An omnibus television series made up of anime adaptations of Japanese folk tales, this show is one of Japan's longest-running TV series and the second TV series produced by Group Tac (the first being The Road to Munich, a documentary anime about the 1972 Olympics). The series' core rule was that the creative team changed with each episode. While later anime series like Nippon Animation's Famous Works of Japanese Literature attempted a similar approach, none matched its longevity or success.
The rotation concept came from director Sugii Gisaburo, a visual visionary unmatched in Japanese film history who revolutionized anime multiple times over his career—whether with the 1967 TV series Goku's Big Adventure, where he sought to free anime from the dominance of story development by pulling it back toward a more cartoonish style, or with The Belladonna of Sadness, where he broke the Disney full-animation mold and created a full-length animated film in an entirely new style that blended still drawings with animation. The reason for rotating the staff for each episode was to give every installment a completely different look and feel from the one before, and in that goal it was highly successful. This series is genuinely rewarding to watch and stands as one of the visually richest shows in anime history.
Although this system also meant quality varied, there were occasionally superb episodes, as the staff included many veterans such as Group Tac founder Sugii Gisaburo himself, Shibayama Tsutomu, Furuzawa Hideo, Rin Taro, and Hikone Norio. As the years went on, old episodes were repeated more and more frequently, and production of new episodes finally ended completely in late 1995, but the series is still widely broadcast.
