July 26, 2021 hugopassarinho

Our new project is on the move – Project “Dawn” is in progress and should be ready by the end of 2021.

There´s a lot we cannot share right now, but we are excited to tell you that we´ve just started a new short movie, it´s already going to the production phase.

This time around we are mixing every skill we have available, classic 2D animation with 3D animation, a bit of stop motion here and there.
The story is set in Japan and it will have 2 very special and “friendly” characters .

"Storytelling is at the heart of everything. "

Estúdio 408

Why Japan? We wanted to work around a setting that was somehow connected to Portuguese history, although this won´t be fully expressed with the main storyline all of us at Estúdio 408 have found memories of the relations and similarities between our two countries.

Follow our social networks to stay updated on this and other projects.

Portugal and Japan

More than 450 years have passed since the Japanese met at the first time the people from Europe, more precisely, from Portugal.

After 1543, when three Portuguese drifted ashore to the island of Tanegashima in Japan, a lot of things were introduced and brought into Japan mainly by the Portuguese.

To take some examples, firearm was introduced into Japan in the very first arrival of the Portuguese in 1543, Christianity was first introduced by São Francisco Xavier, Basque Jesuit who was supported in his foreign missions by the Portuguese Royal Household, and furthermore printing machine and many musical instruments of occidental origin were brought by ‘Tensho Mission to Europe’ constituted by 4 Japanese adolescents, when they returned to Japan in 1590 after their visits to Portugal, Spain and Italy. In addition, it is well known that there are a lot of words of Portuguese origin in Japanese language that we still use in our daily lives.

There are too many words to mention every one of them, but botan (botão), kappa (capa), koppu (copo), orugan (orgão), tabako (tabaco), bisuketto (biscoito), pan (pão), yoroppa (europa) are some of them. As you can see from the facts mentioned above, the Portuguese had the great influence upon Japan at that time.

In spite of the first great step made toward active cultural exchanges between both countries, however, Japan started in the first place to exclude Christianity, one of the things introduced into Japan by the Portuguese, because of various reasons. They put a law to forbid Christianity into force in 1614, which lead to the worse relations between Japan and Portugal. In 1639 the Tokugawa Shogunate closed the door to foreigners except the Dutch, which means the end of relations and exchanges between Japan and Portugal.

It was not until 1860 that Japan restored its relation with Portugal. Though the diplomatic relations were reestablished between both countries, the fact is that the exchanges and trades that they had as many as 2 centuries ago was never restored. Unfortunately, there have not been active cultural exchanges between Japan and Portugal except those made by a few outstanding figures such as Wenceslau de Moraes and Kazuo Dan. It is quite lamentable that when we talk about our relations between both countries, we always need to refer to the past experiences made by our respective ancestors. It is also quite regrettable that we do not have many things to share and talk about nowadays in this modern era and that a lot of Portuguese are not familiar with Japan and vice versa.

Source: https://www.pt.emb-japan.go.jp/relations.html

Estúdio 408


Estúdio 408
contacto.estudio408@gmail.com
Rua Professor Celestino da Costa, 4B , 1170-323
Lisboa, Portugal

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