Night on the Galactic Railroad. © 1985 Asahi Group, Herald Group, TAC.

Night on the Galactic Railroad.
Theatrical feature, 1985. Director: Gisaburo Sugii. 108 minutes. Price & format: DVD $29.99 bilingual. Distributor: Central Park Media.

This art film, released in July 1985, was the first major animated adaptation of the literary classics of Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933), one of Japan's best-known 20th century authors. Superficially a children's fantasy, this allegorical phantasmagoria of the unity of the earth, the heavens, life and death is for all ages. Giovanni is a young schoolboy who is ostracized by most of his classmates when he must stop playing with them to work at odd jobs to support his ailing mother. Only his best friend Campanella remains loyal. On the night of the Milky Way Festival, when the townsfolk sail lanterns down the river, Giovanni goes to a hilltop to look at the stars. An ethereal train stops so he can board, and he is delighted to find that Campanella is also a passenger. The first part of the journey is clearly a dream, with sights influenced (as in the MGM Wizard of Oz movie) by Giovanni's daytime memories of his school teacher's lessons and other elements; a stop at the Pliocene Coast dominated by gigantic antediluvian fossils, and stations based upon the constellations. Gradually, and obviously after a new influx of wet passengers turn out to be people who had just drowned as the Titanic sunk, Giovanni and the audience realize that the train is really taking newly-dead souls to Heaven. He has a rare round-trip ticket, but what is Campanella doing on the train?

Sugii's telling of this story, beautifully animated by Group TAC, blends the original story (which was itself a blend of reality and fantasy) with well-known elements from Miyazawa's other works. Giovanni's hometown is what was then-exotic (to the Japanese) Italy, but with Japanese cultural elements such as the annual festival of floating candles down a river to honor the souls of the dead. There is no hint that the characters are anything other than human, but some of Miyazawa's other stories feature anthropomorphized cats so Sugii presents the cast here as funny animal cats. Street signs and such are in Esperanto rather than Italian, reflecting Miyazawa's passion for that artificial language. All captions and credits are in both Japanese and Esperanto. (Unfortunately, the English translation misses some references, identifying the prehistoric ancestor of the bull as "vos" instead of "bos," and apparently not realizing that some names such as swan and scorpion refer to the constellations rather than the mundane creatures.)

Battle of the Planets.All Rights Reserved. © 2001 Rhino Home Video.

Giovanni and Campanella are both introspective boys who watch in quiet awe, so there are long passages without dialogue. Fortunately, the music (Haruomi Hosono) and sound mix (Atumi Tasiro) superbly carry the movie for adult viewers. However, watching Night on the Galactic Railroad is similar to spending an afternoon at an art museum in that children are apt to become restless.

Battle of the Planets. V.1 - V.4.
TV series, 1972-1974. Japan, Chief Director: Hisayuki Toriumi; America, Executive Producer & Writer: Jameson Brewer. 60 minutes each. Price & Format: DVD $19.95 bilingual. Distributor: Rhino Home Video.

Science Ninja Team Gatchaman was a landmark anime TV series in many respects. It was one of the most popular anime TV series of the 1970s, running for 105 episodes from October 1, 1972 to September 29, 1974 and spinning off two sequels, Gatchaman II (52 episodes, October 1, 1978 to September 23, 1979) and Gatchaman-F (for Fighter) (48 episodes, October 7, 1979 to August 31, 1980). It was the last major title developed by Tatsuo Yoshida, creator of Tatsunoko Production Co., before his death. It was one of the few anime series in the style of American costumed superhero comic books to win any popularity in Japan.