Cars, planes, trains, lions, samurai, seagulls, mountains — the world of the Japanese Paper Films live action is so big, so vibrant and unpredictable. Every film has its own mysteries, and my goal for this project is to resolve some of them.
But, first of all, what is a Paper Film?
Paper films are unique to Japan and were made from 1932 – 1938 by several studios and companies –Tsukiboshi, Katei Toki, Refcy. Because of the paper’s age and fragility, the original projection systems for the films are no longer usable. Thus, various museums, collectors, and film archives that hold the films have never actually seen the films in their collection. The Japanese Paper Film Project was started in order to preserve the films.
The Japanese Paper Film Project originated at Bucknell in 2019 and is dedicated to preserving 1930s Japanese paper films. This is a highly interdisciplinary project that has brought together faculty and students from Film/Media Studies, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, and East Asian Studies.
Our project needed to build a system to view the films in order to study the films. Not surprisingly, there is almost no scholarship on paper films and the small amount of writing only concerns the films’ format and projection system (as no one has viewed the films). In 2023, the project took its customer scanner and bespoke software to Japan to scan roughly 70 films and in 2024 we returned to scan an additional 130 films, and in 2025 we returned to Japan again, scanning 50 films that included 5 titles that we have not seen before.
However, all this time our main focus was on preserving, saving the history, but not studying Paper Films. Why? There was simply no time to do so. Stabilising each individual film can take up to 16 hours. Only this summer, with the help of DSSRF, I finally have the opportunity to dive deeper into our amazing collection. I decided to concentrate on the Live action films. While animated films that we have in our collection are the material that was originally made by the studio, the Live Action films were transferred from the original 35mm prints. Almost all of the Live action Paper Films were renamed, either for passing the copyright purpose or to make the films more attractive for the customers.
My goal for this project is to find the original films from which our Paper Films were copied, as well as to deep dive into the history of the original films themselves and the relationships between the source film and the Paper Film that was produced from it. Which parts of the films were chosen and why? Does every Paper Film contain only one film or multiple films?
This questions are yet to be answered.