Note: To watch this film with sub­ti­tles, please click “cc” at the bot­tom of the video play­er.

When we talk about tra­di­tion­al­ly ani­mat­ed fea­ture films, we most often talk about Dis­ney in the West and Japan­ese ani­me in the East. But both Dis­ney ani­ma­tion and Japan­ese ani­ma­tion (from the stu­dio of the acclaimed Hayao Miyaza­ki or oth­ers) have their inspi­ra­tions as well as their fol­low­ers, and in between Dis­ney and Japan we find the ambi­tious 1941 Chi­nese pro­duc­tion Princess Iron Fan. Made under Japan­ese occu­pa­tion in the thick of the Sec­ond World War, the film took three years, 237 artists, and 350,000 yuan to make, pre­mier­ing as the very first ani­mat­ed fea­ture made in Chi­na. Now you can watch it free (with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles avail­able at the click of the “CC” icon) on Youtube.

Princess Iron Fan adapts one of the many sto­ries in Jour­ney to the West, the Ming-dynasty nov­el rec­og­nized as one of the Four Great Clas­si­cal Nov­els of Chi­nese lit­er­a­ture. In it, the tit­u­lar princess — or rather, a demon with the title of a princess whose “iron” fan, though mag­i­cal nev­er­the­less, is actu­al­ly made of banana leaves — duels the leg­endary Mon­key King.

Artis­ti­cal­ly fired up by a screen­ing of Dis­ney’s Snow White and the Sev­en Dwarfs in 1939, the film’s cre­ators Wan Guchan and Wan Laim­ing, known as the Wan Broth­ers, used a suite of tech­niques then sel­dom or nev­er seen in their home­land to bring the old tale to ani­mat­ed life, such as roto­scop­ing (trac­ing over live-action footage), bounc­ing-ball lyric sequences dur­ing musi­cal num­bers, and even col­or effects hand-drawn on top of the black-and-white ani­ma­tion.

Call­ing the pic­ture “an enor­mous achieve­ment in wartime film­mak­ing,” Ani­me: A His­to­ry author Jonathan Clements writes of its release the fol­low­ing year in Japan­ese cin­e­mas: “This is par­tic­u­lar­ly iron­ic, since the Wan broth­ers orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed it as a protest against the Japan­ese, seed­ing the film with images of ‘the bru­tal real­i­ty of the dai­ly vio­lence in a coun­try crip­pled by war.’ ” And just as Snow White moti­vat­ed the Wan Broth­ers to take ani­ma­tion to a high­er lev­el, so Princess Iron Fan moti­vat­ed a gen­er­a­tion of Japan­ese ani­ma­tors to do the same. Clements quotes Osamu Tezu­ka, cre­ator of Astro Boy and much else besides, on his own first view­ing of the film as a teenag­er, when he clear­ly under­stood it as  “a work of resis­tance.” But like all the most ded­i­cat­ed cre­ators, Tezu­ka could look beyond the Wan Broth­ers’ polit­i­cal chal­lenge to take on their much more impor­tant artis­tic one.

Princess Iron Fan will be added to our list of Ani­mat­ed Films, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The God­dess: A Clas­sic from the Gold­en Age of Chi­nese Cin­e­ma, Star­ring the Silent Film Icon Ruan Lingyu (1934)

An Epic Retelling of the Great Chi­nese Nov­el Romance of the Three King­doms: 110 Free Episodes and Count­ing

Illus­tra­tions for a Chi­nese Lord of the Rings in a Stun­ning “Glass Paint­ing Style”

The Ori­gins of Ani­me: Watch Free Online 64 Ani­ma­tions That Launched the Japan­ese Ani­me Tra­di­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or

Japan­ese ani­ma­tion has a way of seem­ing per­pet­u­al­ly new and dar­ing, but it now goes back at least a cen­tu­ry. Hav­ing carved out its own aes­thet­ic and intel­lec­tu­al space in world cul­ture, ani­me (even for­eign­ers who’ve nev­er watched so much as a minute of it know the Japan­ese term) con­tin­ues to gen­er­ate a dis­tinc­tive kind of excite­ment in its view­ers. That goes for rel­a­tive­ly recent fea­tures that have already attained clas­sic sta­tus, like the lush, simul­ta­ne­ous­ly real­is­tic and fan­tas­ti­cal works of Hayao Miyaza­ki, the dark­er, deep­er visions like Mamoru Oshi­i’s Ghost in the Shell, and the diver­si­ty of works in between. But how did those qual­i­ties man­i­fest in the very ear­li­est ani­me? We can now eas­i­ly see for our­selves, thanks to the selec­tion of 64 Japan­ese ani­mat­ed film clas­sics made freely avail­able online, as a cel­e­bra­tion of the cen­te­nary of the form, by Japan’s Nation­al Film Archive.

“The most excit­ing of these are the two ear­li­est extant ani­me The Dull Sword (Namaku­ra Gatana, 1917) and Urashima Tarō (1918),” writes Nishika­ta Film Review’s Cathy Munroe Hotes, “films which were con­sid­ered lost until copies were mirac­u­lous­ly dis­cov­ered in an antique shop in Osa­ka in 2008.  As the vast major­i­ty of pre-war films have been lost due to nat­ur­al dis­as­ter, war, and gen­er­al neglect, each of these 64 films is an impor­tant glimpse into ear­ly ani­me his­to­ry and ear­ly 20^th cen­tu­ry Japan­ese cul­ture.”

You can also browse the Nation­al Film Archive’s online col­lec­tion of ear­ly ani­ma­tion by direc­tor. Watch­ing the works of cer­tain espe­cial­ly pro­lif­ic ones like Noburō Ōfu­ji and Yasu­ji Mura­ta (whose 1929 The Old Man’s Lump Removed, not avail­able in the col­lec­tion, appears above), you might come away con­vinced that, even in its first decades, Japan­ese ani­ma­tion had devel­oped its auteur cul­ture.

The move­ment (which some­times bare­ly qual­i­fies as such) and sound (if any) in some of these shorts could hard­ly impress today, at least on a tech­ni­cal lev­el. Nev­er­the­less, those of us who’ve felt the excite­ment of the best of ani­me will rec­og­nize in the pre­sen­ta­tion of the images them­selves — in its dynamism, its humor, its cre­ativ­i­ty — the spe­cial ani­mat­ing spir­it, as it were, that first sparked our inter­est. Whether the some­times slap­dash likes of Speed Rac­er, Robot­ech, or Kim­ba the White Lion, which intro­duced gen­er­a­tions of West­ern­ers to ani­me in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, real­ly marked that much of an improve­ment on crude pro­duc­tion of, say, Murata’s My Ski Trip from 1930 remains open to debate, but through them all we can trace the devel­op­ment of the style and sen­si­bil­i­ty that, to this day, no ani­ma­tion but the Japan­ese vari­ety has tru­ly mas­tered.

Enter the Nation­al Film Archive ani­me col­lec­tion here.

(NOTE: the Nation­al Film Archive assures us that the Eng­lish ver­sion of the site “will be avail­able in a month or two,” but you can find Eng­lish-sub­ti­tled films there even now.)

via coudal.com

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ear­ly Japan­ese Ani­ma­tions: The Ori­gins of Ani­me (1917–1931)

How the Films of Hayao Miyaza­ki Work Their Ani­mat­ed Mag­ic, Explained in 4 Video Essays

The Phi­los­o­phy, Sto­ry­telling & Visu­al Cre­ativ­i­ty of Ghost in the Shell, the Acclaimed Ani­me Film, Explained in Video Essays

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.