Taro: The Dragon Boy

By Chris Beveridge     January 09, 2006
Release Date: January 31, 2006



What They Say
Lazy and selfish Taro loves to eat and sleep, and wrestle with the animals. With no direction in his life, a wizard appears that gives him a special potion. With this potion, he gains the strength of a hundred men. But the catch is he can only use it when he is helping others. Taro learns that his long lost mother was turned into a dragon, and he is suddenly given a puorpuse in life. Track down his mother and free her from the spell, all the while trying to help the peasants of his village.

The Review!
Based on a Japanese folklore tale that isn't often told in most modern shows, Taro the Dragon Boy is a simple but straightforward fable done in a very classic tradition.

Audio:
For our primary viewing session, we listened to this show in its original language of Japanese. Both it and the included English track are done in a mono format which overall sounds good but it does have a bit of muffling to it in a number of areas. The dialogue itself is still very much easily understandable but in places where the pitch gets a bit higher or they do something mildly creative with a particular creature's voice, it may not be quite as clear as one would expect. The material is fairly representative of its age though so the mono track is what I expected to get. During regular playback, we had no issues with dropouts or distortions with either language track.

Video:
Originally released to theaters back in 1979, the film is presented in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 2.35:1 and is enhanced for anamorphic playback. When going back to such an old property as this, the materials are often either in awful shape or you luck out by having it been recently remastered in Japan. While I can't find out if it got a remaster recently, what we get here is a very good looking print overall with some very smooth and fluid animation and gorgeous backgrounds but it's not completely free from problems. The main issue, and it is a source issue, is the various scene transitions. Most of these are fine and without trouble but some of them you can see some jitter and transition issues along the bottom where it's not as clean a transition as it should be. The animation itself looks very sharp and full of solid colors when dealing with the bulk of the animation and with the active characters but some of the backgrounds look a bit shifty at times due to the natural film grain that's here. I personally like the grain since it's reflective of the films age and is simply a part of how it was made but many people are so accustomed to clean crisp prints of recent years that these kinds of things tend to be a bother.

Packaging:
The packaging for this release is different but does show some of the issues that there usually are with older shows in getting good artwork to use as well as something that will appeal to modern audiences while still hitting up the nostalgia crowd. The front cover is a split image with two separate action scenes going on that show some good designs to the characters and the dragon in particular while the logo is through the center. It's a bit dark overall but it fits the animation and I like that they didn't try to pretty it up or Disney-fy it. The back cover provides a good summary of the show and a few small shots from it that covers the top half. The bottom half lists the voice actors and the main production staff while rounding it out with a good technical info box and the standard copyright information. The reverse side of the cover is a full length shot from the show with Taro going up against the Black Oni while the insert provides a very detailed credits list across both sides. The only thing I was disappointed about was that there wasn't any kind of history to the film provided.

Menu:
The menu layout is fairly simple and straightforward with few selections here as there's only the movie, language settings and a couple of trailers that are separated up. The main menu has animation of the show itself with the logo taking up a good portion of the screen and the selections on the right as some of the music plays along. Access times are nice and fast and the layout is very easy to navigate and problem free. The disc did correctly read our player's language settings and played accordingly which was a real plus.

Extras:
None.

Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
After Discotek's release of Anime Treasure Island and their live action release of Zero Woman, I've been very keen on seeing what they come up with next. They've kept their focus on Toei films from the 70's so far which is an area that's vastly unexplored for a number of reasons in the last few years so whenever something is comes from here I know that I'm in for an interesting time. I'm either seeing something that I've never seen before or something that is one of the ground layer kind of shows that others built upon during the anime boom in the 80's. With Taro the Dragon Boy, we get a Japanese folklore tale that's not been repeated in varying forms in other big cultural shows. Taro the Dragon Boy, as old as it is, simply felt new.

The premise is kept very much in the folklore and fable style where things happen within the context of this world and not reality. It's very easy to imagine the story being passed down verbally over the generations with small differences here and there but the core story, the moral that's really being told, remaining the same and being just as important to each of those generations. In an age long ago, young Taro is unlike a lot of the other boys in the run down village that he lives in. He's lazy and prefers to keep to himself, tends to look out just for his own interest and rather than play with the other kids or help out around the village he spends his time wrestling and playing with the animals that he can talk to. His days go on like this living with his grandmother until during one of his times playing outside he and the animals are surprised by the arrival of a Tengu "wizard". He takes up the challenge and wins out against the man who gives him a potion that grants him the strength of a hundred men! This has a condition though and it only works whenever he uses his strength in the aid of others, never for himself. When he does, his skin turns red and he's able to do amazing feats.

Revealing this ability to his grandmother and doing some minor work around the village, he learns that his mother isn't really dead but was turned into a dragon when he was born. He was sent down the river to where she picked him up and she tells that his mother then moved on to a lake many mountains away to hopefully await the arrival of her son. She left him with the mark of dragon claws on him and gave him her eye to give him sustenance during his trip downstream. Taro's learning of this, coinciding with his helping of a young girl from the nearby mountain where a red devil was accosting her, gives him the idea that he needs to travel to where this lake is so he can find his mother. Before he does that though he goes through a couple of small trials with the local devils on the mountain, first dealing with the Red Oni that wants to eat him up and then with the bigger and much more evil Black Oni on the next mountain.

This leads him on a number of small adventures as he makes his way around and he learns that many villages in the area are like his own, struggling and dying, looking for ways to make their meager lives work on what little sustenance they can. And at each phase as Taro gets involved and does things for them that in the end also aid him, he's able to improve their lives. At the same time, he's starting to get a much larger worldview of how things work as he sees lands different from his own and how they each suffer from things that others do and don't so that as a ten year old boy he can see the basic solutions without the clutter of adult reasoning. His journey is interesting as it goes along in that he meets such varying people, some are outright mean and manipulative as they look out for themselves while most are just poor and trying to survive. It's a very bleak outlook in a lot of ways but it is all tied to a very positive message that, in essence, if we work together we can find prosperity.

Visually, this is a very interesting film to watch. The character animation is very clean and fluid with a number of very beautiful sequences. Anything with the dragon and the lake is just gorgeous to watch. Some of the moments with the animals look a little awkward but that's partially because they're given some human actions and features at times but when it moves beyond the opening scenes with them it becomes less of a problem. What really proved to be the most fascinating is the backgrounds used here. With most of the show taking place in various valleys within a range of mountains, the backgrounds were done in a bleak off white with a dark blue and black painted style that has a very creepy feel to it. It's consistent throughout with this look as it feels like the mountain range is really closing in around you, adding a very cramped nature to it all. It's simply so strongly bleak and barren, especially in contrast to the more fluid and slightly more colorful characters, that it adds a really strong element to the film.

In Summary:
With two young girls in my house, I get to read and see a lot of folklore and fables come across our TV and books. Like most kids, they get a pretty heavy Eurocentric set of fables since they're the classics many of us grew up with as well as the usual array of American stories. Having spent a good part of the last fifteen years becoming acquainted with Japanese folktales and other Asian stories, I've been glad to be able to show them to my kids and expand the kinds of morality plays that they see. Taro was a very enjoyable one since it's one that I was unfamiliar with especially since it was done without being a modern twist on the tale but rather something more accurate to what's been passed down over the generations. This is a very well done production with some great visuals and solid performances that doesn't pull many punches. Discotek's release is solid pretty much throughout and this is probably the best the film has looked outside of its initial theatrical run and definitely the best that it's looked on video.

Features
Japanese 2.0 Language,English 2.0 Language,English Subtitles

Review Equipment
Panasonic PT50LC13 50" LCD RP HDTV, Zenith DVB-318 Progressive Scan codefree DVD player set to 480p, Sony STR-DE835 DD/DTS receiver, Monster component cable and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.