I don’t remember 1975 too well, because I hadn’t shown up yet. I did show up in March of ‘76, so I guess I existed for the last few months of ‘75, at least nominally. There’s something fascinating about studying events from before you were born, isn’t there? In some ways, looking at the pop culture landscape makes it all seem closer and more real, so let’s check out Japan’s animated pop culture landscape of that fiftieth year of the Showa period.
What he did do was build, from the ground up, the animation aesthetic of Toei Doga itself, starting right with their first feature film, Hakuja-den, for which he provided storyboarding and key animation duties. 1975 started with one of Mori’s best and most well-remembered works, and after the studio changed its name to the somewhat more memorable Nippon Animation later in the year, Mori would work on another adaptation of a famous novel, Prairie Girl Laura, which we westerns would more immediately recognize under the story’s original title, Little House on the Prairie.
1975 wasn’t really the year of animated classics of children’s literature, though. Yasuji Mori did great stuff in that field, but if I had to point to a single creator whose work dominated the mindshare of Japanese cartoon dorks in 1975, I could really only point to Go Nagai and his seemingly limitless army of super robots. The super robot occupation started in March with theatrical screenings of Great Mazinger vs Getter Robo, a short feature film that began with the titular titans squaring off and ended with them teaming up to face an even greater threat. This, of course, wasn’t merely a chance to set little kids’ minds afire with the spectacle of two awesome robots in the same cartoon-- it was a prelude to the TV debut of Getter Robo G in May.
