Watch Corporal Norakuro For Free

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Another Japanese cartoon from the '30s that I saw on YouTube. In this one, an army dog who acts human like the other ones here, is left alone after everyone else has gone home to their families. He decides to go out for chicken on a stick. While there, he tells his story of how he saved his colonel by defeating one of the enemy monkeys in a fight match that almost had the colonel beat up. After leaving, he goes to a trash can to rest. Two monkeys knock out a guard dog at this time and get the package that that guard had before going to a bench that's next to that trash can. The monkeys then run after they're found out...There's a nice chase involving a balloon and fireworks that climaxes this short. Pretty interesting story by Suiho Tagawa with animation by Yasuji Murata. This was originally a silent so the version I saw had music with Japanese narration added though it also had English subtitles. The version I saw also seemed to end abruptly. Otherwise, I'd recommend this for anyone interested in animation especially from a different era and country. Translated, the title is "Corporal Norakuro".

The year after the Japanese invaded Manchuria, Aoji and Murata -- whose most interesting work, I feel, was the series of cartoon about Momotaro -- began this series of cartoons about a dog in the army. In this episode of the series, the dog thwarts the Monkey Army. How much of this is standard cutesy animal cartooning, and how much of this is symbolism for the invasion of Manchuria? Cartoons, intended for children, are very symbol oriented; so are fantasies. And while it is a ridiculous stretch for the modern anime fan to look upon this -- or indeed, any fantasy work -- as a direct defense of invasion, we can see a lot of propaganda in American cartoons at the height of the Second World War -- not just works like Der Fuehrer's Face, which states its case overtly, but in the general statement that art reflects life. So was this series a matter of Aoji and Murata noticing there was a war on and thinking that a dog in the army would be a cute idea for a series? And what abut those bourgeois pigs?