How to Buy a Broken Sword, Get Beaten Up by a Blind Man, and Witness the Birth of Anime in Four Minutes
It’s 3:15 AM. My eyes feel like they’ve been rubbed with coarse sandpaper, the cold pizza on my desk is starting to look back at me, and I am currently watching a cartoon samurai with a massive, goofy face and a topknot trying to ambush a blind musician on a dark road, only for the blind man to casually knock him flat on his back with a wooden stick in a flat, jerky, four-minute cutout animation.
Welcome, my friends, to the absolute, undisputed, and delightfully goofy birth of Japanese animation.
If you’ve never watched Namakura Gatana (also known as The Dull Sword or Hanawa Hekonai meitô no maki), congratulations: you’ve never seen the oldest surviving anime in human history. Directed and animated by Jun’ichi Kōuchi—one of the legendary “fathers of anime”—this four-minute silent short was produced in 1917. Kōuchi’s strategy was a masterclass in silent-era, shoestring-budget creativity:
- Ditch expensive, time-consuming hand-drawn cell animation (which wasn’t even a fully realized medium in Japan yet).
- Meticulously cut characters and backgrounds out of flat, colored paper (kiri-gami) and animate them frame-by-frame on a flat tabletop.
- Completely subvert the traditional, heroic mythology of the deadly, stoic samurai, and turn your main character into a bumbling, incompetent coward who gets bullied by everyone he meets.
The result? Namakura Gatana (1917).
The “Plot” (If we can even call it that)
Hanawa Hekonai, a smug, foolish samurai, walks up to a shady street merchant and buys a “famous, sharp” sword. Eager to test out his new weapon, Hekonai hides in the shadows of a dark country road, waiting to ambush an unsuspecting passerby.
His first target is a blind masseur/musician walking down the path. Hekonai draws his sword and lunges, but his footwork is so terrible that the blind man easily ducks, turns around, and knocks the samurai out with a single blow from his walking stick before casually strolling away. Undeterred, Hekonai tries to ambush a fast-running mail-messenger, who easily dodges the sword, kicks Hekonai flat on his back, and leaves him crying in the dirt with a sword that has bent like a piece of wet cardboard.
It is four minutes of pure, rapid-fire, silent physical slapstick.
Why You Need to Watch This Tonight
- The Absolute Genesis of Anime: If you are a fan of Studio Ghibli, Dragon Ball, Akira, or any modern anime, watching Namakura Gatana is like looking at the literal DNA origin of the entire medium. This four-minute short is the cornerstone upon which an entire global industry was built, and seeing it in its raw, 1917 form is a spiritual experience for any animation nerd.
- The Anti-Samurai Comedy: Usually, 1910s Japanese media treated the historical samurai class with absolute, solemn respect. Kōuchi’s decision to make his samurai a massive-headed, tiny-legged idiot who can’t even beat up a blind man or a postman was a hilariously rebellious piece of pop-culture satire for 1917.
- The Osaka Antique Shop Discovery: Like Frankenstein (1910), this historic film was considered completely and tragically lost to time for nearly a century. Then, in March 2008, an animation historian was browsing through a dusty antique shop in Osaka and found a pristine, tinted celluloid copy sitting in a box of old film canisters. It was restored and brought back to the public, rewriting animation history.
- The Expressive Charm of Paper Cutouts: The kiri-gami (paper cutout) style gives the characters an incredibly charming, flat, and jerky aesthetic. Because the figures are cut out of paper, their facial expressions and limbs move with a sudden, snappy physical comedy that hand-drawn animation often lacked at the time.
The Verdict
Is it a good movie? It is an absolute, historically massive, and incredibly charming piece of art. It takes only four minutes to watch, it features fantastic slapstick timing, and it represents the very first step of Japanese animation. It is the perfect, quick late-night watch for anyone who wants to see where the entire universe of anime began.
My Rating: 5 out of 5 famous swords that bend like wet cardboard.
Wanna see the four-minute short that started the entire anime medium?
Turn off your phone, dim the lights, and search for this 1917 silent short on your favorite retro animation or archive platform. Because it was made over a century ago, the entire restored film is in the public domain, meaning you can watch Hanawa Hekonai get beaten up by a blind man completely free and legally.
