The French Film That Changed Japanese Animation
Plus: news.
Welcome! We’re back with another issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Here’s the plan:
1) Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, Toei Doga and Paul Grimault.
2) Newsbits.
As a note, this is our last Sunday edition before we leave for the Annecy Festival (opening June 8). It’s the main event in the animation world each year, and we’re covering it in person for the first time. Our publishing schedule will change for a couple of weeks — issues will drop on different days, as stories emerge.
With that, let’s go!
1 – A film at the root
In the early 1950s, animation changed for good through an accident of history.
The film wasn’t meant to come out — but it did. In 1952, The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep appeared at the Venice Film Festival. It was a French animated feature by Paul Grimault, who later set out to destroy many copies of it, and to lock away the rest.1
It was his magnum opus. When The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep got started in the ‘40s, it was “expected to be the European answer to American-made animated feature films,” according to historian Giannalberto Bendazzi.2 It’s a surreal tale about a tyrant king and two paintings (a shepherdess, a chimney sweep) that come to life and try to escape his vast, vertical kingdom. Dazzling and hyper-technical animation brings it together.
But, after a few years of production, the project’s scope outstripped its budget. Grimault ran out of money. It was quickly assembled and released anyway.
“[D]espite Grimault’s opposition, his partner André Sarrut decided to exploit the film before its completion (one-fifth was yet to be filmed),” Bendazzi wrote. “Lawsuits, criticism from the press and intellectuals’ indignation could not prevent the film from being shown in an incomplete version.”
That version toured the world. There was an English dub — now reportedly in the public domain, and free on the Internet Archive. More impactful was the Japanese release of 1955. Its title was Yabunirami no Bokun (“The Cross-Eyed Tyrant”), and it took root.
Japan’s press and intelligentsia raved about Grimault’s film. Its incompleteness barely registered. Here was a movie beyond Disney, they argued — something with a deep political meaning, ties to modern art and its own approach to animated characters. “It is not a children’s cartoon (manga), but a sort of experimental film,” noted the Asahi Shimbun.3
It did well in theaters. And, in the years ahead, it grew into a near-universal reference point for Japan’s animation industry.4 Among its fans were the young Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, and their colleagues at the studio Toei Doga in Tokyo.
“If I had not seen this film,” Takahata later wrote, “I would have never imagined entering the world of animation.”
When Takahata first watched Grimault’s film in the 1950s, he was attending university. It “made a vivid impression on me,” he said.5 This thing went “way beyond established ideas at the time.”
“There was no home video in those days,” Takahata told the Yomiuri Shimbun, “so I would go to movie theaters and draw diagrams of the rooms in the dark, and I borrowed the script from the distribution company and copied it all.”
He watched the film again and again. Some 50 years later, he still remembered how its script looked — the words “typed on airmail paper as thin as tracing paper.”
The animation and design in The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep grabbed him. He said that “the way each thing is drawn is concrete, direct and clear, but it has a sense of wonder and beauty, like a waking dream.”6 Plus, the story is a strong but nuanced critique of power, of oppressive structures. The political element lit up Takahata’s imagination:
When I watched The Cross-Eyed Tyrant, I felt the possibility that animation could talk about society and these kinds of ideas. If I hadn’t seen this, I don’t think I would have taken the entrance exam for Toei Doga.
Miyazaki and Takahata didn’t meet until the ‘60s — but, by then, Grimault’s film had caught their attention individually. It appealed to Miyazaki even though he hadn’t really watched it. As he explained:
I first saw The Cross-Eyed Tyrant in manga form. At that time, manga versions of movies were being created and circulated without paying for the license. Osamu Tezuka also created manga based on Disney’s Pinocchio. That was the era. I thought the manga version was interesting.7
An artist named Yasuo Otsuka, soon to be their co-worker (and a legendary animator), likewise came upon the film in the ‘50s. He wasn’t sure how to take it at first. But it eventually became a core influence — after he watched it again at Toei Doga.8
Otsuka was among the first people at Toei’s animation branch when it opened in the ‘50s. Takahata arrived later, in 1959. By 1963, the year Miyazaki joined, a kind of Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep mania had taken hold. According to Otsuka, Toei Doga screened it so often that everyone at the studio got to see it at least once.
“I guess there was an atmosphere of, ‘I want to create something like that,’ ” he remembered.
Back then, Toei Doga was the center of Japanese animation. Its movies, like The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon (1963), were impressive. Otsuka and Takahata were crucial to that project and others. And they were closely studying Grimault’s film.
Takahata recalled an early studio screening of a borrowed copy of The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep. There was a long night afterward, as the team combed over the film frame by frame.9 Takahata “took extensive notes,” Otsuka said. Meanwhile, Otsuka drew a “pose collection” based on what they saw.
At one point, the Toei Doga crew even taped the soundtrack to play in the studio. By the time Miyazaki arrived, screenings of the film were used for training. He was around 23 or 24 when he finally saw it for himself. As he said:
Until then, I had heard the legends from Paku-san (Isao Takahata) and Otsuka-san. They would borrow the film and study it one frame at a time using a viewer. Apparently, they watched it so much that the film tore vertically.
I don’t know if the copy I saw was the same one, but it was in a pretty terrible state. Rain was pouring down on the film [because it was scratched], and it was falling to pieces. However, I thought that the sense of space was very interesting.
What people got out of The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep varied. Takahata, Miyazaki and Otsuka all idolized it, but not always for the same reasons. With Miyazaki, it had a lot to do with the world.
Staffers at Toei Doga described the structure of their films as “skewered dumplings” (kushi-dango). In other words: loosely connected adventures and locations jammed together, one after the next. Grimault’s film had another structure, which the team called “closed room” (misshitsu).
“Closed room is the type where you create a bit more of a detailed world and complete [the story] within that world,” Miyazaki said.
At the time, Miyazaki and many of his colleagues saw the worlds in Toei’s “skewered dumplings” films as tossed-off and vague. Grimault’s work had a different approach: a world that’s “more close-knit and has a sense of presence,” with clearly defined places and a greater use of vertical space. For Miyazaki, it shattered the flat, horizontal staging he knew from other movies — even live-action ones. When a vertical dimension was added, it increased “the presence of the world.”
Takahata obsessed over Grimault’s depiction of class, power and revolutionary struggle. Miyazaki, less so. He preferred the story and themes of the Soviet film The Snow Queen (1957) and even Toei Doga’s own Panda and the Magic Serpent (1958) to those of Grimault’s piece. And, at first, Otsuka completely missed the political angle.
For Otsuka, it was the tyrant’s acting that stole the show: “I was surprised by his gestures and every move, and I thought, ‘Is there really a way to draw something like this?’ ”
The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep is full of complex movements that feel three-dimensional, with strong volumes and a degree of resistance to Disney’s squash-and-stretch method. It’s more solid, more tangible. That includes the tyrant. But the flow of the tyrant’s movement gets broken for effect. He sometimes freezes in place, or his motions get clipped down, jumping from pose to pose.
“There’s timing all over the place that is completely different from Disney,” Otsuka said. It mixes elements of “full” and “limited” animation. There are long, slow, fully rendered motions interspersed with the type of hard, flat hold that Walt Disney hated.10 Otsuka criticized Disney’s films for moving too much to allow for real tension — but he felt Grimault solved the problem.
These are just a few of the lessons that Toei Doga picked up from The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep. They went over every facet of it — meticulously. It was one of the many foreign animated films that the team screened and analyzed, alongside work by Jiří Trnka, Zagreb Film, Soyuzmultfilm and more.11
The trouble was implementing what they were learning. In retrospect, Takahata said that work like The Snow Queen and The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep was “towering” over the team. Miyazaki felt that their heights might be unreachable:
… I thought they were far above, in terms of what they tried to do, and what they accomplished. We were, in short, at the level of “Toei kids’ stuff.” The gap between our level and the works we were inspired by was too big. We thought how could we climb up there, or even if we couldn’t, let’s remove the stones around us. So, there were many things we had to do.
According to one Toei animator, early hints of Grimault’s influence appeared in The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon.12 Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon (1965) openly swiped from Grimault, including the robot’s violent rampage toward the end.
And then there was Takahata’s Horus: Prince of the Sun (1968), the Toei film probably most affected by The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep.
Takahata credited the social and political themes of Horus to the impact of Grimault’s film. More than that, Horus aimed to show a believable, tangible animated world in the same way that Grimault had done. Horus was the project that made Takahata’s colleague Yoichi Kotabe realize, “With animation, you can create a world you can grasp with your hands.”13
Miyazaki and the team took from The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep to portray the central village in Horus. They wanted to create a believable space, a village that could actually exist. The effort to capture “presence” went deeper than that, though. It’s in the filmmaking: Takahata wrote that the shots in Horus were designed to create “a sense of reality and presence by giving the action temporal and spatial continuity.”14 Notably, Grimault had done the same.
Later, in summary, Takahata wrote the following about Miyazaki’s career and his own:
When it comes down to it, I think the largest influence we received from Grimault ... [was to] give a feeling of presence to characters and space, and to create works that are not just “kids’ stuff” but have interior and social dimensions.
Post-Horus, and even post-Toei, Miyazaki and Takahata kept doing these things. Takahata’s failed Pippi Longstocking series, for example, hinged on a sense of reality and space. Similar ideas were behind Panda! Go, Panda! (1972) and so many more.
Miyazaki’s borrowings from Grimault are especially clear in the vertically inclined Castle of Cagliostro (1979). Yet Takahata and Yasuo Otsuka, the latter of whom animated on the film, felt that Miyazaki wasn’t just copying. He’d long since internalized The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep, they argued, alongside influences like Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941). They came out in his work unconsciously.15
This deep influence from Grimault would carry over into Miyazaki’s films, and Takahata’s, in the decades ahead.
Years after The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep had its effect, Paul Grimault went back to it. He reworked the film into The King and the Mockingbird (1980) — a heavily changed and expanded edition of the movie that Takahata and Miyazaki had known.
The two of them saw it eventually, and both were put off. The film’s stylistic wholeness is gone: new animation clashes with old. Miyazaki likened it to a monastery that was half-finished by stonemasons and then completed with concrete blocks. Even in 2006, he believed that Grimault should’ve accepted the original film for what it was and moved on.
For years, Takahata felt similarly — like many in Japan did. Even when he met Grimault in the early ‘90s, he couldn’t bring himself to tell his idol that the remake was good.
Still, Miyazaki and Takahata continued to have The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep in their bank of reference points. And Takahata did, ultimately, take another look at the “completed” version. As he said, “[I]f we deny The King and the Mockingbird, we deny Grimault as a whole.”
Takahata didn’t lose his attachment to the original, but he came to appreciate what Grimault had done with it — particularly the new, more melancholy ending. There, he said, even the revolution against the tyrant gets thrown into question. Takahata called it “an ideological step forward” from the old ending. When Studio Ghibli oversaw the release of The King and the Mockingbird in Japan in the mid-2000s, he was at the forefront of its promo campaign. It became a hit.16
That isn’t to discount the power of the original, though. The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep remains a mesmerizing, almost otherworldly watch. And it was the version that changed animation history. The broken version, which wasn’t supposed to exist.
Seeing it now, it’s hard not to feel a certain familiarity. Like you’ve watched parts of it somewhere — maybe a lot of times, in a lot of animation done in the years after 1952.
This is a revised and expanded reprint of an article that first ran in our newsletter on September 21, 2023. It was exclusive to paying subscribers then — now, it’s free to everyone.
2 – Newsbits
We lost Co Hoedeman (84) — one of the world’s true animation legends — and the longtime Simpsons composer Alf Clausen (84).
The Art of The Boy and the Heron is out in America.
The Irish film Retirement Plan is picking up awards. Its director posted a funny, bittersweet short about his experience on the festival circuit — well worth a look.
In Brazil, the government is preparing a “$23 million incentives package” that includes support for animation.
The grandmaster Andrei Khrzhanovsky (Glass Harmonica) spoke about his views on Russia — the political situation, his sense of “terrible shame” about the war and the cutting of support for School-Studio Shar, which he co-founded.
In France, a book and DVD will cover The Idea (1934) by Berthold Bartosch — who animated on The Adventures of Prince Achmed.
Russia’s courts have, unfortunately, thrown out Francheska Yarbusova’s lawsuit. She went after the government’s co-opting of her character from Hedgehog in the Fog.
Another Russian story (which we missed last year) was recently brought to our attention. This one digs into the wild process behind Halloo, a film animated via slide projector. It’s three minutes long and took three years to make.
In Indonesia, Jumbo hit 10 million attendees. It will soon be the country’s biggest local film ever, animated or live-action. (Including foreign films, it’ll be second.)
Wow Lisa is a kids’ show from Chile that’s been getting international praise. Its directors recently talked to Radix about the project. (Episodes are on YouTube.)
Last of all: we wrote about the art of syncing music and sound, and the disputes over “Mickey Mousing.”
Until next time!
Takahata discussed Grimault’s efforts to eliminate copies of the movie in Ambition of Cartoon Films (漫画映画の志), a book cited throughout. Meanwhile, the struggle to access surviving versions is mentioned here. It’s worth adding that André Bazin praised the film after its Venice premiere — see Cahiers du Cinéma (October 1952).
The quotes from Bendazzi come from the first section on Grimault in Animation: A World History (Volume 2).
Takahata wrote about Japan’s reaction in Ambition of Cartoon Films, as did Seiji Kanoh in The King and the Mockingbird: The Origin of Studio Ghibli (王と鳥―スタジオジブリの原点). The latter is the source of the Asahi Shimbun quote, among other details.
For a small idea of the film’s impact, see Manga Shonen Monthly (October 1978), in which a ton of Japanese animation pros talked about it. We explored this in a previous issue.
Tyrant mania even reached Toei Doga’s competitor Mushi Production, founded in the early ‘60s. When Mushi began, it surveyed its staff about its favorite feature films. Seiji Kanoh said that Grimault’s project “was overwhelmingly in first place.”
From an archived interview between Takahata and the Yomiuri Shimbun, used several times.
From Takahata’s article in the magazine Invitation (August 2006), where he discussed Grimault’s film at length. Most of Miyazaki’s quotes come from the same issue.
The manga version by Nakamura Shoten may or may not have been a bootleg in reality, despite Miyazaki’s perception of it at the time. See pages here.
As explained in Otsuka’s interview with Seiji Kanoh for The Origin of Studio Ghibli. That interview (and what became of it in the book) is used throughout.
Other members of this session, Takahata wrote, were Daisaku Shirakawa and Sadao Tsukioka. He recalled that Yoichi Kotabe was known to sing the song that plays on the gramophone early in the film.
The Illusion of Life talks about the discovery of “moving holds” at Disney, where some element of a character always moves even when they’ve technically “stopped.” This is:
… a fluid type of action where they didn’t hit a hold and move out of it. But when one part would hold something else would move. So there was never a complete stop.
Walt Disney hated “hard” holds and was a big supporter of this new method:
… he said that is the worst thing about the kind of animation you guys are doing. Your character goes dead and it looks like a drawing.
For some of the work screened by the studio, see this interview with Toshio Hirata and this one with Makoto Nagasawa. In The Origin of Studio Ghibli, Kanoh specifically names The Creation of the World by Eduard Hofman, Invention for Destruction by Karel Zeman and A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Trnka, among others.
That’s Nagasawa in the foregoing interview.
From Kotabe’s interview in The Phantom Pippi Longstocking (2014).
From The Visual Expression of Horus (1983).
Takahata made this argument (and cited Mr. Bug as an influence on Cagliostro) in Ambition of Cartoon Films. Otsuka had a similar take in his interview with Kanoh. Regarding Mr. Bug, Miyazaki singled it out as a favorite in January 1979, during his interview for Future Boy Conan: Film 1/24 Special Issue. As seen on page 80:
— What is Miyazaki-san’s favorite cartoon movie (manga eiga)?
Miyazaki: For someone like me who aims to create cartoon movies, the one that I think does it best is Fleischer’s Mr. Bug Goes to Town. In that, the idea and the story’s composition are really closely intertwined, and also closely involved in creating a singular world … Even with a single gag, it’s not something made up on the spot just so people will laugh, but instead something that would [naturally] occur if the character moved that way … That’s why Mr. Bug is truly well made.
In an essay a few months later, Miyazaki’s take on the film was more mixed. But it remained in his mind, as evidenced by his interview for the film’s Ghibli Museum release (included in a booklet with the DVD edition).
What amazing history! Thank you for putting the pieces of the puzzle together and bridging the cultural gap for those of us who love Japanese animation!
It makes me so glad to read texts about someone’s genuine and devoted admiration for a subject, just like you guys do!
Even though I'm not going to look into every recommendation of animated works or articles, I truly admire the incredible effort you put in every week.
As a pretty regular person, I grew up loving cartoons, and now in my 30s I still have a soft spot for animation — especially from Japan or anything sci-fi related.
Unfortunately, I don't have the time to dive into every aspect of it as much as I’d love to, and that’s why I’m so happy to have found your work.
It allows me to learn more about the history of animation, from places I never imagined hearing about, and — most importantly — it makes me realize that I can explore my own interests and write about them with the same passion you do.
Thank you so much!
Warm regards from Brazil!