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.
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