Here is the Japanese movie poster for Toei Doga's fourth animated feature film, Anju to Zushiomaru. This is a very obscure picture compared to the others, but I was successful in finding the DVD at Play-Asia here, so give it a look.
Ben Ettinger offers the following thoughts on this movie:
This scene (Saiyuki, 1960) in fact so impressed the execs at Toei that they decided they wanted to go in that direction for the next film. They wanted to make a human tragedy featuring more realistic characters moving in a realistic fashion, just like Mori's scene....
Which is why it's so interesting that the main animators involved in the film, including Mori, repudiated the film immediately upon its completion with a vehemence bordering on anger for having been duped into taking part in the project. I actually enjoyed it on first watching, but they make so many good points in their statements (reproduced in Sakuga Ase Mamire) that it kind of makes you embarrassed for not having noticed them. About the way it glorifies passive acceptance of injustice. About the way it tells kids that the best thing you can do is bear suffering stoically rather than try to do something about it. That it's OK to step on others to achieve your goals. That the ruling class is all-knowing -- trust them, they know what's best for you.
"A downright infuriating film if you think about it. And Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff, a version of the same Ogai Mori story, is a brilliant, complex and multilayered film that treats the very same material in an entirely compelling and humane and moving fashion, so it's not accountable to the material. There was something rotten in the planning of this film, with its shit-for-brains adaptation and laa-dee-daa ending, and it smells like money. I like the basic premise, and I think there's something in there that could make a good animated film, if you had someone who only knew what they were doing at the head, say, Takahata, so it's all the more disappointing."
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