2. Katsudō Shashin
• In March 2008, a short film was found in an antique shop in Osaka.
• The 4-minute short silent film tells the story of a samurai who purchases a dull sword and figures out
why he cannot kill anything with it. The film was thought to have been released on July 30, 1917
• Video here-Reference: AnimeNewsNetwork
Namakura Gatana
• The first piece of anime was a 3 second clip at sixteen frames per second, 50 frames, called Katsudo
Shashin that was released in 1907 with no information on who the creator is.
• The video consists of a young boy in a sailor suit writing 活動写真 (Katsudō Shashin which roughly
translates to motion picture) onto the background, removing his hat and bowing to the audience.
• The piece is thought to have been destroyed in either the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923 or in the
bombings during World War 2.
• The film was rediscovered in December 2004 by a second-hand dealer in Kyoto (name unknown)
who contacted Natsuki Matsumoto who is an expert in iconology at the Osaka University of Arts. The
dealer had obtained a collection of films and projectors from an old family who lived in Kyoto and
Matsumoto retrieved them about a month afterwards. The collection included three projectors, eleven
35 mm films, and thirteen glass magic lantern slides.
• The filmstrip used to make Katsudō Shashin was in poor condition in the collection
• Reference: Wikipiedia, RightStuf, StackExchange
3. Dekobou Shingachou: Meian no Shippai
• Dekobou Shingachou: Meian no Shippai by Hekoten (or Outen)
Shimokawa is currently regarded as the oldest confirmed Japanese
animation film, having been released in February 1917.
• Okinawa-born Shimokawa (1892–1973) was a disciple of manga artist
Rakuten Kitazawa and worked for the film production company
Tennenshoku Katsudou Shashin. He was 24 years old when Dekobou was
first released.
4. Semiotics is the study of signs, symbols and their possible differentmeanings in society. A sign is
something which can stand for something else – in other words, a sign is anything that can convey
meaning.
Reference:https://opentextbc.ca/mediastudies101/chapter/semiotics/
There are 3 differentsign systems that people use to get their message across to their audience.
• Semantics is the ‘how’ of semiotics and is concernedwith the relationship between a signified
and signifier. This is the sign itself and what it stands for.
• Syntactics refers to structural relations. One structural relation in language is grammar, but
syntactics in semiotics refers to the formal relationshipbetween signs that lets them build into
sign systems.
• Pragmatics is the relationshipof the sign to the person reading or understandingthat sign.
Reference:https://opentextbc.ca/mediastudies101/chapter/sign-systems/
Semiotics
