Taro's Toy Train
About Taro's Toy Train
A father brings home a toy train, and after the boy is in bed the engine crawls up beside him. In the dream the boy is Taro, conductor on a train of animal passengers. Pigs spread their bags across the seats until Taro racks the luggage for an old goat; a hippo couple drop banana skins and a crane slips; a cow flings an empty sake bottle out the window and hits a monkey on the tracks. The monkeys chase the train on a mine trolley, pile on, and attack the cow. Taro steps between them and is thrown off with the brawlers.
Cast & crew
More about Taro's Toy Train
Yokohama Cinema Shokai released the short in June 1929 as number 37 in the Athena Library. Chuzo Aochi supervised, Yasuji Murata drew the cartoon, and Yukikiyo Ueno photographed it. The 35mm original measured 303 meters, about eleven minutes at 24 frames per second. Okamoto & Co. handled Kanto prints and Oku Shokai the Kansai; Konishiroku Honten sold a 16mm Sakura Graph edition.
Themes
Background
In 1926 the Ministry of Education had already put train etiquette on screen in the live-action short Public Manners: Tokyo Sightseeing Tour. This Athena Library entry plays the same rules with animals.
Making
The picture opens in a real bedroom, then switches to the drawn train. Murata stages the passengers as a manners lesson: bags on seats, skins on the floor, trash out the window.
Look
Yukikiyo Ueno shot the black-and-white negative. The bedroom and the toy train are photographed; the passengers are drawn.
Technique
The toy train leaves the boy's covers under its own power, a short stop-motion bridge between the live-action room and the cartoon cars.
Music
Released silent, with Japanese intertitles and no recorded score.
Preservation
A complete 16mm Sakura Graph positive is at the National Film Archive of Japan. The archive's simple digital restoration is the copy streamed as Japanese Animated Film Classics. The 35mm camera original is a separate, longer version.
Notes
- The Home Ministry censorship number is D7059, dated 18 June 1929.
- Eiga Kyoiku carried an introduction in the July 1929 issue, number 17, page 22.
- Katsunori Yamaguchi and Yasushi Watanabe, in The History of Japanese Animation (Yubunsha, 1977), treat the ride as Taro's dream.
- An intertitle has the cow and the horse act out the saying about drinking like a cow and eating like a horse.
- The National Film Archive's digital copy comes from its 16mm positive, printed to a 35mm internegative.
Scenes
- The toy engine climbs into bed with the sleeping boy.
- A crane steps on a banana skin the hippos left in the aisle.
- Monkeys on a mine trolley catch the train and haul Taro out with them.
Influenced by
- Public Manners: Tokyo Sightseeing Tour (1926)
Also available
- Japanese Animated Film Classics (National Film Archive of Japan)
