The Dull Sword

1917 ComedyAnimation 4 minutes Directed by Junichi Kouchi

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About The Dull Sword

A dim samurai buys a sword from a merchant and finds it will not cut. He tries it on people in the street. They knock him down.

Cast & crew

More about The Dull Sword

Jun'ichi Kōuchi and Senpan Maekawa made the short for Kobayashi Shokai. It was released on 30 June 1917. The Japanese title is Namakura Gatana. A longer title on the print is Hanawa Hekonai meitō no maki. The 2014 restoration runs 4 minutes.

Themes

  • A sword that will not cut
  • Strangers who hit back
  • samurai
  • dull sword
  • merchant
  • Namakura Gatana
  • animation
  • Kōuchi

Background

It opened on 30 June 1917, in the first years of Japanese animation made for theaters.

Making

Kōuchi drew a comedy jidaigeki on a few minutes of film. The sword never cuts. The people he swings at do the hitting.

Preservation

The National Film Archive of Japan and the National Film Center at the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, hold restored prints. The 2014 join of the two halves runs 4 minutes at 16 frames per second, silent and dyed. Further frames found in 2017 were screened in 2018.

Notes

  • The samurai is a self-appointed rōnin. The attacks are his attempts at tsujigiri, trying the blade on strangers.
  • Matsumoto Natsuki found a toy-projector print at an Osaka antique market in the summer of 2007, together with Seitaro Kitayama's Urashima Taro (1918).
  • A collector, Gorō Sugimoto, had owned a 35mm copy that burned in 1971.
  • The 2008 find was a digest of the second half. In 2014 the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, matched it with the first half from the Nankoin collection and restored a 4-minute version.
  • In 2017 Honchi Akihiko found another 35 feet and 11 frames, including the masseur's mocking face and the samurai hiding by a tree to attack a courier. That material was added for a screening in 2018.
  • From February 2011 a 2-minute, 16-frames-per-second dyed 35mm copy played on a monitor in the museum's History of Japanese Cinema display.

Scenes

  • The samurai swings the new sword and it fails to cut.
  • The people he attacks knock him out.

Also available

  • National Film Center, Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
  • Wikimedia Commons (Kouichi Jun'ichi - Namakura Gatana (1917) - 4-minute restored version.webm)