Taro Urashima (1918) - A weird, one-minute trip into the past

Look, if you are looking for a blockbuster, you are in the wrong place.

This thing is over before you can even finish a sip of water.

It is worth watching if you care about how things used to be made, or if you just like seeing really old ghosts on your screen.

Most people will probably hate it because it is grainy and silent and feels like it is falling apart.

But for me? I think it is kind of magic.

It is based on the folk tale about Taro Urashima, the fisherman who rescues a turtle from some mean kids on a beach.

The turtle takes him to an underwater palace as a thank you.

In this version, everything is so flat and shaky.

The movement has this clunky, paper-cutout feel that you just don't see anymore.

Manzo Miyashita is the name attached to it, but you can barely see his face through all the film grain.

There is one shot where the turtle looks at Taro, and the eyes are just these little dots.

It is almost funny how simple it is.

The water doesn't look like water at all.

It looks like someone took a pen and just drew some wiggly lines and hoped for the best.

I like that the creator didn't try to make it look realistic.

It reminds me a bit of the vibe in The Potterymaker, where you are just watching a craft happen in real time.

The film is so short because most of it was lost or destroyed a long time ago.

That makes the minute we do have feel heavy, you know?

It is like finding a single page from a book that burned down a century ago.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Taro Urashima (1931) through its definitive frames.

Sometimes the screen goes almost totally white because the film is so damaged.

It is a bit like The Face in the Fog in that sense, where you are squinting to see what is actually happening.

I found myself wondering what the kids on the beach were thinking when they saw this in 1918.

They probably thought it was the coolest thing they had ever seen.

Now we have movies like New York Luck that feel so much more polished, but they lack this weird soul.

There is a specific moment where Taro is riding the turtle and the background just repeats.

It is so basic, but it works.

You can almost feel the movie trying to convince you that they are actually moving through the ocean.

The way the frames jump around makes my eyes hurt a little bit after a while.

But its okay because it is over so fast.

I wonder if they ever found the rest of the footage for things like Torpedoing of the Oceania or if it's just gone forever too.

It makes me a little sad to think about all the stories we can't see anymore.

Taro Urashima is just a tiny window into a world that doesn't exist anymore.

The animation is stiff and the story is barely there, but it has a rhythm.

It’s a personal rhythm, like a heartbeat that’s about to stop.

If you have sixty seconds, just go find it on the internet and watch it.

Don't expect to be blown away by the action.

Just look at the lines and the way the light flickers.

It’s better than sitting through a two-hour movie that doesn't have half the heart this little fragment does. 🐢