Three Tales (新しい動画 3つのはなし, Mittsu no Hanashi) was a black-and-white Japanese anime direct-to-TV short film that aired in 1960. It was thought to be the first domestic anime ever televised until the later discovery of Mole's Adventure.
Overview
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Genre | Fantasy |
| Type | Anime television film |
| Directed by | Keiko Kozonoe |
| Original network | NHK |
| Released | January 15, 1960 |
| Runtime | 30 minutes |
Background
The program was an experimental anthology broadcast on the NHK channel. It was divided into three parts, each featuring an individual short fairy tale. The first segment, titled "The Third Plate," is technically the first anime segment ever televised. At the time of broadcast, NHK was still a nascent television service; as of 1953, the network was broadcasting to only 866 television sets. There is no known estimate of how much their infrastructure had scaled by 1960. Evidence that the anime was black-and-white comes from NHK station records, which indicate that the network did not make its first analog color broadcast until September 10, 1960, in Tokyo and Osaka.
Story Segments
The film is an anthology of three separate fairy tales:
| Story | Japanese Name | English Name | Original Story By |
|---|---|---|---|
| Story 1 | 第三の皿 | The Third Plate | Hirosuke Hamada |
| Story 2 | オッペルと象 | Oppel and the Elephant | Kenji Miyazawa |
| Story 3 | 眠い町 | Sleepy Town | Mimei Ogawa |
Staff
| Role | Japanese Name | English Name |
|---|---|---|
| Director, Supervisor | 小薗江圭子 | Keiko Osonoe |
| Director, Supervisor | 中原収一 | Shûichi Nakahara |
| Director, Supervisor | 和田誠 | Makoto Wada |
| Original Story Author | 浜田広介 | Hirosuke Hamada |
| Original Story Author | 宮沢賢治 | Kenji Miyazawa |
| Original Story Author | 小川未明 | Mimei Ogawa |
Kenji Miyazawa had already died before the broadcast of his story. Mimei Ogawa died one year after the show's first broadcast, in 1961.
Note: There is also a separate work titled Three Tales (2002), a video opera directed by Beryl Korot that profiles three major 20th-century technological events: the Hindenburg explosion, the atomic test at Bikini Atoll, and the cloning of Dolly the sheep. This is a distinct work from the 1960 Japanese anime film described above.
