Poster: Gulliver's Space Travels

Here are two movie posters for the 1963 Toei Doga animated feature film Gulliver's Space Travels. Specifically, these belong to the US version, dubbed Gulliver's Travels Beyond the Moon. This is a terrific movie that's full of spark and adventure and color, a nice change from the usual Toei fare of Eastern myths and fairy tales. It has a very distinct Western flair in its visual design and story that helps set it apart from just about anything at the time.

Hayao Miyazaki fans know about this movie, of course. It was his second feature film as an in-between animator, and he famously drew attention by suggesting a vital change to the movie's ending, one that was embraced by the director and production team. The scene in question was later riffed in My Neighbor Totoro in one of those cool "blink and you'll miss it" moments.

The US version of Gulliver is very nice and benefits nicely from the source material. The voices are not too irritating and the songs are bearable. By anime dub standards, you could do a lot worse. These poster designs are also very nice, especially the second one which is washed in rich color tones and dynamic character poses.

It's very unfortunate that the Toei Doga classics are all but impossible to find today. A decade ago, a few dedicated fans created English fansubs for nearly all of their anime feature films, but the websites are gone and its creators vanished. Today, you might be able to track down the Japanese DVDs that were released around the turn of the century, but you'll have to live without subtitles. Hopefully, that situation will change one day.

P.S. Here's a great surprise: Gulliver's Space Travels is available on YouTube, in the original Japanese audio and English subtitles. Check this out before it gets pulled down.

Photos: Anne of Green Gables

Some screenshots from the latter episodes of Isao Takahata's 1979 Anne of Green Gables. A fascinating bit of trivia: the house in this series is modeled after the "official" Green Gables house in Canada. Takahata and his team visited the location for their research (Paku-san was a pioneer in location research in anime). A 2004 NHK TV documentary showed the director returning to pay his respects as well as meet with the legendary animator Frederic Back.

Again, watch this series by any means necessary. It's fantastic and if you've ever enjoyed the Studio Ghibli movies, you'll be head over heels for this one.

Heidi, Girl of the Alps English Fansub Translation

Heidi, Girl of the Alps is the landmark 1974 anime television series created by Isao Takahata, Hayao Miyazaki and Yoichi Kotabe. It was a tremendous success in Japan and helped to spawn an entire genre of literary-based cartoon dramas, sparking the World Masterpiece Theater to prominence for years and inspiring generations. Outside of Japan, Heidi also became a beloved childhood favorite, as the series was exported to nearly every corner of the globe.

That is, of course, every place on the globe except the United States. For reasons that remain unknown, Heidi was never brought to our shores, meaning that we missed out on what all the other kids were enjoying these past 45 years.

Thankfully, after many years of dedication and hard work, an English fan translation, or "fansub", was completed by Silver Zero Subs. Using the Japanese Blu-Ray box set as a video source, Heidi has never looked or sounded better, offering crisp picture displays that burst with color and detail. And finally being able to enjoy this series in English is a genuine thrill.

You can find a copy of the Heidi English fansub at the Silver Zero Subs download page. This series has also been posted onto YouTube, but we should probably expect the copyright robots to take those videos down, sooner or later.

As always, I would be thrilled to see Heidi given a commercial release here in the States. GKIDS would be my best choice, and their biggest challenge would be to find a television or streaming network to broadcast all 52 episodes. As we are now entering the next stage of the "streaming wars," perhaps this is the opportunity to strike. Oh, well, it likely won't ever happen, but it's good to dream.

In any case, download Heidi while you can and enjoy this all-time classic.

Heidi, Girl of the Alps - Silver Zero Subs English Fansub

Anne of Green Gables: 2018 Fansub Translation

In December 2018, Silver Zero Subs finally completed their long English fansub translation of Anne of Green Gables, Isao Takahata's 1979 television production with World Masterpiece Theater.

Anne had been translated into English many years ago, but this new fansub takes advantage of the show's Blu-Ray box set that was released in Japan. The picture quality is a dramatic improvement over the ancient DVD (or possibly even VHS) source.

Obviously, we would love to see Anne and all the other WMT series commercially released on home video in the West, but given the enormous costs of licensing and producing an English-language soundtrack, such a move is highly unlikely if not impossible. These fan translations are always a labor of love, often taking years of dedication and hard work to see completion. They're certainly not doing this for the money, but love of anime and the need to preserve those works that disappear unfairly.

Personally, I think this is a magnificent series and the best adaptation of Anne ever seen. Takahata captures the spirit of Maud Montgomery's classic novel while skillfully filling out the characters and their world. The addition of new animation director Yoshifumi Kondo (replacing Yoichi Kotabe, who worked on Heidi and Marco) also adds a degree of natural realism to the story, thanks to his brilliant character designs. You can see why Kondo was so beloved at Studio Ghibli years later. Hayao Miyazaki also served as the sole layout designer, as he did with the two previous series, but he famously dropped out after episode 13 to direct his first feature film, The Castle of Cagliostro. Because of this, Anne feels much more like Paku-san's baby, especially when compared to the team effort on Heidi.

A fantastic series, overall, one that deserved to be seen and enjoyed by everyone. Expect the usual amount of humor, psychological realism and tear-jerking melodrama. This is Paku-san, after all.

You can find Anne of Green Gables at the Silver Zero Subs download page.

Photos: Omohide Poro Poro

Isao Takahata's 1991 Studio Ghibl masterwork Omohide Poro Poro remains my all-time favorite animated feature film. This is a movie that I have championed for many years and remains, for me, the gold standard for the untapped potential for dramatic, naturalist animation, one inspired by Ozu and Fellini and Bergman and Renoir.

Miraculously, this movie is now available on Blu-Ray format in the States, thanks to the efforts of GKIDS, the American film distributor that has become a champion for global animation.

These screenshots were taken from the Japanese DVD, which I purchased way back in 2005, along with a stack of other Ghibli films. This was at a time when hardly anybody knew these gems existed, and it felt like a true treasure, a true secret left untold. I feel much happier today that this secret can now be shared with everyone.

For me, the genius of Omohide Poro Poro is its ability to weave multiple narratives between past and present, detailing key events in the childhood of a quiet office worker who yearns for direction and purpose. It is a commentary on (then) contemporary Japan, whose "bubble economy" created in pursuit of Western materialism had burst, offering the opportunity to reconnect with a Japan of the past. It is a film about those post-war generations, raised on television and movies, versed in the language of American Pop, learning to rediscover the cultural language of their homeland.

1984 Nemo Pilot: The Complete Riffs

The 1984 Nemo pilot film is a landmark of Japanese anime, a three-and-one-half minute short that dazzles with a mastery of character animation, action and set design. It was created at Tokyo Movie Shinsha's Telecom studio, created by Yoshifumi Kondo (director), Kazuhide Tomonaga (animation director, ekonte, key animation), Nobuo Tomizawa (key animation), Kyoto Tanaka (key animation) and Nizo Yamamoto (art direction). These very same people worked with Hayao Miyazaki on Lupin the 3rd, Future Boy Conan and Sherlock Hound, as well as the later Studio Ghibli movies.

Several "riffs," or quoted shots, appear in this Nemo pilot. Some aim back to previous films, while others are seen in later works. Here is a brief rundown of those riffs, as shown by the screenshots above:

1. Nemo hops onto his bed as it rises above the floor, passing a collection of toy airplanes on the right side of the frame. Miyazaki would later quote this shot in Porco Rosso, in the scene where Marco describes the sight of endless ghost planes floating in the clouds.

2. Nemo and an unnamed boy give chase through an Edwardian-era city street, startling a policeman below. This shot was directly taken from Sherlock Hound, which was created by the same animators in 1981.

3. After skidding underneath a bridge, Nemo's bed skips over the river several times. This sequence is taken from Animal Treasure Island, Toei Doga's 1971 feature film. It would also be used again in Porco Rosso in 1992.

4. Nemo gives chase through a series of winding curves through buildings. This shot and composition would later be riffed by My Neighbor Totoro, in the scene where Catbus races Mei and Satsuki to their mother, running through the woods.

Finally, we should also note that the completed Little Nemo animated feature recreates almost the entirety of the 1984 Nemo pilot in its opening sequence, and makes for an interesting contrast between the Japanese and American animators.