The Littlest Warrior

jpn Anju to Zushiomaru. 1961. Movie. 83 min. (English dub: 69 min.) Historical fantasy/drama. dir Yugo Serikawa, Taiji Yabushita. -bc

An early Japanese animated feature, The Littlest Warrior is based on a classic folktale and tells a sad and tragic story bolstered by exquisitely rendered artwork and design based on traditional Japanese art.

In feudal Japan, a gentle groundskeeper is framed and sent into exile, forcing his family to flee their home to try and reach Kyoto to seek justice. The mother and her children, daughter Anju and young son Zushio, are accompanied by a maid, Igono, and three pets, a dog named Ranmaru, a talking bear cub, and a white mouse. When the party is tricked by slave traders posing as boatmen, the mother and pets are separated from the children, with the maid falling into the water and turning into a mermaid. Anju and Zushio are taken and sold to Lord Sansho, a cruel nobleman who is using slave labor to build a new palace. Forced to do menial tasks and sleep in a stable, the two children are treated harshly by Lord Sansho’s sons, with the exception of the kind Saburo, who endeavors to help them whenever possible.

One night, Anju urges Zushio to escape, seek sanctuary in a nearby temple, and go to Kyoto to find out their father’s whereabouts. When the furious Sansho sends men to search for the fleeing boy, Saburo helps Anju to escape. She makes it to a nearby lake in which she intends to drown herself but instead turns into a beautiful, graceful white swan.

Zushio makes it to Kyoto and becomes the ward of the Mikado’s chief advisor after learning of his father’s death. He studies, trains, grows strong, and commits heroic acts, including the slaying of a giant spider terrorizing the region. He so impresses the Mikado, he is made a lord and is given command of a province that includes Lord Sansho’s estate. Returning to Sansho’s palace and fighting off his villainous sons and henchmen, Zushio orders Sansho to free his slaves and finds Saburo, now a Buddhist monk, who tells him what happened to Anju. Zushio, having also reunited with his pets, then boards a boat for Sado Island to find his mother.

The Littlest Warrior stands out from the other Toei animated features of its time (1958–63) by virtue of its painterly style and a design scheme based on traditional Japanese art. It’s a profoundly beautiful work, with character design, period decor, and lush landscapes all rendered in loving detail. It’s the least cartoonish Japanese feature from its era, and its fluid animation is closer to classic Disney animation than to any subsequent anime. If there is any later anime feature it resembles, in terms of design and tone, it is Gisaburo Sugii’s stately and elegant Tale of Genji (1987).

One of the factors that ties the design to traditional Japanese art is that all the characters look noticeably Japanese. While some of the cruel men in the film have slightly exaggerated features, most of the faces are cleanly and concisely designed and painted, and looking as if they’d stepped out of a 19th-century color woodblock print. Even the animal characters look like animals, particularly the dog and the bear. The white mouse is a bit of a stretch, thanks to her ostentatious red sash.

One of the key attractions of this film is a rich musical score, performed by a full symphony orchestra, but mixed with traditional Japanese melodies and instruments. When we first see Anju, she is sitting in her immaculate room playing a koto (a traditional stringed instrument). Several original Japanese songs are redone in English but with enough care and the right vocalist to stay true to the proper tone and feeling. The English dubbing is above average for this kind of film.

Codirector Taiji Yabushita is credited with direction or codirection on all of the earliest animated theatrical features (1958-62) from Toei Animation, including this one, Panda and the Magic Serpent (Hakujaden), Magic Boy (Shonen Sarutobi Sasuke), Alakazam the Great (Saiyuki), and The Adventures of Sinbad (Sinbad no Boken). Codirector Yugo Serikawa directed another of the early Toei features, Little Prince and Eight-Headed Dragon (1963), as well as the two Cyborg 009 movies (1966-67).

This is an unsung classic of early Japanese animation and has been seen by relatively few people in the U.S., despite once being syndicated on television and released on home video back in the late 1970s. It’s very hard to find these days. More than any of the early animated features from Toei, this one lives up to the promise of the medium. It is a work of Japanese art that moves with the fluidity of the best frame counts. With the exceptions of scenes with the two talking animals, the film has a tone and feel befitting a live-action historical Japanese film of the period. The level of cruelty in feudal Japan is treated unstintingly (and was probably more pronounced in scenes cut from the original). An air of sorrow and tragedy permeates the whole story as one misfortune after another befalls this gentle, cultured family. As a result, the film’s resolution has greater resonance as Zushio achieves some kind of bittersweet victory. Still, one can see why this film was never properly promoted in the U.S. It is very much a children’s film, thanks to its talking animals, but was so downbeat that it was hard to sell to the mass audience.

The film’s one minor drawback, in fact, is its reliance on the familiar conceit of sympathetic animals that rally to aid the film’s protagonists in much the same way the animals in Disney films dropped their daily routines to tend to Snow White, Cinderella, and the Little Mermaid. Even so, the pets provide some moments of welcome humor and manage not to overwhelm the film, as similar creatures almost did in the earlier Panda and The Magic Serpent (1958).

Saburo, the one kindly son in the Sansho family, becomes a monk to atone for his family’s treatment of Anju and Zushio. When Zushio returns as a Lord, he comes across a wooden sculpture of Anju that Saburo has made.

When Igono, the maid, falls into the sea and sinks to the bottom, she is transformed into a mermaid. When the slave traders take out to sea again, she lies in wait and creates a whirlpool to suck them to the bottom.

The Littlest Warrior is based on the same folktale that served as the basis for Kenji Mizoguchi’s live-action classic, Sansho the Bailiff (1954), a straight drama without any talking animals or supernatural elements.

The VHS edition of this film, released by Family Home Entertainment, was made from a slightly color-faded TV syndication print from Ziv International Inc. with a copyright date of 1975. (Ziv was a TV syndication company active in the 1970s and distributed other anime, including Captain Future, Candy Candy, and Captain Harlock.) The distributor credited on the print itself is Signal International Films, a company active briefly in the early 1960s, although no record exists of an actual theatrical release at any time in the United States.

advisory Some violence and cruelty was cut from the English-language print, including a scene of a slave being punished and scenes of forest animals being slaughtered. Still, there is enough tragedy and cruelty to mark this as too downbeat for a children’s film. A giant spider, which threatens the Mikado’s estate, may prove scary to very young viewers.