FLYING PHANTOM SHIP and I received started at roughly the the same time, the summer season of 1969. I was busy being born, and the relaxation of the world used to be grooving within the mud to Sha Na Na at Woodstock, the shapely people at Toei unleashed this film as share of their summer season Manga Matsuri. FLYING PHANTOM SHIP would be idea a couple of shorter and now not more plucky followup to HORUS PRINCE OF THE SUN, nonetheless, rather than the delicate key animation by the Hayao Miyzazki / Isao Takahata combo, it be that film’s proper opposite. While HORUS is an plucky, prehistoric fairy yarn myth fat of symbolism and deep mythological import, FLYING PHANTOM SHIP is a paranoid Assign aside Age actioner constructed to whisper kid-sized kicks and thrills. And as such, it be an unqualified success.
We’re talking, useless to whisper, of a movie that points a massive flying derelict sailing ship, captained by a ghostly apparition in a cranium cowl, a ship in point of fact a mountainous-scientific aerial battlewagon geared up with lasers and missiles. Its mission? To defeat a world mankind-defying conspiracy armed with massive robots, enormous talking crabs, and a favored, addictive delicate drink that finally dissolves you into mush. Bolt-hour Tokyo is interrupted by Self-Protection Pressure tanks manoeuvring to attack a mountainous rocket-firing robot Golem curved on smashing the metropolis to bits.Our hero Hayato is tragically orphaned within the midst of a worldwide crisis, and he reels in disbelief as he uncovers the dreadful truth within the encourage of his zillionaire zaibatsu benefactor. Hayato’s strive to warn the world by job of live TV is halted by the invasion of enormous crustaceans. He finally learns the most critical within the encourage of his correct parentage and finds himself captaining a mountainous scientific undersea battleship on a kamikaze mission to the bottom of the ocean. Most other movies would get away with one or even two of these ideas. No longer FLYING PHANTOM SHIP, which cheerfully shoehorns ample insanity for eight or nine movies into its mere sixty minutes.
Is it thematically deep? No. Did it accumulate awards from oldsters groups or arts councils? No sir. While you happen to mention it in film class, will the change students be impressed? I’d no longer strive it. However– does it fulfill 1000% percent of your on a regular foundation instant allowance of EFFING AWESOME – your total reason you see these darn Japa-heeno cartoons anyway? Scurry. Scurry it does.
In accordance to a 1960 SHONEN MAGAZINE myth by legendary manga-ka Shotaro Ishinomori, FLYING PHANTOM SHIP, or “Soratobu Yurei Sen” as the Eastern comprehend it, can also have viewed an extraordinary formulation to film. Nonetheless, Toei had had earlier success with Ishinomori’s CYBORG 009 film and TV sequence, fat of the the same form of mountainous-science trail. Toei would later originate one more Ishinomori-essentially essentially essentially based Matsuri-fest film – 30,000 MILES UNDER THE SEA, one more aquatic-themed SF movie – and while a special and moving film, it be no FLYING PHANTOM SHIP.
FLYING PHANTOM SHIP is pure distilled cool sharp film pleasure delivered with the slick 60s form of your popular interval scrutinize movies or sci-fi TV shows, and that if this doesn’t push your buttons, it be critical to chase to the doctor and get your buttons checked out. The film is an hour-prolonged reminder of the unfamiliar cool sharp film stress-free that made me drop in treasure with Eastern anime to initiating up with, and I came about to first fetch it in 1990, when my hobby within the media used to be at an all-time low. Other than the occasional Miyazaki film and the procedural pandemonium of Patlabor, the early 90s were a moribund time of broken-down, derivative OVAs and limp sequels sucking the life out of once-well-known franchises. In this muddled ambiance the boldness of FLYING PHANTOM SHIP used to be a breath of fresh but thirty-one year-prone air.
Too nutty and violent to be “tutorial”, FLYING PHANTOM SHIP wasn’t in accordance with a fairy yarn or a storybook look after many of Toei’s ’60s releases. It didn’t accumulate any Fogeys Awards or Certificates Of Advantage from Self-Main World Organizations Of Kid’s Cinema. What it DID carry out used to be entertain the livin’ shit out of audiences, a splash of youngster sci-fi actioners look after MAZINGER Z and CAPTAIN HARLOCK that will perchance perhaps later cement Toei’s reputation as an energetic (if no longer overly taking into consideration technical brilliance) animation powerhouse.
And but in spite of my cheerleading the film’s nonsensical sugar-covered kookery, FLYING PHANTOM SHIP can no longer encourage nonetheless make you deem. The script’s bolted-together combination of H.P. Lovecraft, Jules Verne, and Ian Fleming can also ONLY work situation in a postwar Japan in which the industrial giants fuelling the nation’s economic miracle are the the same economic giants who profited from the wholesale rape of China, Korea, and the Philippines for the interval of the Pacific Battle. The belief that issues are no longer what they seem, that within the encourage of the skyscrapers and marketing and rock and roll of enhance-time Japan lurk horrifying monsters, this belief underlies the total movie. The film’s insistence that people that claim to be fighting the threat are in point of fact CAUSING the threat (for his or her personal immoral ends) is a trademark of paranoid screeds stapled to mobile phone poles and posted on the Internets all the scheme thru the world. And Hayato’s futile strive to warn us- by job of cheerfully hosted TV chat demonstrate – puts a media-saturated bolt on every kid’s nightmare of No longer Being Listened To.
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| Drink ample Boa Juice and accumulate a time out to the bottom of the ocean! Or get dissolved, perchance |
The massive-belief Ishinomori personality designs are normally at odds with the more naturalistic animation, critically the tanks-in-Tokyo scene that Miyazaki would later use for a Lupin III tv episode. There’s a exact effort made at realism in portrayals of the metropolis, the navy equipment, and your nautical spars and yardarms, accurate the total manner down to the undersea flowers and fauna that the Flying Phantom Ship strikes thru. But director Hiroshi Ikeda’s main-coloured, fat-animation style makes it a extremely 60s-taking a look, almost visually dated movie, a sexy change for a 1969 sharp originate in a then-psychedelic world of Fresh Cinema. Nonetheless, the apocalyptic, paranoid tone suits accurate in with the grownup movies of the interval. The nervous undercurrents, jammed up in opposition to long-established kid’s lumber movie cliches look after Comedy Relief Dog, Tacked On Girlfriend, and Guess Who Your Right Dad Is, make it onerous to whisper whether or no longer it is far a extremely unlit youngsters movie, or the main strive at an anime film geared toward older audiences, the form that will perchance perhaps dominate the world within the 70s and 80s. In all likelihood it be both.
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| My fanzine article about FLYING PHANTOM SHIP from 1991. I’m prone. |
Omitted for years by anime fandom, FLYING PHANTOM SHIP is very critical now, more than ever, to remind the world why we received into these items within the main space; that sense of unfamiliar did-I-shapely-fetch-that nonsense that engages the massive kid in us all. At the end of the day don’t all of us want to be Captain Hayato, master of his personal vessel, sailing into a brilliant future? Crawl forward Captain Hayato!!
-Dave Merrill
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