Seitarō Kitayama

Seitarō Kitayama
c. 1919
BornMarch 3, 1888
Tokyo, Japan
DiedFebruary 13, 1945(1945-02-13) (aged 56)
Osaka, Japan
OccupationAnimator

Seitarō Kitayama (北山 清太郎, Kitayama Seitarō; March 3, 1888 – February 13, 1945) was an early Japanese animation director whose work includes the first examples of commercial production of anime. Kitayama was referred to as one of the fathers of anime by Yoshirō Irie, a researcher at Japan's National Film Center.

Biography

Kitayama's early career was in painting rather than film: apprenticed to the watercolorist Tōjirō Ōshita from 1911, he simultaneously helped edit the art magazine Mizue before relocating to Tokyo, where he founded the Western Art Guild of Japan and launched its journal Contemporary Western Art (現代の洋画). As manager of the Fusain Art Group he went on to mentor emerging Western-style painters, among them Ryūsei Kishida and Sōhachi Kimura, supplying materials and organizing their exhibitions and catalogues.

A move into film came in 1916, when Kitayama joined Nikkatsu's Mukōjima studio to work on illustrated intertitles; the studio's animation efforts began there too, producing Monkey and Crabs (猿蟹合戦), one of Japan's earliest animated films, in May 1917. Its warm reception encouraged Nikkatsu to keep making animation, and Kitayama assembled a small production team—Sanae Yamamoto and Hiroshi Mineda handling the drawing, Kiichirō Kanai the cinematography—capable of turning out upward of ten films annually.

He struck out on his own in 1921 with the independent Kitayama Film Productions, but the studio did not survive the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake. Kitayama relocated to Osaka afterward and spent the rest of his career as a newsreel cameraman for the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun, never returning to animation production.

Works

References

  1. ↑ "Japan finds films by early "anime" pioneers". Reuters. Retrieved 6 July 2013.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Seitaro Kitayama". Japanese Animated Film Classics. National Film Archive of Japan. Retrieved 2026-07-10.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Frederick S. Litten. "Some remarks on the first Japanese animation films in 1917" (PDF). Retrieved 2014-01-02.