Tsukioka Sadao’s Blog

In the 1980s, when the word “content” was beginning to spread, I worked for a time at Company F, a personal computer maker. Hardware alone was becoming hard to profit from, and I experienced on the ground the mood in which value was shifting toward the software that ran on PCs (personal computers) and the information that flowed through them. It was said that the word “content” was born at IBM, the giant of the PC industry in those days, and spread from there. ...

The talk turns back to animation once more, and I would like to look at Disney’s works. Among the features are “Snow White,” “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Rapunzel,” and so on. Of course, the number of titles is far greater than that. Many of Disney’s works take their material from the collections of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and by Perrault, who gathered folk tales from Germany and, beyond it, from around Italy and France. The contents of the Grimms’ book are quite cruel; in the second edition some revision was made to the treatment of the mother, and it is said that with every edition after that, revisions here and there were unavoidable. And one often hears that when these became Disney animation, a great many more revisions were made on top of that. ...

Now, when it comes to ensemble drama, the first thing that springs to mind is that masterpiece of the Hashimoto–Kurosawa pairing, “Seven Samurai.” The individuality of all seven was drawn without a scrap left over. A human quality unlike anything fabricated, the kind you might find anywhere in the real world, comes pouring out of it. Reality was the window through which empathy entered. There Were Two Miyamoto Musashis in “Seven Samurai” ...

Added 14 September 2026: Errors in several personal names have been corrected — Keisuke Fujikawa, Eiichi Yamamoto, Toshio Masuda, Shogo Hirata, Nobuhiro Okaseko, and Masanori Ito and Yasuo Shibue of the founding members of Soeisha (Sunrise) — following a correction kindly sent in by a reader, Kitajima. With thanks. Almost all anime, from the start, has something you could call a story. But speaking from the position of a man who makes his living by anime: story matters, yes, and yet what matters as much or more is the thing only animation can express — what we call animation artistry. There is a way of thinking that says the finest thing of all would be high animation artistry with a story still visible inside it. It is Mr. Hashimoto’s theme, then story, then character, read backwards. ...

At the end of my last piece on limited animation, I declared that next time I would write about “Japanimation.” The name Japanimation was a label bestowed in Europe, meaning: that stuff is not animation. After “Astro Boy,” thirty-minute series came to be produced one after another, and by the 1990s series like “Candy Candy” and “Urusei Yatsura” were airing on French and Italian broadcasters. They created a boom among children, and at the same time criticism began — and the word born of that criticism was “Japanimation.” ...