Japanese Paper Films at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival May 8 at 5pm! We are delighted to play at the amazing @castrotheatre.bsky.social with live music by Duo Yumeno #anime #japan #koto #film

This week is my office's humble "hanami" season when a small 90° turn to the right moves from editing Japanese paper films to the beautiful 桜 cherry blossoms. (Next week the blossoms will all be on my carpet from walking through them to get to my office!).

Kachi Kachi Yama is a Japanese folktale about a mischievous tanuki who torments an elderly couple only to be tricked by their friend, the rabbit. This film reshapes the story as wartime propaganda. The tanuki and rabbit continue their battle complete with a climax of flying Japanese daikon radishes!

Our scanning system is super gentle on the films. But some films need repairs before scanning. _Monkey & Tanuki_ was so brittle that it fell apart at the slightest touch. Owner Yo Sato-sensei generously let us bring it to Bucknell for repairs. Enjoy the time lapse (4-hour surgery!) & final result!

"Silver Comes Through" is a 1927 Hollywood film that made its way to Japan & then copied to paper in the 1930s. The original 35mm film is lost thus making the paper copy some of the film's only surviving footage. Star Fred Thomson is largely forgotten now because so few of his films were preserved.

Our next show will be Jan. 31st at the Museum of Modern Art as part of the "To Save and Project" festival. A big "thank you" to Dan Streible for including Japanese paper films in the @orphanfilms at MoMA program. As usual, Duo Yumeno will provide live musical accompaniment.

A great show in Sydney! Plus koala! Thank you Art Gallery of NSW and Japan Foundation (japanesefilmfestival.net) for helping turn out the audience for this sold out event. Melbourne is next with a show at ACMI on Nov. 27! #film #Japan #anime #koto

Thank you Brisbane & QAGOMA for hosting our screening! What an amazing audience. A special note of appreciation to curator Robert Hughes for organizing our visit. Duo Yumeno were fantastic & we loved the James Turrell artwork outside the Gallery. Sydney is up next for the Japanese Film Festival.

Hello Brisbane! Join us tonight at the Gallery of Modern Art. The whole team arrived smoothly from the U.S. and we're excited to share our program of Japanese paper films. Duo Yumeno provides live musical accompaniment on koto & cello. #anime #Japan #film japanesefilmfestival.net/paper-films/

Come to our Yale screening by car, boat, train, hot air balloon, turtle, tanuki, horse, motorcycle, skis, rocket or just run! As always, Duo Yumeno (Yoko Reikano Kimura on koto and Hikaru Tamaki on cello) provide live musical accompaniment. Details: film.yale.edu/events/2025-...

Some of our favorite photos from our performance at The Pordenone Silent Film Festival. The photos were shot by the amazing Valerio Greco (@silentvalerio on Instagram). Duo Yumeno played from the orchestra pit. #Japan #film #anime #paper

Hello from the Pordenone Silent Film Festival! We loved seeing Japanese paper films projected onto the Teatro Verdi theatre to promote our screening. Props to Phoebe for b-roll of Yoko, Hikaru, & Eric capturing the moment! A big THANK YOU to the Yanai Initiative for supporting our screening here.

Hello from Italy! We screened our program at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival yesterday and received our first review! Thank you @pamhutch.bsky.social ! silentlondon.co.uk/2025/10/05/l... Bonus: we also received "Intertitle of the Day!"

I love paper films' materiality, especially in an age where digital streams have largely replaced physical media. When color grading, I always look at the beginning of the filmstrip and darken it to reveal the ridges and spirals of fingerprints from those who handled the films 90+ years ago.

Land ho! Tonkichi's Adventure is a charming anime where nothing is as it seems.

Sharing from Instagram: we're beyond thrilled to play the Pordenone Silent Film Festival next month in Italy. A truly magical venue and event. #japan, #anime, #silentcinema

Philly, New Jersey, and NYC friends: new program premiering next week at Lafayette's Williams Center for the Arts on Sept. 12 at 7pm. Ticket's here: williamscenter.lafayette.edu/event/japane... As usual, Duo Yumeno joins us for live musical accompaniment!

In case you weren't up at 2am last night to catch the live broadcast from Japan, here's a link to the English news segment from NHK World broadcast on the Japanese Paper Film Project. Thank you to journalist Takatoshi Murakami & his amazing filming crew! www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/...

This summer NHK (Japan's national TV network) produced a great news segment on our project that broadcast in July & re-aired in August. They've now made an English version for NHK World. If you find yourself awake tonight at 2am (EST), then watch it live: www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/...

Beware of speedy turtles! Suihō Tagawa's Norakuro was a popular manga character in the 1930s who also appears in several paper films. We scanned an incomplete version of this film in 2024 but collector Natsuki Matsumoto found a complete version which we scanned this summer in Japan.

Lehigh Valley, NYC, Philly Friends: Lafayette College's Williams Center for the Arts will host the Japanese Paper Film Project on Friday, September 12 @ 7pm! Prof Eric Faden will intro the program. Live musical accompaniment by Duo Yumeno. Please join us! williamscenter.lafayette.edu/event/japane...

New 2025 cut of our live roadshow program is done! New subtitles, fixed a lot of little (and sometimes big) mistakes, typos, random frames that crept into the cut, improved the Japanese, and incorporated several new films and/or better preservations of films already in the program!

Like so many paper films, this one begs for more research. This film - along with several others - targets (in an admittedly stereotyped way) 1930s Japanese girls & young women. Other films (like the Sutakora Sacchan films), however, upend gender norms. A book chapter/journal article awaits!

Back to work on new films. We scanned Prof. Yo Sato's collection this summer including the Japanese folktale "Battle of Monkey & Crab." Like most Japanese folktales ... it's complicated: there's onigiri, persimmons, a crustacean tragedy, & vengeance with bees, chestnuts, and a quasi-human mortar.

We always travel with musicians Yoko Reikano Kimura & Hikaru Tamaki but our Japan tour also had benshi Ichiro Kataoka & Kumiko Omori. Benshi were star Japanese film narrators popular in the 1920s & 1930s. Some paper film soundtracks include benshi so it was an honor to have live benshi on the tour.

The current issue of MUBI's NOTEBOOK magazine (issue #7, "Threshold of the Visible") features a GEORGEOUS profile on our project. NOTEBOOK is a print-only, biannual magazine where each issue is a bespoke design and layout based on the content. Pick up a copy or subscribe: mubi.com/en/notebook/...

One of the film's screened during our summer tour was Seven Little Lambs. Here's a G-rated part of the film but things turn dark quickly when the wolf eats the lambs and then the mother sheep seeks revenge. 1930s fairy tales don't pull any punches!

Whoa! It's been awhile! We've been super busy this summer touring Japan and scanning new films. We'll start with this amazing picture drawn by our research students Yara Polusmak and Mikaru Plankenhorn for Kyoto's Toy Film Museum's guest book. We were visiting the museum's new location!

For more information on Dr. Faden’s Japanese Paper Film Project ( @kamifirumu.bsky.social), please visit its webpage: kamifirumu.scholar.bucknell.edu And check out the work of the group he partners with, the Media Archaeology Research Team of the Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences! 🎬

Our 2025 Japan summer tour (details coming soon!) needs high resolution images of paper film strips for the theatrical posters. So we shot some tests using a 100 megapixel camera. The paper film frame is just 27mm but the 100MP image reveals individual paper fibers!

You may be surprised to learn in the 1930s live & animated films were produced on paper! 🎞️🗾 Learn about this cinema history by revisiting an #NCCSpotlight by Eric Faden (Bucknell U): “The Japanese Paper Film Project: Preserving the History of 1930s Kami Firumu”! guides.nccjapan.org/homepage/new...

Most days working on Japanese paper films is staring at three monitors painstakingly working on films frame by frame to bring them back to life. But for one week a year, if I rotate my chair to the right, I get my own Pennsylvania version of sakura season.

A clip from Ponsuke's Shapeshifting Training from our LA rehearsal at the Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theatre. Thank you to everyone who came to the show and to the UCLA Film/TV Archive. As always, Yoko Reikano Kimura on koto and Hikaru Tamaki on cell were amazing.

Great show in Santa Barbara yesterday. Thank you to everyone who came out and thank you to the Carsey-Wolf Center for hosting us. Here's a short clip of the amazing Hikaru Tamaki (cello) and Yoko Reikano Kimura (koto). Tonight: Los Angeles at the Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theatre. Join us!

Fun interview with the Maura Cunningham from the Association for Asian Studies about Japanese paper films. www.asianstudies.org/asianow-spea...

Presented in partnership with @uclaftvarchive.bsky.social. See the @kamifirumu.bsky.social for more exciting news about this project and the paper film world tour. 🗓️

Sunday, April 13, 7 p.m. 📽 Japanese Paper Films Join us for a rare screening of digitized “kami firumu” from @kamifirumu.bsky.social, Japanese short films that were printed on paper in the 1930s. Live musical accompaniment! Free: ucla.in/3Eb9NQZ Co-presented by @yanaiinitiative.bsky.social

Two west coast shows coming up! Santa Barbara (Carsey-Wolf Center) Saturday 4/12 at 2pm and Los Angeles (Hammer Museum Billy Wilder Theatre) Sunday 4/13 at 7pm. Join us! www.carseywolf.ucsb.edu/pollock-even... www.cinema.ucla.edu/events/japan...

Sound up! A great show last week in Chicago featuring paper films (this one is 浦島太郎 / Urashima Taro from the Kyoto Toy Film Museum) and Duo Yumeno accompanying the films with koto and cello. Thank you to everyone who came out for the show.

Wonderful article about our project by Sarah Downey for Bucknell Magazine: www.bucknell.edu/news/bucknel...

Come by car, boat, train, hot air balloon, turtle, tanuki, horse, motorcycle, skis, rocket or just run but get yourself to the Japanese Paper Film screenings in Chicago (3/27, Logan Center for the Arts) and Urbana, IL (3/28, Spurlock Museum)!

DCP is on its way to Chicago! Get your tickets: events.uchicago.edu/event/245081...

Japanese Paper Films are coming to Illinois next week! Tickets for our Chicago show on March 27 are here: events.uchicago.edu/event/245081... The following evening, March 28, we play the Spurlock Museum in Urbana: www.spurlock.illinois.edu/events/event... Live music by Duo Yumeno. Join us!

Post production supervisor Leroy T. Cat making sure work on paper films never stops.

A different spin on Méliès' Trip to the Moon with REFCY's Reffie's Rocket. This is a popular film we've scanned from several different collections. This is one of two copies from the Matsumoto collection. And to be fair, the moon had insulted Reffie earlier in the film!

New show added! We're thrilled to screen Japanese Paper Films at the Spurlock Museum in Urbana, IL on Fri., March 28 at 7pm. As usual, the amazing Yoko Reikano Kimura (koto) & cellist Hikaru Tamaki will accompany the films with live music. Sponsored by the Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies.

A 1930s "cat video" (er, anime) with some familiar looking mice! We just finished this film for the Natsuki Matsumoto Collection.

We've received the 2025 Sumie Jones Prize for Project Leadership in Japanese-centered Humanities from the Association for Asian Studies. We're truly honored and humbled to be recognized for our work in this way. Thank you! www.asianstudies.org/aas-2025-pri...

Never trust a rabbit on the moon!

Our local PBS station WVIA and host Erika Funke kindly featured our project on their recent show, "Keystone Edition Arts." You can watch here! https://buff.ly/4aGCVew