Mitsuyo Seo

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Mitsuyo Seo (September 26, 1911 – August 24, 2010) was a Japanese animator, screenwriter, and director who helped shape early Japanese anime. He started as a sign painter and moved into animation at a toy film company that made short movies. He was involved with the Proletarian Film League of Japan, helping on animated films like Sankichi no Kūchū Ryokō, and in 1931 he was arrested and jailed for 21 days.

Seo worked with Kenzō Masaoka on Japan’s first sound animation, Chikara to Onna no Yo no Naka, and in 1935 started his own company making Norakuro cartoons. He joined Geijutsu Eigasha in 1937 and created Ari-chan in 1941, the first Japanese work to fully use a multiplane camera. His best-known works are two World War II propaganda shorts: Momotarō no Umiwashi, in which Momotarō and his animal friends bomb Pearl Harbor, and its sequel Momotarō: Umi no Shinpei, produced for Shōchiku and often called Japan’s first real feature-length animated film (though there is debate because Momotarō no Umiwashi is only 37 minutes long).

After the war, Seo joined Nihon Manga Eigasha and made Ōsama no Shippo in 1949, a pro-democracy anime. It had no distributor because it was seen as too leftist, and the company went bankrupt. With postwar conditions difficult for animation, Seo left the industry and became a children's book illustrator. Osamu Tezuka later said Umi no Shinpei impressed him so much that he wished to become an animator. Mitsuyo Seo died on August 24, 2010, at the age of 98.