Tadahito "Tad" Mochinaga was a pioneer Japanese stop-motion animator.
16 Facts About Tadahito Mochinaga
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Tadahito Mochinaga did this work in association with American director Arthur Rankin, Jr.
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In 1945, Mochinaga traveled to Xinjing in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo set up in occupied China, to work at the Manchukuo Film Association.
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Tadahito Mochinaga stayed in China after the war and from 1950, he spent three years in Shanghai working on such films as Thank You, Kitty.
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Tadahito Mochinaga is perhaps the only major artist of the era to have worked in both the Chinese and Japanese animation industries.
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Tadahito Mochinaga began his animation career in the middle of WWII Japan.
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Tadahito Mochinaga was officially in charge of backgrounds and visual effects.
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Shortly after the release of Momotaro's Sea Eagles, Tadahito Mochinaga was put in charge of Fuku-Chan's Submarine despite his own protests that he was too inexperienced.
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Exhausted, Tadahito Mochinaga returned home to find it destroyed in a bombing raid.
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Fortunately for Tadahito Mochinaga, he was rehired at the now rebranded Northeast Film Studio.
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Tadahito Mochinaga was then given the job of subtitling Soviet films for Chinese, Korean, and Japanese markets.
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Tadahito Mochinaga soon found himself in another war zone as the Chinese National and Communist armies battled for dominance over Manchuria.
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Tadahito Mochinaga had to be very careful with the amount of film they used.
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Tadahito Mochinaga was forced to mix his own homemade paints from what he could scavenge.
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Tadahito Mochinaga was assigned the task of animating a propaganda comic drawn by Hua Junwu.
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Tadahito Mochinaga continued to work as a successful animator and filmmaker in China for the next decade, finally returning to his home country in 1954, four years before the massive famines in 1958.