1973–1974

Time has stubbornly made its way toward 1975.

People have seen more of what animation can do,

and have gradually found in it a genuine source of “inner strength.”

The mainstream of the age is SF.

The direction in which the age advances is SF too.

Last time we ended with Mazinger Z.

But it signaled the beginning of a whole new age.

A smash-hit TV series and toys selling like crazy: countless businesses saw their chance.

From this moment on, toys and mecha battles became inseparable.

In the years that followed, all sorts of peculiar “super robots” kept emerging.

Their openings overflowed with combining and transforming sequences.

Don’t think this was just laziness—reusing animation. These were actual instructions for transforming the toys.

And works on other subjects? They received the previous age’s inheritance and nourishment from other cultural media,

continuing to reinvent themselves and shed their exclusively child-oriented skin.

More and more animation for “all ages” and “adults” began to come into view.

But to people at the time, the prospects did not look particularly bright, while the road was certainly going to have twists and turns.

In 1973, the oil crisis broke out, its effects sweeping almost the whole world.

Yet in Japan, with exchange rates stable, the stock market kept rising.

The economic bubble kept inflating, but actual workers saw little improvement in their lot.

The small downturn inevitably cast its reflection on the animation industry.

Lack of production funds, shorter schedules, and constant technological innovation left many companies struggling to cope.

And so this year gave birth to a shocking, immortal, god-tier piece of shit: Chargeman Ken!¹

But Ken was only a small reflection of it all. What truly exposed the Japanese soul in despair

was the film released that same year, Japan Sinks.

When physical towers collapse, in films and in reality, we can rebuild them in a very short time.

But when the towers in our hearts collapse, when the earth beneath our feet sinks, getting back up is another matter.

1973

1 January: Babel II airs, 39 episodes.

A superpower-battle animation based on Mitsuteru Yokoyama’s work, with a premise rare at the time: fighting in a school uniform—

Except it isn’t. That premise lasts only a few episodes before expiring; the whole second half has the hero fighting in some mysterious bodysuit. Its story is the now thoroughly overused “old mentor falls into your lap” setup. But this old man is ridiculously powerful: an alien from the ancient civilization that tried to build the Tower of Babel. Shoddy construction back in antiquity made the tower a botched job, so the old man starts seeking a suitable heir in order to return to his home planet. Right at the start, then, he gives the protagonist three servants, names him his most powerful successor, and grants him invincible powers.

Yes, invincible. His nemesis is an heir the old man previously considered, a man with countless talented followers who treats his subordinates with warmth and consideration. Every time he takes the field in person with his strongest lineup to face the hero head-on, the hero crushes him, looting everything, then wiping out his followers, bases, and weapons in an orgy of killing and burning.

Rename it today and perhaps it could sell better than that “battle energy turns into a horse” business?²

2 January: Demetan, the Boy Frog airs, 39 episodes.

Like last time’s Hutch, another tragic Tatsunoko fairy tale. This time, though, it intensifies racial enmity and the tragedy of fate, making its lovers, from two different species, suffer agonies for their love amid their communities’ mutual hatred. It looks very much for children, but is packed with betrayal, disaster, abduction, manhunts, and war. Truly a supercharged Romeo and Juliet…

7 January: Fables of the Green Forest airs, 52 episodes.

An animation adapted from American children’s picture books. Not much to say about it in itself, but the following year its company makes the enduring classic Heidi, Girl of the Alps.

2 March: Jungle Kurobe airs, 61 episodes.

Original work by Fujiko F. Fujio, original concept by Hayao Miyazaki: a dream lineup. And you can see Doraemon everywhere, from the hero to the supporting cast. This black boy from Africa also brings society a whole crop of “black” magic words, popular for a while. Then, during the American black liberation movement of the eighties, it gets caught in the crossfire over “discrimination against black people” and banned by Daddy America with a single order from across the Pacific. Yet this work is full of beautiful dreams of Africa and idealized portrayals of cultural differences.³

Proof, then, that when leaders decide to be fucking idiots, no matter the country, they don’t care what your work originally said.

1 April: Doraemon, Nippon TV version, 26 episodes.

The Nippon TV Doraemon, not the Doraemon of our childhood memories. Known as the blue fatty’s disgrace, not just because its ratings kept hitting new lows until it was finally canceled, but because of all the godlike, baffling moves made in adaptation: changing the blue fatty’s voice actor halfway through; rewriting the setup to make a bit player a regular, Shizuka’s own Dora-duck-mon; killing off Gian’s mother outright and giving him a different father… The list goes on. Consequently, beyond its six-month run before cancellation in 1973, this Nippon TV version has never had another chance at a rerun or commercial release. An unambiguous skeleton in the closet of this household institution.

2 April: Wansa-kun airs, 26 episodes.

Wansa begins as a mascot Osamu Tezuka designs for Sanwa Bank. Only later does Tezuka draw him as a character in a manga series, which Mushi Production turns into an animation.

But the manga never gets a proper ending, because the magazine carrying it folds. The animation’s approach is refreshing at the time: the musical, rare in Japanese animation, with a new song appearing in almost every episode.

It leaves little mark on history. Its one claim to fame is that after it ends, most of the creative team moves over, unchanged, to make an enduring classic: Space Battleship Yamato.

4 April: The Rough and Ready Cowboy (Kōya no Shōnen Isamu) airs, 52 episodes.

Japan’s first TV animation modeled on the American Western, following a boy of Japanese blood wandering and adventuring during the opening of the West and the gold rush. It touches on the racial differences of the age: his father is Japanese, his mother Native American. In an age rife with racial discrimination, the threats he faces are by no means limited to the wilderness and bandit attacks.

The animation also explores such questions as “whether a weapon makes you a god or a demon depends on its user” and “even an unjust law is still law.” Though it shows people being shot dead, it is not simply about gratifying revenge and settling scores. It is still examining human goodness and the greatness of love.

7 April: Microid S airs, 26 episodes.

An oddity beside human-sized and giant heroes: miniaturized heroes. The three leads are “superheroes” created by reconstructing insects. Originally it is to be called Microid Z, but Seiko’s investment changes the Z to Seiko’s S.

The work concentrates on revealing humanity’s darkness and ugliness indirectly, through the eyes of “insects.” It even has scenes like Devilman, with the Self-Defense Forces massacring civilians who disobey orders. In the end, it is not insects becoming intelligent that brings humanity to destruction. Humanity still destroys itself.

1 October: Miracle Girl Limit-chan airs, 25 episodes.

Toei’s fifth little-witch work: a “magical girl” premise that today would absolutely be taken for lingering Urobuchi poison. Limit is rebuilt as a cyborg by her father after a plane crash. All her supposed “magic” comes from the miniature nuclear-fusion reactor inside her. You really have to say it has a Mitsuteru Yokoyama flavor… And so, unsurprisingly, episode two blows up both the ratings and the station’s phone lines. Scathing responses make it the shortest-lived of Toei’s little-witch works.

So stop saying Urobuchi started the rot. Magical girls who are neither magical nor girls were being done long ago. Hide… ptui, Urobuchi was only paying “homage.”⁴

1 October: Zero Tester airs, 66 episodes.

Both premise and combat have something of Gatchaman about them; the paint schemes of the three “invincible fighter craft” make you think you’ve wandered onto the set of Getter Robo. Add Sunrise’s original intention to create a Japanese Thunderbirds, and it reeks of “homage” from the outset. They had intended to copy Thunderbirds’ serious, scientific, sophisticated approach too, but the endlessly repeated formula battles send it straight down the little-kids route.

Yet this “mecha show,” which ought to be selling its machines, has main robots so weak and ugly that people even ask, “Could we get rid of the robots?”

…This looks familiar. Isn’t a certain “mecha show” called the national team like this too?⁵

2 October: Casshan, 35 episodes.

The last of the merry trio finally appears, though the premise is anything but merry: to protect humanity from the threat of robots turned to evil, the hero abandons his body for a mechanical one. That tragic atmosphere is ill suited to its intended child audience and makes broad social acclaim difficult. On top of that, the sponsor goes bankrupt halfway through the run, and the work ends hastily at thirty-five episodes. Yet its distinctive introductory narration—“If not Casshan, who?”—still echoes in countless ears.

Its opening is the anisong debut of King Isao Sasaki.

3 October: Karate Master airs, 47 episodes.

Like last time’s Kick no Oni, a biographical work, depicting the first half of karate practitioner Masutatsu Ōyama’s life in the sport. It presents his major exploits one by one: training in the mountains, fighting fifty-two bulls, chopping off bulls’ horns with knife-hand strikes, challenging masters of different martial arts, founding the Kyokushin organization, and clashing fiercely with mainstream karate. The real Ōyama is a “naturalized” ethnic Korean born on the Korean peninsula under colonial rule. His identity might seem sensitive, but it is precisely the despair the war brings him that leads him to the karate to which he will devote his life.

As the founder of Kyokushin karate, he deserves enormous credit for popularizing karate in Japan. The Kyokushin organization he founds continues to contribute greatly to martial arts worldwide. The Kyokugen karate practiced by Ryu in Street Fighter actually comes from Kyokushin.⁶

4 October: Dororon Enma-kun airs, 25 episodes.

A work in which the old perv Go Nagai starts revealing his fetishes, and a comparatively early horror animation. Though its surface disguise as “children’s entertainment” makes some developments rather contrived, most of its horror stories, drawn from real human nature, still strike straight into the hearts of its many small viewers.

In an age dominated by “great heroes punishing evil and rewarding good,” setting up a “good yōkai” protagonist who “defeats bad yōkai” also amounts to a kind of homage to Kitarō. Of course, the fan service from its heroine, Princess Yukiko, is something yōkai animation had not had before. Well, he is the old perv, after all.

5 October: Aim for the Ace! (Ace o Nerae!) airs, 26 episodes.

Japanese TV animation’s first tennis work, another dose of the seventies’ spokon poison. Its character art draws heavily on the style of kamishibai—picture-card theater (think peepshows)—and depicts certain features of tennis relatively “objectively.” The spokon staples of the “demon coach” and “harsh conditions” are present here in full force.

You can tell just from the title that Gunbuster, or Aim for the Top!, pays a certain homage to this work. You can even map the character relationships one for one onto the Gunbuster cast. Even the coach gets killed off the same way, which shows how deep the influence runs. At least the coach dies of illness.

The tennis here doesn’t kill people…

6 October: The Adventures of the Korobokkuru airs, 26 episodes.

Korobokkuru are the little people of Hokkaido’s Ainu mythology. This work tells assorted stories about three little gods and a human who can see them. Its source is a bestselling illustrated children’s book of the time, A Little Country No One Knows.

The main plot is rather flat, the episodic adventure format common then. Overall, neither good nor bad, nothing special.

7 October: Samurai Giants airs, 48 episodes.

Its creator is, once again, Ikki Kajiwara, king of seventies spokon animation: the giant who created Tiger Mask, Ashita no Joe, Star of the Giants, and Kick no Oni, and the former husband of Taiwanese star Pai Ping-ping. By this point, though, Samurai Giants is striding toward superpower combat. Its protagonist still keeps overcoming difficulties and moving forward, but wins every battle with a suddenly invented magic pitch.

The work’s greatest attraction is arguably its creator’s endless, unimaginably outlandish magic pitches, and a hero whose personality is utterly different from Hyūma’s in Star of the Giants. To a certain extent it even foretells some later dream matchups. Yet these very magic pitches completely wreck the power system. They bring popularity while destroying its “hard-core sports” credentials.

Even so, years later people still relish the scene in the final episode where, to win, the protagonist throws his last magic pitch at the cost of his life.

13 October: Cutie Honey airs, 25 episodes.

The work in which old perv Go Nagai exposes his fetishes completely, and the true instigator of fan-service anime’s arrival on the scene. Earlier works had shown naked transformations, but making them a major selling point and displaying them openly? Cutie Honey must be number one in all of TV animation.

Not much to say about the plot. Think of it as Sailor Moon by the old perv. Put simply, a professor puts a ridiculously overpowered device in a female android, names her Honey Kisaragi, and raises her as his daughter. Then he is murdered. Honey avenges her father and fights evil, using that broken-as-hell device to produce outfits that now look entirely like cosplay, endlessly fighting, fighting, fighting a gang of thieves.

Set aside the flesh on display and it is a thoroughly classic story, the founding ancestor of “turn evil, get three times stronger.” Also, while each Cutie Honey has more or less the same underlying premise—and, apart from this year’s new Universe, even the opening song is a family heirloom—the plots differ considerably. They are not “remakes” in the usual sense. Give them a look if you’re interested. Especially the 2003 Re: Cutie Honey from the otaku studio, Gainax, directed by that rogue Hideaki Anno.⁷ Takes a young perv to understand an old one.

Do not watch the live-action version.

Do not watch the live-action version.

Do not watch the live-action version.

1974

6 January: Heidi, Girl of the Alps airs, 52 episodes.

One of the enduring masterpieces of the great director Isao Takahata, who died this April. Adapted from the German-language novel Heidi, it gathers such leading talents as Takahata, Yoshiyuki Tomino, Yōichi Kotabe, and Hayao Miyazaki. The production team even goes to Europe for on-site research—a first in Japanese TV animation history. Its evocation of local European life is so convincing that many European viewers do not believe it is made in Japan.

During production, Takahata uses a considerable number of new camera techniques to present dazzling landscapes and human life. He also boldly removes large stretches of religious material, presenting the very best of the original to the audience in full. The enormous labor behind this is accomplished perfectly through those masters’ passion, bringing viewers the book’s innocent, exuberant Heidi, who heals everyone around her.

The opening song is also the first to spend heavily on overseas recording. It uses numerous local Swedish folk instruments and choirs in its mix and accompaniment, completely breaking out of anisong’s folk-song and nursery-rhyme style.⁸ I imagine plenty of viewers practically pissed themselves when those opening harmonies of alphorn, harp, and choir hit.

Thank you, Columbia!

1 April: Chargeman Ken!, 65 episodes.

Dug out of history’s garbage heap by scrolling-comment video sites, a classic in quite another sense. Even other shows that fall apart have something redeeming somewhere. You laugh at My Sister, My Writer, but at least it has beautifully drawn cabbages. This thing has a broken plot, deranged animation, warped values, and bizarre music. From start to finish, not one tiny redeeming feature. Probably only its comic effect makes an impression.

Yet when production began, it was aiming for Hiroshi Manabe’s elegantly pared-down vision of the future. In the end, budget trouble made its in-betweens and explosions pared down beyond measure. Its use of recycled animation could leave Gundam SEED Destiny gaping and make The King’s Avatar bow down before it. By late in production, even the staff gave up, dropped their work, and went off to the beach. The team originally included such sterling names of the day as Hisashi Sakaguchi and Eiji Tanaka. But even a hero can be brought low for want of a penny: without money, even the finest creative leads cannot make good work.

Of all the ancient TV animations so far, this is probably the one I most recommend you watch—especially with Niconico or Bilibili’s danmaku comments scrolling across the image. The synchronization rate can top 400 percent. Try the legendary three essential episodes: sixteen, “Killer Record: A Terrifying Melody”; twenty-three, “Terror! The Mental Hospital”; and the legend of legends, thirty-five, “A Bomb Inside the Head.” Amazing that the director could say, while making this thing, “Only animation made for children can endure.”

All I can say is that this work was born in the wrong age. Yet it also exemplifies the appalling conditions of animation production then: a victim of both its times and capital.

Then again, perhaps we could do with fewer “children’s shows” that specialize in scaring kids into tears, witlessness, and wet pants; fewer “superheroes” who leave psychological scars and contaminate your mind.

1 April: Polon, Child of the Stars, 260 episodes.

Another victim whose corpse Niconico drags out for a flogging, because it aired at the same time as Chargeman Ken! The episode count has probably told you already: another bite-size educational series for children. This one goes further still, replacing its opening and ending with the hero saying hello and goodbye. The plot, in brief:

1. Anthropomorphic animals do something bad, with bad consequences.
2. The hero appears and solves the problem.
3. The audience gets a lecture.

“Incomprehensible” sums up its narrative logic perfectly, full of what-the-hell twists, as if you’d suddenly heard “Dai Jia Hu.”

As for production, it saves on animation wherever it can. Still images and monotonous movement are everywhere, earning it the reputation of “television kamishibai” at the time. Without Ken’s “shining example” before it, this probably ought to be the real immortal classic.

1 April: Ode to Judo airs, 27 episodes.

Still Ikki Kajiwara, still spokon. This time he chooses judo, with its broad popular base in Japan, but changes the premise a little: the hero is born in a fishing village and spends his childhood honing himself in struggles with sea beasts, striving and fighting.

At last, the mother gets to be the legendary such-and-such champion. And the teacher training the hero gets together with her, nearly turning mother and son against each other. The hero runs away and throws himself into judo with his whole being. Another sort of radical, epoch-making move, I suppose.

1 April: Little Witch Meg airs, 72 episodes.

Replacing the badly performing, canceled Limit-chan mentioned earlier, this is regarded by Toei as its “last little-witch work.” But its innovative approach suits the audience’s taste and does rather well.

It changes the series’ previous style, giving the witch enemies and greatly enriching the story. No more small-scale magic to solve everyday problems: now two girls with radically different personalities descend to Earth for a magical examination, competing for the throne.

It also becomes a turning point in Toei’s little-witch series. The producers broaden the audience to teenage girls and even young women. Inevitably, it also attracts some “big friends”—adult fans—because Meg’s exuberance really is getting a little “leeeewd”…

2 April: Dame Oyaji (“Useless Dad”) airs, 26 episodes.

A comedy, paying a certain homage to Fujio Akatsuka’s Tensai Bakabon. When sold on cheap video discs in China, it even acquired the fraudulent title Big-Head Son and Small-Head Dad.

But really watch it and you find the bitter tears of the salaried class beneath its comedy. The animation constantly portrays its hero Damesuke—“Useless”—Ameno’s wretched life to “make you laugh.” In reality, it is not funny at all. At work, Dad is berated by his boss for being incompetent, with capable juniors coming up behind him. At home, he has to endure abuse from his wife, nicknamed “the ogress,” while his son and daughter do not understand him either and constantly play tricks on him. Even so, when he reaches his doorstep, he still prays to the gods for peace and happiness within.

He works himself to the bone, struggling to survive in the cracks, simply to keep his family happy and well. Yet they ruthlessly destroy his psychological defenses, over and over, in the name of “comedy.” He is exhausted in body and mind, subjected to violence on both fronts. The work even earns a public reputation for inciting domestic violence.

It finally arrives at a happy ending. Damesuke finds success, and even the wife who once abused and tormented him reforms into a good wife and loving mother. But the mockery behind it, and its penetrating depiction of a family poisoned by work, still make you shudder today.

3 April: Vicky the Viking airs, 77 episodes.

A German–Japanese coproduction based on the Swedish children’s novel of the same name, mainly about a little Viking pirate setting out to sea on adventures. The story itself is decent, but its method of unfolding a vast, turbulent panorama against an ocean backdrop directly and profoundly influences One Piece.

4 April: Getter Robo airs, 51 episodes.

The toy manufacturers’ conspiracy, the founding ancestor of several machines combining into a robot. Go Nagai and Ken Ishikawa draw inspiration from Toei’s “robots plus transformation” works to create this transforming-robot animation. Apparently the machine design was inspired by a pencil sharpener; I don’t know whether that’s true.

After it, the three-machine combination’s pilot lineup of “handsome, cool, fat” practically becomes standard. It also inaugurates the rule that the fat guy in a mecha show is almost certainly going to die. Even Toei starts making heartless jokes about Musashi dying over and over.

Set aside its halo as the founding combining-robot work and the original Getter still has a remarkably good story. Want hot blood? It has it. Depth? It has it. Comedy? That too. Though the overall structure remains the very old formula of defeating monsters and leveling up, the heroes’ “leveling up” lies chiefly in their teamwork and growth as people, not simply ever-increasing combat power. Set aside some exaggeration and forced characterization and we can still see their personalities clearly.

But why does Getter-1 weigh 220 tonnes, Getter-2 200, and Getter-3 suddenly 250…?

5 April: Tamageta-kun Next Door, 60 episodes.

An unusual little work by the old master Shōtarō Ishimori, a strip-scheduled segment within the children’s TV program Good Morning! Children’s Show. But he experiments so heavily here that I don’t know whether children at the time could understand it. Probably all distracted by the protagonist’s extraordinary fire-spouting head.

5 April: Gan and Gon, 260 episodes.

A bite-size series that makes no sense from the title onward, billed as a “phantom animation.” Victim number two of being dragged out for a posthumous flogging thanks to Chargeman Ken! It mainly tells the story of Gan, Gon, and Lala hunting treasure in the Wild West—if this thing can be said to have a story.

Come to think of it, who the hell is Lala? Nowhere in the first three episodes, then suddenly in episode four she’s on their team. Judging by the title, did they not think of her in the first place? Three episodes in, the director slaps his forehead: “Oh, fuck me, forgot someone.”

The animation is so lazy it falls apart with total reliability—so reliable that you can barely find a picture that moves. The character designs are so wonderfully varied you can hardly find the same face in two frames. It is probably only a little better than Ken at reusing animation. The story lurches from one thing to another, with no continuity and what-the-hell twists everywhere. Music and sound effects are paired with complete abandon, anything goes, and most of the time the voices don’t match the mouth movements. Probably only the scarcity of copies and a story less deranged than Ken’s keep it from being widely known.

Think of children back then having to endure 260 episodes of this stuff. I can hardly bear to look.

5 April: The New Adventures of Hutch, the Honeybee airs, 26 episodes.

A sequel to the original 1970 Hutch, taking up the story after his mother’s death in the earlier work. Hutch and his sister set out for the Beautiful Hill in accordance with her last wishes. But the earlier work had made such a deep impression, with such a profound and moving story, that the sequel always feels like an unnecessary addition. This actually not-so-bad work cannot bear the burden of following a classic and gets hastily canceled at twenty-six episodes.

5 April: Chobin, Child of the Stars airs, 26 episodes.

A fantasy animation by Shōtarō Ishimori. In an age when the tokusatsu-hero style rules, the father of Kamen Rider creates this fairy tale about Chobin, an alien prince who comes to Earth’s forests to look for his mother and befriend animals.

Only at the ending do we learn that Chobin’s mother died long ago and has been using her image to encourage him to keep striving. Yet the story also lets us see Chobin grow. After learning the truth, he can become stronger still and enter the final battle with the rebellious villains.

8 September: Great Mazinger airs, 56 episodes.

Tetsuya Tsurugi, the hero who gets his ass kicked. Ke Jianguo, the combat pro.⁹

Oh, Tetsuya. The Super Robot Wars forum is mocking you again.

It is the direct sequel to Mazinger Z, the second Mazinger installment. Compared with the earlier work’s leisurely battle atmosphere, stronger enemies give this one’s combat a much greater sense of urgency. But the overemphasis on Tetsuya Tsurugi’s “hero” qualities disappoints many viewers who came for Kōji. Tetsuya’s somewhat bitter, burdened style of tragic heroism also leaves many viewers uncomfortable. That indirectly leads to his becoming a comic character in later Mazinger works, and to Great Mazinger’s fading presence.

Still, better than the Mycenaean Empire and the Great General of Darkness, already reduced to measuring sticks for other people’s power.

The other seven generals: What about us? Have you considered our feelings?

Nobody wanted things to end in a one-hit kill.

The opening has a particularly strong beat. My official running soundtrack…

30 September: Urikupen Rescue Team airs, 22 episodes.

Animal protagonists form a rescue team in the animal kingdom to save their fellows from natural disasters. Though listed as twenty-two episodes, each is actually split into six five-minute parts, aired over six days, one full episode a week. So, precisely speaking, 132 episodes.

Unfortunately, it has never had a DVD release and little footage remains.

4 October: Hurricane Polimar, 26 episodes.

Compared with the other three of Tatsunoko’s “four great heroes”—Tekkaman, Gatchaman, and Casshan—this poor fellow has it even worse. Not only does he barely register in discussions of animation history, even his spin-off count trails the others badly. Looking just at this work’s story, that isn’t hard to understand. Watching it from start to finish feels like a street-side superhero show. The protagonist transforms by putting on a helmet, but the exposed face lacks the mystery self-dramatizing teenage boys want. The villains’ designs are too simple as well, looking like somebody’s cosplay. The exaggerated, wildly varied fighting makes you feel you’re watching kabuki—though I don’t suppose any kabuki actor turns his actual body into an airplane or anything…

So, despite considerable improvements in satisfying combat and fluid animation, it still cannot match its predecessors’ popularity.

4 October: Jim Button airs, 26 episodes.

Adapted from the long children’s tale of the same name. A demon and pirates attack the island where Jim lives, abducting his mother and turning his sweetheart into a little bird. So he takes the button handed down in his family, starts up his beloved little mouse… no, his locomotive Emma, and sets off to recover his happy life.

While preserving the original’s distinctive features, the adaptation also takes account of the industry at the time. It turns the fairy tale into an adventure fantasy, making it much more watchable through hot-blooded dramatic conflicts and fantastic imagination. It truly escapes the mold of World Masterpiece Theater: the original no longer serves as a cage keeping the adaptation from taking flight.

5 October: Giatrus, the First Man airs, 77 episodes.

A comedy starring prehistoric people, a very simple depiction of their lives. It creates many conventions for later comedies: shouted words turning into flying stones; “manga meat”; herds of horses suddenly appearing and trampling people full of hoofprints; and on and on.

Though a comedy, it still depicts all sorts of prehistoric “social problems,” such as the collapse of a money economy and plunder in wartime. You really have to say that the concern for human beings shown by that age’s creators is on an entirely different scale from anything in today’s mass-produced commercial works.

Oh, and with this work, a resounding name enters animation history:

Joe Hisaishi—still using his birth name, Mamoru Fujisawa, at the time.

6 October: The Song of the Ladybug airs, 104 episodes.

It sounds like an insect story but is actually a warm tale of seven siblings supporting and relying on one another after losing their parents. Named for the seven days of the week, the children each have a different personality. The greatest attraction is watching how they keep growing up in these circumstances.

6 October: Space Battleship Yamato airs, 26 episodes.

A new era of animation begins.

The absolute pinnacle, a work that needs absolutely no further elaboration. The initial spark of the second animation boom, and of animation’s escape from its subordinate role as an adjunct to advertising and manga. A true “Yamato for men,” a truly antiwar work. Countless sequels, new productions, live-action films, and game adaptations. Its influence runs so deep you can even find traces of it in StarCraft. The founding ancestor of modern Japanese TV animation, a spiritual home for countless animators.

Yamato’s influence on the industry is by no means limited to pioneering story-led animation. More importantly, it embodies the “Yamato spirit” rooted deep in the souls of the Japanese people of that era. Though it bears the name of the Yamato, an emblem of militarist madness, it is actually filled with a longing for peace and praise for the beauty of life.

Facing a boundless sea of stars, facing an enemy incomparably stronger; courage before limitless terror, limitless longing for the vast unknown. Obsolete big ships and big guns may be drifting through the galaxy, but they are filled with the unconquerable vigor peculiar to that age.

It is inappropriate to look at Space Battleship Yamato through today’s eyes. To sneer at its now rough, strange-looking images and plot without twists, or nitpick about “no crew members other than Japanese” and “militarism,” is just the screeching of petty nobodies against a great work. (I mean only the original series and the remake, 2199.) The imagination and force of spirit within Yamato continue to influence countless animators and, indeed, Japanese people today. Humanity’s dreams of the unknown territory of space, its longing to drift through the galaxy, will never have an end. These have endured for forty years alongside King Sasaki’s rich, majestic opening song, and still echo in many people’s souls. (Fuck, by now the Yamato theme has practically become a Self-Defense Forces anthem.)

Let me once again urge you to watch the remake, 2199.

Honestly, people who start getting off at the mere sight of the name “Yamato,” endlessly going on about “militarism” and “historical responsibility,” are basically nuts.

Yes, I mean certain people in the comments on a certain cloud-music site.¹⁰

15 October: Calimero airs, 45 episodes.

A Japanese–Italian coproduction that hauls in a very popular Italian advertising mascot to serve as its hero. One incident after another, as in Moomin: the sort of plot you forget as soon as you’ve watched it. Very suitable for young children.

While the shock Space Battleship Yamato brought animators still echoes in their hearts, time has stubbornly made its way toward 1975.

People have seen more of what animation can do, and have gradually found in it a genuine source of “inner strength.”

The mainstream of the age is SF;

the direction in which the age advances is SF too.

Beautiful dreams of science, passionate pursuit of technology: not only a perfect embodiment of how young people then benefited from technology, but a direct experience of an age in which humanity was moving forward.

And amid science fiction’s fantastic colors, “moe elements”—the qualities that inspire attachment to characters—gradually sprout from deeper characterization and the characters’ own appeal. The otaku community slowly begins to take shape.

What kind of age will come next?

Probably another four installments before the bubble begins to break.