Abstract
The purpose of this essay is to examine representations of the mouth in comics for children before and during the Second World War. In this period, while American talkie animation such as Disney films often feature active movements of characters’ mouths, it was difficult for comics to express lip sync. In comics, expressing the emotion and psychology of characters was given priority over realistically representing the shape of the mouth emitting a specific sound. This essay clarifies the originality of representations of mouth movements in Suiho Tagawa’s Norakuro. This essay shows that, due to governmental censorship over children’s books initiated in 1938, speech balloons were removed and representations of the mouth became less active.
