Instant History

• 1. Introduction

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  Instant History was a black and white Japanese anime series that aired from 1961 to 1964. Together with Astro Boy, it is counted as the oldest anime television series. That places a little-known history program at the very beginning of Japanese television animation. How do you teach history through a cartoon? Where did the real photographs and film come from? And what became of the episodes after their first broadcasts?

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• 2. A Character Without a Calendar

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  The star of Instant History had no idea what had happened on this day in history. The series used that unawareness as its way into the past, letting a gap in one character's knowledge frame each historical event. To explain what had actually taken place, the animation did not work alone. Photographs and film footage were mixed in with the drawn scenes. Real images sat beside cartoon ones in the same short program. The photographs and footage had to come from somewhere, and the answer was a newspaper.

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• 3. The Newspaper Archive

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  The research archives of Mainichi Shinbun supplied the raw material for Instant History. The director, Ryūichi Yokoyama, was a cartoonist whose Fuku-chan manga was running in that same newspaper when the series began. His manga printing there gave the anime its link to the archives. In 1961, the series started out as a run of 3 minute shorts. Each one combined animation, film footage and stills taken from the Mainichi Shinbun collection. The material would not stay with a single broadcaster for long.

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• 4. Second Lives

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  The first run of Instant History aired on Fuji TV and was sponsored by Meiji Seika. This season began on the 1st of May 1961 and ended on the 24th of February 1962. In 1962, the series was recycled into Otogi Manga Calendar, which went out on Tokyo Broadcasting System with Kirin Company as its sponsor. That second season ran from the 25th of June 1962 to the 4th of July 1964. The trail continues in 1966, when parts of the series turned up inside Knowledgeable University on Mainichi Broadcasting System.

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