Anime columnist Andrew Osmond delves into the knotty history linking ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,’ ‘The Flight of Dragons,’ and the classic ‘Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind.’
This week I’ll look into a strand of history connecting two iconic companies, Rankin/Bass Productions in America and Studio Ghibli in Japan. Later, I’ll be focusing on a 1982 cartoon feature, The Flight of Dragons, which was produced by Rankin/Bass and animated at Topcraft, a Japanese studio which was effectively Ghibli’s forerunner. Just after Dragons, Topcraft would animate the first so-called “Ghibli” film, Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind.
This story’s knotty; it involves several other studios, crosses between cel animation and stop-motion, and takes in such beloved Christmas institutions as Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman. Here goes.
Arthur Rankin and Tadahito Mochinaga
*** Note: This section mentions a film and a book with racist titles.
Arthur Rankin Jr. was born in New York in 1924, leaning towards painting and graphic design from a young age. Following a stint in graphic design and art direction at ABC, he set up a company in 1955 called Videocraft International, creating commercials for clients such as General Electric.
Some of the adverts used limited animation, but Rankin needed larger facilities to expand his production. “I was looking for a source of production that I could depend on and that would be, well, mine,” Rankin said in 2005. (All the Rankin quotes come from the video interview linked below, with many pertinent comments around the 28-minute mark; the full multi-part interview is here.)
Rankin says he was approached by a member of a Japanese trade delegation, who’d been directed to him by a friend. “The Japanese government had been sending people to (America) to find out what they could sell… A man came here looking for America’s foremost animation expert, and he was mistakenly led to me!” On Rankin’s account, the rep – one Minoru Kawamoto – liked what Videocraft was doing and invited Rankin to Japan.
It was 1958, an auspicious year for Japanese animation. The Toei studio was just releasing Legend of the White Serpent (Hakujaden), the first color anime feature. (I’ve covered Toei Animation’s history in a previous column.) “I went over to see what Japan had, not with much hope,” Rankin said. “I was amazed at (Japan’s) facilities, they had huge animation studios. Toei was as big as Disney…”
“Unfortunately,” Rankin continued, “they were making films that, while technically well animated, the stories and the design were very Oriental… no possibility of export.” (White Serpent would have a limited US cinema release in 1961, renamed Panda and the Magic Serpent, but did disappointing business.) “I said, ‘Well, that’s the problem, you need (a) new design, you need a story that will work.’ And then I also saw a stop-motion project and thought, wait a minute, this is something new.”
The stop-motion project wasn’t by Toei, but by a tiny animation unit established by a man called Tadahito Mochinaga. He’s largely forgotten today, but even before 1950, he’d had an incredible and turbulent career in animation. In what follows, I’m indebted to Jonathan Clements; readers wanting to learn more about Mochinaga should peruse his indispensable book Anime: A History. There’s also a detailed obituary of Mochinaga on AWN itself, for he lived until 1999.
Mochinaga worked on propaganda cartoons in Japan during World War II, but had the bad luck to be in Manchuria when Japan surrendered. He ended up working for both the Soviet and Chinese forces, including painting portraits of Stalin and Mao.
He’d been trained as a cel animator, but in China he was tasked with creating a stop-motion sequence – a satiric piece where the American general George Marshall puppeteers a Chinese politician. In other circumstances, the puppets would have been filmed “live,” but film stock was so scarce that it was more frugal to create the scene in stop-motion. The sequence received acclaim, leading Mochinaga to a more grueling stop-motion project, The Emperor’s Dream (1947).
Returning to Japan in the 1950s, Mochinaga took out a loan and began his own independent stop-motion unit, with what Clements describes as jury-rigged materials. In his memoir, Mochinaga claimed Videocraft approached his company, on the strength of an award-winning film with a now-shocking title. It was Little Black Sambo’s Tiger Conquest (1956), adapted from the 1899 British picture book The Story of Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman. (The same book had been animated by America’s Ub Iwerks studio in 1935.)
Pinnocchio and Rudolph
Mochinaga’s and Rankin’s accounts may not gel in their details, but whichever story you believe, the upshot was clear. Rankin contracted Mochinaga’s team to make an animation – not a stand-alone special of the kind for which Rankin/Bass would be famed, but a lengthy TV series. It was The New Adventures of Pinocchio, starting in 1961. This was two years before TV anime series are often considered to have begun with 1963’s Astro Boy, though 1961 also saw Instant History, a series of partly-animated Japanese TV shorts which arguably deserves the title.
Unlike Astro Boy and Instant History, The New Adventures of Pinocchio isn’t anime by any sensible definition. From the Japanese viewpoint, it was contract work for hire, made for a foreign market and to foreign specifications. The character designs, scripts and storyboards were done Stateside. Rankin oversaw the design, while the writing was overseen by Jules Bass, Rankin’s friend and collaborator. Nonetheless, the workload for Mochinaga’s new company, MOM Production, was extreme.
Pinoccchio ran for 130 five-minute chapters, eventually coming to Japan as well – it was broadcast in 1963 as part of a local puppet show, Ciscon Oji. It was the start of what Rankin and Bass branded “Animagic” stop-motion, and was followed by a far better-remembered animation – the 1964 TV special Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer.
It was a deeply American creation, of course. Screenwriter Romeo Muller expanded the story from the source poem and song; his association with Rudolph’s successors would last three decades, including many of the titles below.
But Mochinaga wasn’t passively following Stateside directives. He and his animation director journeyed to Japan’s Nara National Park, where they spent two days observing the famed local deer. Having visited Nara, I can testify its deer are Terminators; if they see a tourist unwisely showing food, they absolutely will not stop in their pursuit.
Over the following years, MOM and Mochinaga animated Willy McBean and His Magic Machine (1965), a feature-length time-travel adventure; the animated portions of The Daydreamer (1966), about Hans Christian Andersen; and the same year’s The Ballad of Smokey the Bear. 1967 saw the self-descriptive Mad Monster Party, a feature with Frankenstein, Dracula and others.
Mochinaga, who had supervisor credits on all of these, said in his memoir that he objected to Mad Monster Party as “something we should not be involved in.” He elaborates no further, but perhaps its comedy-horror offended his sensibilities in ways the previous collaborations hadn’t. A communist, Mochinaga detested American film imports, applying Mao’s description of them as “sugar-coated bullets and bombs.”
In any case, Mochinaga left MOM Production in 1967. In later life, he’d make and teach animation back in China, his second professional home. There, he’d warn Chinese animators against accepting outsourced work such as Rankin/Bass’, on financial and cultural grounds. For example, he argued that the very fact that these projects paid more than domestic work distorted the domestic industry. (See Animation Obsessive or the book it quotes, Animated Encounters by Daisy Yan Du.)
Mochinaga’s departure almost coincides with Rankin/Bass’ official “beginning” – Videocraft International was renamed Rankin/Bass Productions in 1968. The studio would make many more stop-motion films, such as Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town (1970), Here Comes Peter Cottontail (1971) and The First Christmas: The Story of the First Christmas Snow (1975),
Clearly these were still Japan-animated, with Mochinaga’s assistant Komuro Ichiro credited on several. According to Wikipedia and other sources I can’t confirm, MOM Production was replaced as Rankin/Bass’ stop-motion supplier by a company generically named Video Tokyo Production. Clements points out that MOM Production’s name was partly derived from Mochinaga’s. “I think it very likely that Video Tokyo Production was a re-assembly of its staff and assets under someone else.”
Rankin/Bass’ cel animation, though, was its own story.
Cel animation and Topcraft
Rankin/Bass’ first cel production, the 1964 series Tales of the Wizard of Oz, was produced by Canada’s Crawley Films. However, Japanese studios were soon animating their cel work too, such as 1966’s The King Kong Show and the 1968 special The Mouse on the Mayflower, both by Toei Animation.
Much better remembered was the Frosty the Snowman special in 1969. This time the animation studio was Mushi Production, founded by Japan’s “God of Manga” Osamu Tezuka, which had adapted his strips Astro Boy and Kimba, the White Lion. Mushi, though, was heading into financial collapse, and was gone before Frosty’s sequels were made.
Through the 1970s, Rankin/Bass’ foremost provider of cel animation was Topcraft, sometimes written Top Craft; I’ll use the former option. It was founded in 1972 by Toru Hara, previously a Toei employee, who’d overseen The King Kong Show.
As mentioned above, Topcraft was destined to animate Hayao Miyazaki’s 1984 film Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind. Hara himself would become Studio Ghibli’s CEO through its first years, with his last Ghibli producer credit on 1991’s Only Yesterday.
That, though, was in the far future. Topcraft’s early work for Rankin/Bass included the 1972 series Kid Power (above), from the syndicated newspaper strip “Wee Pals.” The same year it animated 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; it was in a limited comic-strip style that evoked Hanna-Barbera’s Johnny Quest, though Topcraft’s 1973 Tom Sawyer was more conventionally cartoonish. Both cartoons were part of a Rankin/Bass anthology series called Festival of Family Classics, mostly animated by Mushi.
As for Rankin/Bass’ Yuletide fare, Topcraft animated the 1974 special ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas and 1978’s The Stingiest Man in Town. The latter was a version of A Christmas Carol which had a dubbed TV broadcast in Japan just hours after its American debut.
Hobbits and a unicorn
But Topcraft’s Rankin/Bass works also include four fantasies far from Christmas. The first was a TV version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit in 1977, reportedly five years in the making. Its animators included Hidetoshi Kaneko, who’d later create backgrounds for My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service and many others.
I wrote about the Topcraft Hobbit here. It has likable moments, and even the way it rushes through the story in under 90 minutes might seem a virtue to viewers after the bloated live-action trilogy. However, I won’t defend Rankin/Bass’s loose 1980 sequel, Return of the King, based on the later chapters of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. It’s clumsy and often laughable, though even it has good moments (this duel) amid the many laughable ones.
The most respected of Topcraft’s fantasy offerings was undoubtedly The Last Unicorn, which opened in cinemas in 1982 and has enjoyed a loyal fandom ever since. Based on an acclaimed fantasy novel, it boasted a script by the book’s author, Peter Beagle, who’d previously co-scripted a rival Tolkien animation, Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 The Lord of the Rings. (In interviews, Beagle didn’t hide how much he disliked Rankin/Bass’ work up till then.)
Last Unicorn undoubtedly has much of Rankin/Bass’ best cel art and animation. One of its most important Japanese artists was Tsuguyuki Kubo, who collaborated on the film’s story and design. Kubo’s credits stretch back to 1960s series including The King Kong Show. He doesn’t seem to have any Ghibli credits, but instead would contribute to ThunderCats’ character design and title sequence. His later credits range from The Legend of Korra to the anime Emma: A Victorian Romance.
Unicorn has received much attention, including a recent 4K remastered edition by Shout! Studio. So, I’d rather highlight a film I connected with more as an impressionable youngster – The Flight of Dragons, which was Topcraft’s other fantasy film for Rankin/Bass in 1982.
The Flight of Dragons
Available on Prime Video and YouTube, The Flight of Dragons has two sources. On one hand, it’s inspired by a 1979 book of the same name by a British author, Peter Dickinson. The book’s not a story, but an extended argument that dragons might have actually evolved and existed in reality. British readers may know Dickinson better for his 1970s SF trilogy The Changes (adapted for television). In the Dragons film, the hero’s also called Peter Dickinson, though now he’s American and voiced by the inimitable John Ritter, best known back then for the sitcom Three’s Company.
However, much of the film’s story comes from a different book, the 1976 American novel The Dragon and the George by an author with similar-sounding name, Gordon R. Dickson. Like so many of Rankin/Bass’ animations, the film was scripted by Romeo Muller, who was perhaps influenced by what Beagle was doing with Last Unicorn. Both films take their fantasy scenarios with bookish seriousness. There’s no slapstick, no self-mockery, and lines an Anglophone viewer wouldn’t expect in a cartoon in 1982.
“I will not concede defeat by this modern world!” declares the red-robed, sallow-skinned hulking villain in an early scene. “Fear rules men… I will infest the spirt of man so that he uses his science and logic to destroy himself… I’ll give the ultimate answer to all his science can ask!” The last line is spoken over a mushroom cloud, transforming into the gloating fiend. “Man will never inherit my domain, for I am making man mine!”
As anyone who’s seen the film knows, it’s James Earl Jones speaking. Forget Darth Vader or Thulsa Doom (Jones’ villain in that year’s Conan the Barbarian). It sounds like Jones is enjoying himself a hundred times more as the Red Wizard Ommadon. His laughter booms, rasps, and sneers all at once. Neither the performance nor the script can be credited to the Japanese animators. Yet I remember Flight of Dragons striking the young me as a different kind of cartoon in its story and themes, in ways that prepped me for anime.
Watching the film now, it’s also remarkable how much Flight of Dragons anticipates anime today. Like Scarlet last week, it’s an isekai story where a character from our world crosses to a fantastical one. Here, it’s Peter Dickinson (the fictional New Yorker), a trained scientist who still has an affinity for fantasy. He’s unknowingly replicated the fantasy characters in a board game he’s made, though mercifully the film’s not constrained by RPG rules.
Like many characters, Peter is an otaku - an obsessive - but driven by his honest wonder rather than any resentful wish to beat everyone else. When he’s summoned to the fantasy world, he geeks out hilariously at his first sight of a dragon, then baffles everyone with his obsessive need to understand how they can exist in ways that make sense scientifically. Ritter’s thrilled tones make this plotline sweet and funny, far stronger than his mandatory romance with a princess who’s supposedly the girl of his dreams.
Early on, Peter gets accidentally “merged” into the body of one of the dragons he adores, letting him comprehend the species first-hand, and removing the film wittily from fantasy formula, (“I have a longing to eat a cow… hooves, tail, bones, ears, the whole thing!”) The subsequent journey sometimes sags; the second half is less consistent than the first and some of the side characters are ballast. But the final showdown is truly splendid, a David and Goliath battle between the explosive villain and the determined hero, with shouting, monsters and the righteousness of Van Helsing dueling Dracula.
One of the animation directors was Kazuyuki Kobayashi, who’d animate on the Miyazaki films Nausicaa and Laputa. Last Unicorn designer Tsuguyuki Kubo is credited for “Continuity Animation” (presumably supervision). In truth, I can’t pretend there’s any obvious continuity between Flight of Dragons and Ghibli, while the only obvious anime link is the princess’s final appearance in what looks like a Japanese school uniform.
Dragons’ animation itself is no match for Last Unicorn’s delicacy. It’s seldom more than functional, save in occasional action shots. Like many anime, it impresses in other ways. The humanoids are upstaged by the dragons, powered by their fiery belches, with wrinkled, ballooning bellies. The palette and backgrounds are often delightful, while Peter is boyish without seeming an obnoxious manchild.
Like Last Unicorn and Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, the pastoral backdrops evoke the medieval Unicorn Tapestries (later a key element of an outstanding sci-fi anime, Gundam Unicorn). The title song, performed by no less than Don McLean, can’t match Last Unicorn’s, but both it and the soundtrack by regular Rankin/Bass composer Maury Laws are suitably majestic. I could even imagine Dragons’ soundtrack being switched into Nausicaa, in place of Joe Hisaishi’s electronica.
Hidden Histories
Topcraft went on to animate Nausicaa before Ghibli existed (the studio was founded in 1985, a year after Nausicaa’s release). Many Ghibli fans don’t know the retconning of animation history of which the above trailer is part. After all, it starts with the Ghibli logo, while Topcraft’s name isn’t mentioned.
Nausicaa was produced by the Japanese publisher Tokuma Shoten. Following the film’s success, Tokuma established Ghibli and passed Nausicaa’s rights over to it. Ever since, Nausicaa has been counted as a Ghibli film, whether in studio merchandise, streaming packages or on the studio’s own Japanese website (which at least has a “Produced by Top Craft” footnote.)
In one way, though, this is fitting. Topcraft’s history, barring Nausicaa, was tied very largely to Rankin/Bass (though for its other credits, see here). Few people in America or Japan had any idea that Japanese studios made animation for Rankin/Bass, including Christmas specials still screened more than 50 years later. The Japanese origins of Rankin/Bass are effectively buried, much like the origins of Ghibli in Topcraft.
But it was par for the course for the time. Nausicaa itself first came to Anglophone territories in “buried” form, as an abridged children’s video called Warriors of the Wind. I saw it in the 1980s, around the same time I watched Flight of Dragons. Even in that form, it struck me as a “different” kind of fantasy cartoon, much like Dragons, though I would have never guessed they were animated by the same studio.
Topcraft itself seems to have ceased around the time of Nausicaa, with some of that film’s animators going to the new Ghibli studio, while others formed Pacific Animation Corporation (PAC). PAC took over ThunderCats from Topcraft, one of Rankin/Bass’ most successful productions.
It also animated the less-remembered Silverhawks cartoon and Rankin/Bass’ last stop-motion special, 1985’s The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. Subsequently, PAC was purchased by Disney and renamed Walt Disney Animation Japan, working on Gummi Bears, Rescue Rangers and many of its successors.
Rankin/Bass shut down in 1987 (barring a 2001 revival in the form of Santa, Baby!, a traditionally-animated Christmas special mostly animated in America). From stop-motion deer, through hobbits and unicorns and ThunderCats, Rankin/Bass had given vast amounts of work to Japan’s studios and animators. Despite Mochinaga’s warnings against the malign side-effects of outsourced productions, its overall effect on the domestic industry was surely benign. After all, it seeded Ghibli, a studio that would help anime break its “buried” status and be recognized worldwide.
