A movie on paper. Paper was less expensive than celluloid and safer for the intended home user—a natural solution given the background of the inventors, Tsujimoto Shūgorō and Kobayashi Yūtarō of REFCY, who came from printing rather than the movie business. (Other inventors adopted similar solutions for the Parlor Kinetoscope and Cine Skob.) Paper films were made by three studios: REFCY, Katei-Toki and Tsukiboshi.

Films were one to four minutes in length. Subjects included both live action and anime. Live action movies were printed from existing 35 mm films from Japan as well as from countries like the United States and Germany (Polusmak 2026). Live action films were printed using photogravure, which Tsujimoto had introduced to Japan. Anime was offset printed in color.

Films were printed on a large sheet of paper, then cut by hand into strips. The strips were assembled by gluing together short segments of 40 frames (about three feet long). REFCY films were center perforated. The image was projected by reflection rather than transmission; a 100-watt light bulb illuminated the front of the paper strip, with the lens focusing the reflected light on the screen (as in an episcope or opaque projector). The projector was cranked by hand. A beater mechanism pulled the strip intermittently through the gate (Rogge 2017, 00:47). In some cases, a movie was paired with a 78 rpm shellac soundtrack record, with a mark on the film indicating when the record was to be started (Fadden 2025, 11:39).

REFCY started production in 1932. By 1938, metal toy production was banned in Japan, which meant the projectors could no longer be manufactured. After the war, safety film came to dominate home cinema and paper films were not revived. Several hundred of the films survive, but in a fragile state that does not allow viewing with the original projectors. Under the direction of film studies professor Eric Fadden, the Japanese Paper Film Project at Bucknell has developed a process for scanning the films and has presented many of them at locations around the world (Fadden 2026).