"Queen Millennia" (1981), a Japanese animated TV series, told essentially the same story presented in the feature film spin-off (QUEEN MILLENNIA, 1982) of the impending disaster awaiting Earth as a rival planet, La Metalle, approaches it. The title character, who has reigned on Earth for a thousand years, finds to her dismay that the people of La Metalle, her home planet, have sinister designs on Earth, so she resolves to fight back and defend her adopted planet.
Because it had 42 half-hour episodes in which to tell the story, the TV series was able to take its time, build the story, introduce the characters gradually and give the viewers a chance to get to know them, starting with young Hajime, an amateur astronomer, whose uncle, Professor Amamori, runs the observatory on Mt. Tsukuba. When his parents are killed in a suspicious blast at their home, Hajime goes to live at the observatory and is taken under the wing of Amamori's secretary, Yukino Yayoi, a pretty blonde who also works part-time at her parents' noodle shop in an outlying district of Tokyo. Unbeknownst to Hajime (and to the viewers for quite a few episodes), Yukino is actually Queen Millennia and it will be her job to confront the opposing planet when it gets near.
Although the series is set in 1999, it avoids the futuristic trappings of the movie version. Instead, the animators take great pains to present a more realistic, everyday Tokyo, with its noodle shops, elementary school activities, parkland, and sprawling waterfront. The backgrounds are beautifully painted and laden with evocative details. The series gives its characters lots of quiet, reflective moments and suitable spaces in which to indulge them. Hajime frequently flashes back to his home life, his parents and his old room. The animators convey his emotional state with an artistry clearly keyed to balancing the needs of the characters with the demands of the complex science fiction storyline. Overall, the series is filled with the kind of artistic touches that were common in Japanese animated series in the pre-digital era, particularly that golden period of the 1980s.
The series was created by Leiji Matsumoto, the pioneering manga artist/anime creator best known for "Galaxy Express 999" and "Captain Harlock" and their numerous movie/TV spin-offs. (He also designed "Space Battleship Yamato.") Interestingly, the "Queen Millennia" TV series is seemingly the most realistic production he's been involved in, at least in terms of surface details. Please note that the striped cat which appears in many Matsumoto works belongs to Yukino here and is called "Leiji."
