{"id":12963,"date":"2014-08-31T00:01:39","date_gmt":"2014-08-31T07:01:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/?p=12963"},"modified":"2014-08-24T11:43:33","modified_gmt":"2014-08-24T18:43:33","slug":"anime-jack-and-the-beanstalk-1974","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/anime-jack-and-the-beanstalk-1974\/","title":{"rendered":"Anime “Jack And The Beanstalk” (1974)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Top Ten lists are popular. I have been asked (before Steve Stanchfield brought it up on Cartoon Research) what I think are the Top Ten (Japanese) anime features, or what my ten favorite anime features, or anime TV series, are. <\/p>\n

I have not decided so far. I keep changing my mind, so I want more time to consider this. Yet there is one Japanese animated feature that I have always enjoyed very much, which is hard to think of as \u201canime\u201d because it does not look \u201cJapanese\u201d at all. Since it is not likely to end up on a \u201ctop anime\u201d list, here it is separately.<\/p>\n

\"jack-japan-poster\"Jack and the Beanstalk<\/strong> Jack no Mami no Ki<\/em>. Group TAC. July 20, 1974 (Japan); February 13, 1976 (U.S.); 96 minutes. Directed by Gisabur\u014d Sugii.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t care if this is Japanese-made; it does not look \u201cforeign\u201d in any way. It looks like the best animated musical feature-length movie that was not made by Disney, before the 1990s with Cats Don\u2019t Dance<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Group TAC Co., Ltd. was founded in March 1968 by former employees of Mushi Productions. Information on the Internet says that it was run by Tashiro Atsumi until his death in July 2010, during a period of extreme financial hardship for the studio. Atsumi had hoped to save the studio from bankruptcy, but after his death, bankruptcy was declared in September 2010 and the studio broke up. Its staff and projects were assumed by the new Studio Diomed\u00e9a, and the existing OLM, Inc. (originally Oriental Light and Magic) and XEBEC studios.<\/p>\n

Wikipedia\u2019s Group TAC entry does not even list any projects for the studio between its 1968 founding and 1983. According to Wikipedia, Group TAC was best-known for two things: producing the animated adaptations of the literary works of Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933) with the characters shown as anthropomorphized cats, such as Night on the Galactic Railroad (1985); plus the Touch animated high school baseball TV series (1985-1987; 101 episodes) and theatrical features (three) based on Mitsuru Adachi\u2019s manga, all directed by Gisabur\u014d Sugii. After Group TAC\u2019s breakup, Sugii directed Miyazawa\u2019s 1932 The Life of Gusk\u014d Budori, again with all the characters as anthropomorphized cats, as a 105-minute theatrical movie in July 2012 for Tezuka Productions.<\/p>\n

\"jack-lobby-250\"<\/a>Wikipedia says of Jack and the Beanstalk<\/em>, \u201cIt is the first feature directed by Sugii or animated by Group TAC\u201d, \u201cThe feature is [\u2026] particularly unusual in the nature of its Western influence, which extends to animation being assigned by character (rather than by scene as it is conventionally in Japan) and the eclecticism of its soundtrack, which includes examples of kay\u014dkyoku pop, progressive, funk and hard rock, enka and other genres\u201d, and \u201cHenry Herx wrote in his Family Guide to Movies on Video: \u2018Its songs are insipid and the animation rather primitive[;] still it moves along at a lively enough pace and may amuse younger children.\u2019 Richard Eder of The New York Times remarked: \u2018The lines are blurry, the colors muddy, and the action is blocklike. When the characters’ lips move up and down, the words come out sideways.\u2019 He ended his short review with this comment: \u2018It is the kind of thing grandfathers are sent out to send their grandchildren to. They will sit silently, side by side, and a quiet loathing will come up between them.\u2019 In 2010, Michael R. Pitts said that the songs are \u2018forgettable\u2019. Conversely, the writers of Jerry Beck’s Animated Movie Guide hailed it as \u2018A successful Japanese emulation of American fairy tale theatrical cartoon features with many delightful songs\u2019, and gave it four stars.\u201d<\/p>\n

I will take the credit for giving it the favorable review in Jerry\u2019s The Animated Movie Guide<\/em><\/a>; I wrote all the entries on Japanese and Korean animated features released in America. As I said, I have always enjoyed the film, which in my opinion was designed from the start to look as much like a traditional American animated musical as possible. I am still humming its first song after forty years. When I was asked to help program California State University at Long Beach\u2019s first Japanese Animation Festival on April 21-22, 2000, I recommended this film (which Columbia Pictures only had one theatrical file print of left by that time; so spliced and worn that Columbia only reluctantly agreed to loan it to CSULB for the festival). To quote again from Wikipedia, \u201cStyled after classical Western animation, it is a musical fantasy based on the fairy tale of the same name with the screenplay by Sh\u016bji Hirami, music organization by Y\u016b Aku and songs and score composed and arranged by Takashi Miki with Shun’ichi Tokura and Tadao In\u014de.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"jack-us-poster250\"<\/a>Jack and the Beanstalk<\/em> was distributed in the U.S. extremely briefly in 1976 by Columbia Pictures. More people probably saw it on HBO in the early 1980s. I saw it first on RCA\/Columbia Pictures Home Video in the early or mid-1980s. I have always wondered if Columbia provided input to Group TAC while the movie was being produced, since it looks so \u201cAmerican\u201d. The complete film on YouTube credits the English-language production to Film-Rite, Inc. (which IMDb identifies as a New York post-production house active from 1966 through 1985), written by Peter J. Solmo. Jack and the Beanstalk is notable as being the only movie that I know of to combine the voice actors of Titan Productions (Ray Owens, Billie Lou Watt, and so on) and Peter Fernandez\u2019s group (Corinne Orr, Jack Grimes). <\/p>\n

In the early days of American anime fandom, a fan interviewed a Columbia executive about its distribution of Jack and the Beanstalk, including its hasty disappearance that was so fast that the studio could hardly have determined whether it was doing well at the box office or not. The executive admitted that, due to the poor record of anime in American theatrical release, Columbia had always considered it to be a tax write-off. When Jack and the Beanstalk actually started to make a profit despite some killer reviews, Columbia hastily yanked it out of the theaters.<\/p>\n

Yeah, I can pick a few nits with the film. Jack\u2019s mother complains about them being poor and starving when she is so plump. In the first song, the two verses about the trapped fish and the trapped rabbit seem to be switched with their visuals. The most serious error can be blamed on the original folk tale: why would anyone trade magic beans like those for a dried-up old cow? Who is the bean-seller and what is his motive?<\/p>\n