Galaxy Express 999 - The Movie

My review was written in August 1982 after a Greenwich Village screening.

"Galaxy Express 999" is an attractive Japanese animated sci-fi feature dating from 1979. One of the many hits in the genre in its domestic market, film was picked up for U. S. distribution by Roger Corman's New World Pictures in 1980 but shelved after test bookings. Sporting an effective English-language soundtrack, pic deserves a second look, with tv usage a strong possibility.

Though the visual inspiration for "Galaxy Express" is from hit films such as "Star Wars", this episodic picture more closely resembles the format of Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles". Premise is to represent future concepts in familiar nostalgic forms. Thus the title refers to a vast space ship which looks to its passengers like a steam locomotive. Throughout the film, the visual mixture of the old-fashioned an high-tech creates comic juxtapositions.

Story concerns an orphan named Joey, who encounters a beautiful blonde (Matel) who looks like his mother, killed years before per flashback) in a "people hunt" by the evil Count Mecca. The young boy, styled with his dark hair covering one eye (Veronica Lake-style) is bent upon revenge, riding with Matel on the Express to search for Mecca's TIme Castle on some distant planet.

Stopovers en route bring him into contact with villains styled out of Westerns, pirate movies and other varied genres. After visiting the moon Titan circling around Saturn, duo visit the frozen planet Pluto, where humans' bodies are stored under the ice, after they have opted for immortality by taking machine bodies. The conflict between cyborgs (whose humanity is gradually draining away) and remaining human is the central theme, with the visuals making it understandable for younger viewers.

Working in a limited animation format, the chief drawback of which is limited movement (backgrounds are static and key characters move minimally), the film does boast beautifully colored elaborate designs. Once one gets used to the lack of fluid, full animation, the imaginative visuals are impressive. Characters are practically all human or humanoid, with the Japanese animators typically using Caucasian models (all the better to match the American voice dubbing). Oddest touches, besides the use of misspelled English words worked into the animated designs, are an Ed Wynn styled voice for the Express's kindly conductor, and giving John Wayne's voice and gait to a good guy named Capt. Warlock. Violence and semi-nudity account for the basically children's film receiving a PG rating.

Fans of Matsumoto probably know him best from either his original mangas, or the mostly made-for-TV adaptations like "Space Battleship Yamato/Star Blazers" and "Captain Harlock." The man definitely had his own little enterprise there, with his own vision and style; for a while in the '70s he was arguable THE star creator of anime & manga (like Osama Tezuka before him, and Hayao Miyazaki after). I've never seen his stories in their original episodic TV form, just the impressive and emotional but maddeningly fragmented movie version of "Yamato" (edited down from an entire TV series into roughly two-odd hours). There is no such problem with "Galaxy Express 999," a feature film from 1979.

Besides a cohesive storyline--involving scrappy young Tetsuro Hoshino taking a trip on the eponymous spacegoing locomotive along with enigmatic lady-in black Maetel, and kicking some major mechanical butt along the way for his dead mother--the movie has all the trademarks of Matsumoto at his best: wonderfully slinky old-school character designs, fanciful details and settings, a stylized, distinctly "vintage-futuristic" flavor (rather than the grungy postmodern cyberpunk variety made popular by "Blade Runner" and, in anime, "Bubblegum Crisis"); Matsumoto's obsession with vintage terrestrial vehicles streaking through space (the 999 is an old-fashioned steam locomotive-turned-spaceship, the Yamato is a resurrected WWII Japanese battleship-turned spaceship...one wonders if Leiji ever considered a "Galactic Land-Yacht Edsel"); even Leijiverse regulars Captain Harlock, one of the coolest anime characters ever, and Queen Emeralda figure into the story. A scene where the good Captain forces a belligerent android to down a bottle of rust-inducing milk is a classic--I can hear Japanese movie audiences cheering.

Above everything else, "Galaxy Express 999" offers a kind of poetry in the imagery and the story, and an enormous reserve of humanity and unadulterated drama, that touches on very deeply embedded emotional buttons. Like the Yamato movies, I find myself feeling close to tears in several places. This is no empty thrill-ride anime where the mecha are the stars, but a bona-fide sci-fi drama featuring effectively "real people" with real concerns and intense feelings that radiate directly out to you--what the best anime are all about. See this one, definitely. The style (including that endearing '70s-rock end theme) may strike some younger otaku as quaint or even hard to deal with, but those who stay on the Galaxy Express 999 to the end of the line will be glad they did, experiencing a true anime classic, from a master of the genre, that has survived the test of time.

One word can describe this movie and that is weird. I recorded this movie one day because it was a Japanese animation and it was old so I thought it would be interesting. Well it was, the movie is about a young boy who travels the universe to get a metal body so he can seek revenge. On the way he meets very colorful characters and must ultimately decide if he wants the body or not. Very strange, if you are a fan of animation/science-fiction you might want to check this out.

I saw this as a child in the late eighties and I must say, Galaxy Express is one of those films that sticks in your imagination for a long time. If you've never understood the appeal of anime, discovering this film may be your golden ticket to Otaku-town.

The story is as delicate and poetic as Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. The cell animation, while somewhat traditional, possesses a vivid style that explosively portrays Leiji Matsumoto's great talent for character design and visual storytelling.

This is one of those unique children's films like Star Wars, The Dark Crystal and The Wizard of Oz that completely transcends 'family entertainment' status and stands as a classic of cinema on its own terms.

I highly recommend this film.

this movie is a classic of the genre. deals with innocense lost, the idolization of parental figures, the journey myth. everyone in the movie, even the secondary characters, has an agenda and a complexity lacking most american live-action movies, let alone the animated ones.

one of the best things about this movie is its use of iconographic imagery, the trains, the pirate ships. in the future where bodies can be replaced by machines without trouble, why not have trains and pirate ships. their allagoric status is made more powerful by their total out-of-place-edness within an outer space environment.

what's more, their importance to the characters becomes clear. in a world where the loss of body can lead to the callousness displayed by the "evil" characters, and their eventual loss of inner humanity, icons of what it means to be human become that much more important. each character in this movie is ultimately looking for that which makes them who they are. the landmarks of their collective pasts as the human race are important.

the best anime, in my humble opinion, is that which asks those questions because it is in the peculiar position of being able to explore it in fantastic ways. GE999 works well along those lines.

*drops $.02 in jar*