Audience reviews
7 · Sample from the first available page, separate from the total number of ratings.
Jet-Rider
Momotaro, Sacred Sailors follows Momotaro and his loyal animal companions as they train, march, and eventually launch an attack on an enemy base, yet the adventure never becomes as engaging as its premise suggests. The monkey, dog, and pheasant are easily the most charming part of the film, but the story around them feels thin and overly prolonged, with long stretches of drills that never build tension and a final mission that arrives without dramatic lift. The pacing drifts from scene to scene with little momentum, leaving the whole feature feeling more like a slow instructional piece than a compelling narrative, and even the adorable character designs cannot fully overcome the sluggish rhythm that weighs the experience down.
Read at the sourceKousakaK
I can't rightfully support this film in any genuine manner, it's wartime propaganda at its finest. But viewing this as a piece of history, both in terms of Japanese history and animation history is incredibly interesting, and I will rate it based purely on how well I feel it's made, not what it represents.
For allegedly being the first feature length Japanese animation, it's animated surprisingly well, with adorable characters to boot, which is very evidently on purpose as it's trying to sell the idea of joining the military to kids. It's showing that it's an honorable decision that'll leave you with love and respect from all those around you. This is also shown in the scenes highlighting the beautiful nature of Japan, and the heroics displayed by the squad of Sacred Sailors. And I will s…
Read at the sourceThe_Namer
Oh jeez, where do I even start with a film that has such a difficult history? While not technically the first anime, this was the first feature-length anime film. And it's WWII propaganda. There are two ways to approach a film like this: as a piece of entertainment or a historical artefact. Depending on which you opt for, you'll have two very different experiences.
Viewed in isolation, purely on its own narrative merits as a piece of entertainment, Momotaro doesn't hold up. That's not necessarily a failure on its part because its primary aim is to indoctrinate as much as entertain, but there's not much left for an audience where the propaganda aspect is anachronistic. Also, the expectations for an animated film have changed so much in the decades since. The Disney influence on this film…
Read at the sourceAlanDSouza1
This is the first ever feature length animated movie to come out of Japan - and it is an overt propaganda film sanctioned by the Imperial Navy during the peak of the Pacific theatre of the second World War.
Imperial Japan was being embargoed by most of the world's manufacturers at the time - primarily the US, UK and their colonies and resources in the Island Nation were difficult to come across. This was increasingly so in the case of precious goods like celluloid or chemical dyes used for feature length animated films. It was one of the primary reasons why most of the works of this period in Japan, both before and after the war were relatively short in length ( budgetary imitations were another constraint).
Post War analysts have consistently portrayed the Imperial expansionists as delu…
Read at the sourceJaguar-chan
MID 2 to LIGHT 5. I found some aspects okay but dislike others.
Well, that was something. I've never watched feature-length propaganda, nor have I watched much pre-60s animation. This was a new experience for me, and, in both the propaganda and animation aspects, the movie was morbidly interesting.
As a Pinoy, well... I think it should be obvious how I feel about the propaganda. Although, I want to note a caveat in my take.
The way they depict themselves liberating the natives from those nasty whites sounds similar to nationalist propaganda in my home country. The somewhat messy relationship between the natives and the white men is a relationship heavily played upon in politics and rhetoric here, and I believe most Filipinos agree that being free from the Americans was approximately a…
Read at the sourceliteraturenerd
Overview:
I have a new laptop and now I'm back to befoul MAL with more silly reviews of bad, obscure anime that nobody asked to be reviewed. Let the universe howl in despair for I have returned! Time to review Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors!
Background:
The year is 1945 and Japan is very rapidly losing the war in the Pacific. The Japanese navy has been utterly decimated and is simply unable to keep up with America's manufacturing strength and output. Japan's resources are running bone dry and most of the Japanese merchant fleet has been sunk by American submarines. All of Japan's best pilots were trained in Germany and now virtually all are dead. Germany has been knocked out of the war, so no new quality pilots can be trained. The Soviet Red Army is now steamrolling Japan's Army in Chin…
Read at the sourcetheGreenDeath
Yes it's a wartime propaganda film, but one that spends as much time with cute animal soldiers packing and eating their bento lunches as it does with any fighting. It's only in the last fifteen minutes of runtime that there's any War at all. There are also extended scenes of singing alphabet songs, hanging laundry and feeding birds.
The animation is amazing, of course continuity is a little jumpy which considering the conditions of it being made make sense, so a lot of the scenes have little jumps and skips in the motion. Still the movement is remarkably three dimensional, and the characters have very expressive facial expressions.
When compared to the Disney wartime movies, these one lacks the coherent plots and punchy action and quick gags. It's all rather hallucinatory, slow moving an…
Read at the source