Anime Icon Rintaro Revives A Lost Piece Of Japanese Cinema In ‘Nezumikozō Jirokichi’

Nezumikozō Jirokichi, legendary Metropalis and Galaxy Express 999 director Rintaro’s first film in more than a decade, is now free to watch online, and arrives with the unusual mission of resurrecting a classic Japanese movie that no longer exists.

Nezumikozo Jirokichi is based on a lost 1933 project by pioneering Japanese filmmaker Sadao Yamanaka, whose brief career helped shape the country’s period-drama tradition before his death at age 28 during World War II.

Rather than treating that absence as a historical footnote, Rintaro turns it into the film’s main creative challenge, imagining what Yamanaka’s vanished work might have looked and felt like through animation and introducing the backstory with a brief scroll at the beginning of the short.

Silent-film intertitles, benshi-style narration, and a jaunty score blend with rich colors, fluid and frequently very funny animation, and extremely charming character designs by Katsuhiro Otomo and Yoshinori Kanemori. The story itself follows the folk-hero thief Jirokichi, a Robin Hood figure who steals from the wealthy and aids the poor in Edo-era Japan, but the real subject is animation’s ability to bring lost history back to life.

The film, which clocks in at an impressive 24 minutes, likely well short of its feature predecessor, feels less like a remake and more like a tribute to a long-lost classic of Japanese cinema history.