Literary adaptations were popular throughout the thirties, and as Anderson and Richie note in The Japanese Film, "The man who really gave the movement its form, and much of its vitality, was Shiro Toyoda, whose 1937 Young People (The Young) was one of the best of the adaptations. It was also the most popular of these literary-cycle films, and its excellence made it Toyoda's first really important picture. Based on a novel by Yojiro Ishizaka, it was the story of the love affair between a school teacher and one of his students. The girl had never known her father, and the film presented her search for a substitute. Despite its literary origin, the film was highly pictorial in style and also managed to avoid all of the pitfalls usually encountered in reproducing novelistic dialogue."