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Tadahito Mochinaga (1919-1999)

Alias:
Tad Mochinaga
Тадахито Мотинага
持永 只仁
方明

Birthplace:
Tokyo

Born:
March 3, 1919

Died:
April 1, 1999

Biography from TheMovieDB

Tadahito "Tad" Mochinaga was a pioneer Japanese stop-motion animator. Having done many stop motion films/shorts in Japan, he is best known as the animator for Rankin/Bass' "Animagic" productions at his MOM Studio in Tokyo throughout the 1960s. He did this work in association with American director Arthur Rankin, Jr. who wrote and designed the productions before sending them to Japan for animation.  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. He stayed in China after the war and from 1950, he spent three years in Shanghai working on such films as Thank You, Kitty. He is perhaps the only major artist of the era to have worked in both Chinese and Japanese animation industries.

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Additional information:

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Film Production

Animation:
1947  The Dream to Be an Emperor
1956  Beer, those were the days

Animation Supervisor:
1947  The Dream to Be an Emperor
1956  Beer, those were the days
1965  Willy McBean and His Magic Machine

Cinematography:
1947  The Dream to Be an Emperor
1956  Beer, those were the days
1965  Willy McBean and His Magic Machine
1967  Mad Monster Party?

Director:
1947  The Dream to Be an Emperor
1948  Capturing the Turtle in the Jar
1950  Thank You, Kitty
1951  Little Iron Pillar the Boy
1952  Kitty Goes Fishing
1956  Beer, those were the days
1956  Go-hiki no Kozaru-tachi
1956  Uriko-hime to Amanojaku
1957  Fushigi na Taiko
1957  The Stolen Lump
1958  Bunbuku Chagama
1959  Ou-sama ni Natta Kitsune
1965  Willy McBean and His Magic Machine
1967  Mad Monster Party?

Director of Photography:
1944  Fuku-chan's Submarine
1947  The Dream to Be an Emperor
1948  Capturing the Turtle in the Jar
1950  Thank You, Kitty
1951  Little Iron Pillar the Boy
1952  Kitty Goes Fishing
1956  Beer, those were the days
1956  Go-hiki no Kozaru-tachi
1956  Uriko-hime to Amanojaku
1957  Fushigi na Taiko
1957  The Stolen Lump
1958  Bunbuku Chagama
1959  Ou-sama ni Natta Kitsune
1965  Willy McBean and His Magic Machine
1967  Mad Monster Party?

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About the Movie Section

Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).

Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.

Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)

While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:

  • I added "runners up" to Top 10 lists, treating them as ties where applicable and numbering them accordingly at the bottom of each list.
  • Regarding those polls wherein "franchise" movies were submitted as one project until BFI's policy changed to regard them separately, I treated them as ties and renumbered the affected lists accordingly (e.g. the Godfather films).

Regarding profile removals and data corrections:

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  • For additional corrections and profile removals, please e-mail The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).

Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.

Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.