Shounen Sarutobi Sasuke

Toei's second feature-length cartoon was 1959's Shounen Sarutobi Sasuke (Young Sarutobi Sasuke). It was Toei's first wide-screen feature and the first Japanese animated film to be released in North America, under the title Magic Boy. Orphan is pleased to present a new version in high(er) definition, based on the Toei channel broadcast of the remastered film.

Sarutobi Sasuke is a legendary Japanese folk hero, a ninja who supposedly served the Sengoku warlord Sanada Yukimura in the latter's ultimately futile resistance to the rise of Tokugawa Ieyesu. (Sarutobi is a generic term for a ninja who servers a local lord.) Sasuke has appeared in many manga and anime, including Orphan's release of Shinshaku Sengoku Eiyuu Densetsu Sanada Juu Yuushi, better known as Sanada 10. Shounen Sarutobi Sasuke purports to be an origin story, telling how young Sasuke became a master of ninjutsu and met up with Sanada Yukimura.

In the movie, Sasuke is a boy living in a forest with his sister, Oyuu, and the usual collection (for Toei) of animal sidekicks - a monkey (Jiro), a sun bear (Kolo), a female deer, her fawn (Eri), and others. 

His idyllic existence is interrupted when a giant eagle snatches the fawn and eventually drops it into an evil-looking lake, home to a voracious giant salamander. The doe and Saskuke follow. The doe jumps in to save her fawn and is taken by the monster. Sasuke attempts to fight the salamander, 

but he is unable to save the doe from a grisly fate. The salamander transforms into a woman and easily defeats Sasuke's pursuit. 

Oyuu tells Sasuke that the salamander is a powerful witch, Princess Yasha, in disguise. Determined to become stronger, Sasuke leaves home to learn the secrets of ninjutsu (ninja techniques).

On his travels, Sasuke runs into and fights a bandit gang from Mt. Oyama, led by the villainous Gonkurou. 

They're allied with Princess Yasha, and her intervention proves almost fatal to the boy - but also fortuitous. The unconscious Sasuke is discovered by Tozawa Hakuunsai, a legendary hermit and ninjutsu master from Mt. Togakure. 

He agrees to teach Sasuke ninjutsu and puts the boy through a rigorous training regimen. Meanwhile, the bandits attack and sack a nearby village, escaping before the local lord, Sanada Yukimura, can arrive to fight them. A young village girl, Okei, refuses to be parted from her chest of belongings and ends up the "captive" of two comically inept bandits, Kinta and Sanji.

Three years pass. Yukimura meets Oyuu and is smitten by her. 

Sasuke masters all of Tozawa's teachings and prepares to leave. But when Princess Yasha learns of the budding romance, and Oyuu's connection to the boy who confronted her before, she is infuriated. She orders the bandits to capture Oyuu in order to lure both Yukimura and Sasuke into a fatal trap. 

Needless to say, the outcome is not what she intended.

In short, Shounen Sarutobi Sasuke resembles the other early Toei films, notably Saiyuuki, drawing its plot from Japanese legends, interspersing the action with physical comedy, providing lots of animal sidekicks, lightening the villains' villainy with comic ineptitude, and including a fair number of songs. Fortunately, the songs are not intrusive or long. and Oyuu is far less cloying than Saiyuuki's Rin Rin. The character designs for the human characters are still a bit off, and in medium and long shots, the characters appear to glide across surfaces rather than walk on them. 24fps animation is used to good effect where needed. So the movie's a decent albeit mixed ride, exciting and a bit scary for children, tolerable for adults.

The CVs of the voice cast are mostly lost in the mists of time. Many in the cast were stage or screen actors.

• Miyazaki Teruo (Sarutobi Sasuke) - no other information.
• Sakuramachi Hiroko (Oyuu) - no other anime credits.
• Nakamura Katsuo (Sanada Yukimura) played the title role in Kaitou Lupin: 813 no Nazo, Lloyd Steam in Steamboy, and Yagyuu Munemori in Samurai Resurrection.
• Sugiyama Tokuko (Princess Yasha) played the mother in Taiyou no Ouji: Horus no Daibouken, an Orphan release, and appeared in two Sekai Meisaku Douwa movies.
• Yoshida Yoshio (Gonkurou) - no other anime credits.
• Itou Ryouei ( Kinta) - no other anime credits.
• Sakai Shunji (Sanji) - no other anime credits.
• Matsushima Tomoko (Okei) played Annie Sullivan in Helen Keller Monogatari, Princess Aya in Anju to Zushio-maru, and Yumi in the original Mazinger Z.
• Kishii Akira (Miyoshi Seikai Nyudo, Yukimura's lead warrior) - no other information .
• Susukida Kenji (Tozawa Hakuunsai) - no other information.
• Kishido (Iwata?) Kazuo (Yukimura's gatekeeper) - no other information.
• Akagi Harue was a film and TV actress with no other anime credits.
• Asou Mitsuko played the title role in Donkikko and Matsuyo in Osamatsu-kun and appeared in Attack No. 1 and Sarutobi Ecchan,
• Kashii Kuniko played the title role in Ciscon Ouji, Maneko in Okawari-Boy Starzan S, and Shinpachi in Shin Dokonjo G.

Two directors are listed. One, Daikuhara Akira, was an early pioneer of Japanese animation, with his first credit dating from 1942. He worked on most of the early Toei movies before retiring in the 1980s. The other director, Yabushita Taiji, also worked on the early Toei movies.

Perevodildo translated and timed. Yume translation checked. I edited and typeset, with massive help from Perevodildo (more on that in a moment). Nemesis and imatu QCed. The encoder, as usual, wished to remain anonymous. The raw was encoded from a Toei channel broadcast of the remastered film. Although the web stream is too bit-starved to support FHD, it is sufficient for HD (720p equivalent), the same as Orphan's previous Toei channel encodes. The result looks better than the DVD, particularly for color fidelity. The encoder noted:

[An] x265-based encode this time as following testing, it achieved source transparency at a markedly lower file size than x264 (despite the descaled resolution over the native broadcast stream, it's actually the footage grain contained within and associated high bit rate required to preserve it that reduces compression efficiency). A clean progressive 23.976 fps film IVTC was extracted from the interlaced 29.970 fps NTSC video stream, and 4:4:4 10-bit to preserve color resolution.  Light chroma cleanup, deblocking, dehaloing, and grain-matching were also employed to take care of the transport stream's residual artifacts. 

There was only one sign of significance: Sasuke's note to Oyuu that he is leaving home to learn ninjutsu. It appeared to be a simple plan and zoom on a static painting, but it simply would not track. After banging my forehead on the screen for weeks, I realized that during the zoom, the aspect ratio of the sign was changing. (I have no idea how this happened.) Perevodildo discovered that the motion tracker's "shear" parameter allowed the sign to be tracked, and a different Aegisub script (perspective motion) allowed the sign to scale independently in the x and y axes. Props to him for figuring this out. Remember, kids, I'm not a typesetter; I only play one in this column.

Shounen Sarutobi Sasuke was the first Japanese anime to be dubbed and released in North America, under the title Magic Boy. Like the ones that followed, it was not financially successful, and the dub was unavailable on home media until 2014. As I've stated before, I don't think the dubs of the Toei films add anything, and it's not included in this release.

Shounen Sarutobi Sasuke showed that Toei's faux-Disney format could be made to work as entertainment, but it's still a hit-or-miss proposition. You can get the movie from the usual torrent site.