Taro the Dragon Boy (1979)

I know of very few anime movies that predate Studio Ghibli's 1985 debut. This one may be the earliest I've seen, with the possible exception of the same year's Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro.

The setting is rural Japan before the Japanese discovered irrigation. Taro, around age nine, has a reputation for being lazy and gluttonous but good at sumo and popular with woodland critters, who can talk. An impressed tengu (Shinto spirit) grants him the strength of 100 men, activated only when he aims to help others. When Taro asks his grandmother about his long-gone mother, he learns that she had involuntarily turned into an aquatic dragon while pregnant, which explains the scales on part of his back. He makes it his quest to find her in whatever distant lake has become her home.

Taro gets a lot of help along the way, including from a girl with an enchanted flute, a wingless yet flying horse, and even an oni (demon). For the most part, however, he prefers to go it alone, because the journey is long, hazardous, and altogether personal, and someone has to look after Grandma. Thankfully, he is not too single-minded: When he tastes rice for the first time, he pities his village and everyone else who lives in an area too mountainous to grow it. He makes good use of his super brawn to that end. Oddly enough, the rice thing even proves relevant to his primary objective.

Be warned: Even at his most altruistic, Taro seems pretty arrogant. He's also prone to strong emotions and less-than-beautiful singing. I didn't get too annoyed, but someone else might.

Between the simple plot and the type of protagonist, I'm sure TtDB was intended as a family film. But even more than The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, it contains many instances of overt if "innocent" frontal nudity (both sexes), because old Japan had looser standards on that front. Also, of course, western kids would be unfamiliar with some of the folkloric archetypes. At least the overarching lesson transcends cultures.

You might be wondering about the artwork. No modern anime would settle for this style, but that doesn't make it bad. The backgrounds typically look like hand paintings, and the motion is smoother than I expected for the time.

I enjoyed the flick well enough. It doesn't make me eager to find more work by the people involved, but it makes for a pleasant 75 minutes.