Namakura Gatana (The Dull Sword)

This is a small, slow archive of Japanese animated shorts from the 1910s to the early 1950s, the era before television. Most of what survives from those years exists as a handful of prints, later TV airings taped at home, and museum restorations that rarely leave the museum.

We collect what is legally free to share (works whose copyright has expired in Japan), transfer the tapes and telecine copies we have, clean them up a little, and put them here with notes. Nothing is sold, and nothing here is pulled in from anyone else's site.

If you have an old VHS or Betamax recording of a broadcast of one of these films, we would love to hear from you. Tape copies often preserve frames that the surviving prints have lost.