One Giant Step: Looking Back at the Anime “Jack and the Beanstalk”

If you watched HBO in the ’80s, you probably remember the 1974 animated feature Jack and the Beanstalk. It was shown quite a bit on the cable platform during the decade, which is how a generation remembers it, or recalls it as a long-lost fever dream, when someone brings the movie up in conversation.

Jack and the Beanstalk also had an interesting path to movie screens. It was the first film produced by the then-new Japanese studio Group TAC, founded by staff from the studio Mushi Pro, which had gone bankrupt. That studio was not only responsible for the popular TV series Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion but also provided animation to several Rankin/Bass holiday specials, such as Frosty the Snowman.

Mushi Pro had also made more adult-oriented animated features, such as 1970’s Cleopatra, which received an X rating. With Jack and the Beanstalk, the new Group TAC studio aimed to create a more traditional, musical animated fairy tale for a family audience.

Even with that, their take on Jack and the Beanstalk was still a decidedly different and, at times, darker version of the familiar fable.

The film begins traditionally enough with Jack and his Mother deciding to sell the family’s cow. Jack meets an enigmatic, cloaked stranger with an eyepatch who convinces Jack to make the trade for “mysterious, miraculous and magical” beans.

After he does and returns home, of course, his mother is upset and, tossing the beans outside, they sprout up into the mammoth beanstalk. Jack scales it into the clouds, accompanied by his sidekicks: his dog, Crosby, and a mouse named Laura.

When they arrive at the castle in the clouds, Jack and the Beanstalk begins to take its gloomier turn as they meet a mysterious young girl, Princess Margaret.

They also encounter the creepy Madame Hecuba, who seems welcoming but is actually an evil witch who has placed the princess under a spell and plans on having Margaret marry her son, “Tulip,” so that Hecuba can rule the kingdom. Jack is invited to dinner by Hecuba but is also placed under a sleeping spell by the witch.

There’s somber music accompanied by slowly paced animation in these scenes that adds a horror movie quality to the proceedings, which only escalates as “Tulip,” a/k/a the Giant, enters the film. The character emerges looking less like a fairy-tale character and more like one of the Universal Monsters.

As Jack wakes, he attempts to escape from the castle and the Giant. He discovers a treasure trove with a talking harp and looks to help the Princess break her trance and break up the marriage to Tulip. The wedding sequence is another disturbing scene in Jack and the Beanstalk, playing out against funeral dirge-like music, with all the wedding guests portrayed as surrealistic paper-thin people conjured by Hecuba.

This year, Jack and the Beanstalk celebrates the 50th anniversary of its release in Japan on July 20th, 1974. The film was released on February 13th, 1976, in the United States. At the helm was director Gisaburō Sugii, a talented, prolific director who would also direct the acclaimed 1985 film Night on the Galactic Railroad.

When released in the United States, many of the cast voices, such as Jack, his mother, Madame Hecuba and the harp, were provided by actress Billie Lou Watt, who also voiced the title character in Mushi Pro’s Astro Boy series.

When it was initially released in the States by Columbia Pictures in 1976, Jack and the Beanstalk was dismissed by critics. Richard Eder wrote in the New York Times, “It is the kind of thing grandfathers are sent out to take their grandchildren to. They will sit silently, side by side, and a quiet loathing will spring up between them.”

However, it’s those grandchildren, their siblings, and friends who re-watched Jack and the Beanstalk during its multiple cable airings on HBO, and today flashback to that unique, offbeat, gloomier corner of animation history not with loathing but with rose-colored memories.