesop’s Fables cartoon series in the US, Sanae Yamamoto (18981981) produced this beautiful linedrawn adaptation of The Hare and the Tortoise. Based on a popular Japanese nursery rhyme inspired by the fable, it was one of the first films by the animator, who would go on to have a long and successful career in the industry, notably at the Toei Doga studio. As Laura Montero-Plata and Marie Pruvost-Delaspre point out, Yamamoto’s early films “offer good examples of the technical skills mastered by Japanese animators at that time and the way they were trying to bring together the tools available and their knowledge of American cartoons”. Kyoikuotogimanga usagi to kame is one of several gems available on the National Film Archive of Japan’s Japanese Animated Film Classics portal (animation.filmarchives.jp); a veritable treasure trove covering a 24-year period, from the earliest surviving Japanese animated film from 1917, to Yamamoto’s Namakegitsune (The Lazy Fox, 1941).

Oliver Hanley