Lost film found

Yoshiro Irie, a researcher at Tokyo's National Film Center, announced that two of Japan's oldest animated films have been found. "Lost films", Junichi Kouchi's 1917 two minute silent movie Nakamura Gatana, and Seitaro Kitayama's 1918 Urashima Taro, were discovered in an Osaka antique store. Nakamura Gatana is a about a samurai tricked into buying a dull sword, and Urashima Taro is based on a folk tale about a fisherman who goes to an underwater world on the back of a turtle.

Irie said, along with Oten Shimokawa, who made what is most probably the first commercial Japanese animated film: Imokaw Muzuko, The Janitor, that Kouichi and Kitayama are considered "fathers of Japanese anime.

"Now everything is digitalized, but these early animated films were made on the same principles used now. It was an era when people were surprised just to see that the pictures moved. The films are also full of gags."