Mole's Adventure

• 1. Introduction

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  Mole's Adventure holds a distinction that most films can only dream of: it is the earliest surviving Japanese anime broadcast on television. On the 14th of July, 1958, the nine-minute animation aired on NTV, marking the first time a Japanese animated work appeared on television screens. It also carried a second first: it was the first full color broadcast of its kind. Two questions follow naturally from that pair of firsts. What kind of story did Japan's pioneering animators choose to tell? And what does a nine-minute film look like when it is carrying the weight of an entirely new medium?

• 2. A Dream About the Dark

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  At the center of the film is a mole with a very specific problem: sunlight bothers him. Rather than retreat underground in the ordinary way, this mole takes a more dramatic route and leaves Earth entirely, climbing aboard a rocket ship. He lands on a strange planet and travels across its surface on a set of skis. The planet is populated by weird creatures that live both above and below the soil. When the mole uses a flashlight to scatter them, the story seems to be building toward some kind of resolution. Then the sun's rays catch him again, knock him off the planet, and as he falls through space he wakes up. It was all a dream. The plot is compact by design, since the entire film runs only nine minutes, but the choice to frame it as a dream gives the animators permission to move through surreal environments without explanation. A mole afraid of the sun who escapes to a planet of underground creatures is its own internal logic.

• 3. Television's First Color Broadcast

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  NTV broadcast Mole's Adventure on the 14th of July, 1958, and then again on the 15th of October, 1958. That second airing is worth noting: the film was deemed worth repeating within the same year. The fact that it aired in full color made it doubly significant as a technical landmark. Color television was not yet common, and a nine-minute animated film in full color was a demonstration of what the medium could do. The strange planet, the skiing mole, the scattered creatures: all of it was rendered in color for an audience that was still getting used to the idea of television itself.