Manga Nippon Mukashibanashi (1976)

まんが日本昔ばなし（第2期）

07/01/1976 6.6 0 G

Synopsis

An omnibus-format TV series featuring anime adaptations of Japanese folk tales, this is one of Japan's longest-running TV series and Group Tac's second TV series (the first was The Road to Munich, a documentary anime about the 1972 Olympics). The series' governing rule was that the creative staff changed from episode to episode. While later anime series like Nippon Animation's Famous Works of Japanese Literature attempted the same, none were as long-lived or successful. The rotation idea was that of director Sugii Gisaburo, a visual visionary unmatched in Japanese film history who has revolutionized anime several times in his career, be it in the 1967 TV series Goku's Big Adventure, where he sought to free anime from the dominance of story development by returning it to a more cartoonish form, or The Belladonna of Sadness, where he broke the Disney full-animation mold, creating a full-length animated film in a completely new style that was a hybrid of still drawings and animation. The reason for rotating the staff each episode was to ensure that each episode had a completely different look and feel from its predecessor, and in this, it was eminently successful. This is a series that is genuinely rewarding to watch and is visually one of the richest in anime history. While this system also meant that quality varied, there were also occasionally superb episodes, as the staff included many veterans like Group Tac founder SUGII Gisaburo himself, SHIBAYAMA Tsutomu, FURUZAWA Hideo, RIN Taro, and HIKONE Norio. Old episodes started being repeated more and more frequently as the years went on, and production of new episodes finally ceased completely in late 1995, but the series is still widely broadcast.