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.

Poster - Gulliver's Space Travels

Here are a pair of movie posters for Toei Doga's 1965 animated feature, Gulliver's Space Travels.  This movie is probably best remembered as the one where young Hayao Miyazaki, working on his second picture as an in-betweener, successfully lobbied the director to change the ending, where the princess robot is revealed to contain a human princess underneath the shell.  It's a fiendishly clever move, one that alters the tone of the entire story.  The climactic scene has also been riffed, many years later, in My Neighbor Totoro.

I always love the style of Toei Animation's movie posters, and the official Gulliver poster fits nicely into that groove.  But it's the second poster that really makes my eyes jump out.  Now this is an anime movie poster!  I'm stunned - we've never seen a futuristic design quite like this one.  If I were in charge of bringing the Toei classics to DVD and Blu-Ray, not only would I use this poster for the cover design, I'd use this same abstract style for all the films.  How very Criterion-ish.

I honestly can't comprehend why Toei isn't selling prints of their classic movie posters.  Tell me the second Gulliver poster wouldn't find its way onto the walls of every animator's studio in the West.  You know you want it.  And you'd be willing to pay a pretty penny to own one.

Poster - Gulliver's Travels Beyond the Moon (Gulliver's Space Travels)

Here is an American movie poster for Gulliver's Travels Beyond the Moon, the 1965 Toei Doga animation feature. I finally got around to watching this tonight (Saturday), and I had a really great time. Of course, I would prefer to see the original Toei movie, in pristine condition, and the original soundtrack, instead of an old VHS rip of the US dubbed version. But that option simply isn't available right now.

It's safe to say this movie is more famous for Hayao Miyazaki's changed ending, where the robot princess is revealed to be human inside her shell, and that's really unfair, because this is an excellent movie in its own right, and another feather in the cap of Toei. I've really grown to love their classic movies, from 1958's Hakujaden to 1971's Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves. They were the forebearers to Studio Ghibli, yes. But they were also a great animation studio in their own right, and the modern anime era ushered in by 1968's Horus, Prince of the Sun (how is that for cruel irony?) rendered this classic, Disney-esque era obsolete.

That's really unfortunate. Toei Doga made some great movies, some great classics. I'd certainly put Hakujaden and Little Prince & the Magic Serpent up against anything from the West. And, of course, there's Miyazaki, Takahata, and the rest of the crew who gave us Puss in Boots and Animal Treasure Island and Ali Baba....and Horus, the greatest and most revolutionary of them all.

Anime fansubbers and Ghibli Freaks must make it their goal to catalog and share the classic Toei films with the world. It's really quite impossible to fully appreciate anime's rich history without them.

Trailer - Gulliver's Space Travels

I'm sitting around, trying to find something interesting to write for the blog, when I remembered that I mentioned Toei Animation's 1963 movie, Gulliver's Travels Beyond the Moon. It's place in Miyazaki lore is well known, even though it remains somewhat unknown. While a dubbed version appeared in the US in the 1960s (like most of the classic Toei films), a proper DVD release has never made its way beyond Japan. Strange.

In any event, here is the trailer for your enjoyment (embedding was disabled...jerks). I'm still hoping I could find a copy of the full movie on YouTube. Does anybody have a link?

Gulliver's Space Travels Trailer

Gulliver's Space Travels - Miyazaki Emerges

This is a spectacular find! This is the climactic scene to Toei Doga's 1965 feature animation, Gulliver's Space Travels. But it's also more than that. It's history.

Every dedicated Ghibli Freak knows the story behind Gulliver's Space Travels. It's the story of a young 23-year-old college graduate, who first emerges as a serious creative talent. He was first hired by the studio in 1963, and was employed as a lowly in-between animator for the film Wan Wan Chushingura, a reenactment of the Japanese tale of "The 40 Ronin," with dogs.

Gulliver's Travels would be his second film, again serving as an in-betweener. For animators, this is the entry-level job, the bottom rung on the ladder. But Toei was a special place, full of democratic ferver, its union strong and powerful. The young animator would join the union and eventually become its president. He was something of a hotheaded youth, who aspired to draw comics until the lure of animation took hold. He was full of ideas and he wasn't afraid to share them.

The story of Gulliver's Space Travels involve an aging Gulliver leading a team of young explorers to a distant world, where its robot population was enslaved. They would unite against the oppressed robots and defeat the invaders.

But the young animator was not impressed with the ending. So he got it in his head to change it, and he walked straight up to the movie's director and explained his idea. In this new version, the inhabitants of this world were not robots, but revealed to be people trapped inside the metal shells. At the end, the robot princess would break from her shell and the human princess would be rescued.

The director is greatly impressed. He agrees. The ending is changed, and the movie finishes with a surprise ending that completely changes the nature of the entire movie. Instead of defeating a robot army, the heroes were rescuing a people and saving their humanity.

That is the story of the young Hayao Miyazaki, and that is the scene we are watching here. This story has become the stuff of legend, and it's thrilling to finally be able to see it. It really is a great ending; I only wish there were more than a handful of clips on YouTube.

One last thing I noticed when I was watching. Pay close attention to the dog at 1:05. He pokes his finger against the robot shell. 20 years later, this exact shot would be riffed in My Neighbor Totoro - the shot of Mei poking Totoro's tail.