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MYSTERIOUS CITIES OF GOLD Girl
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A Japanese - French co-production that has been on TV in the UK. The RTL7 edition has American dialogue over-dubbed in Polish, so it's very easy to follow! It's a fantasy adventure in which a group of children and adults, all Central Americans to judge by their names, are looking for gold in competition with a weird lot of hidden civilizations. Replete with hidden cities, Tolmecs, gold aircraft and whatnot. Rather American in some ways. I'm not saying it's any good, (though older British anime fans quite liked it) but if you check it out you can say you've seen it...It was fully written up in one of the anime mags..Anime UK I think. |
THE SECRET GARDEN (Polish title=Tajemniczy
ogr#d) Colin | Mary & Dickon
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NHK adaptation of the classic children's story by Frances Hodgson Burnett,
who also wrote "A Little Princess". It's not as good
as the WMT adaptations, but still worth a look. In
fact it's mostly a bit more straight than you might fear after encountering
the bouncy opening credits. The end credits, which (for some unfathomable
reason) show Mary as a puppet, are plenty weird, and some of the character
design is good. In particular, Mary's expression varies charmingly from
wide-eyed innocence through to rage without ever being excessively cute-ified.
I also like the character design for Camilla, the wise-woman.
The anime seems a more upbeat affair than the book, and it's not a
particularly faithful adaptation, having more material than the original
novel, at least one extra major character, Camilla the wise-woman (jap.
Kamira). Dickon's menagerie of tame animals all look sickeningly
"cute". Substantial extra material appears particularly in the latter part
of the series. In a way one would like to be reporting that these insertions
are inferior, but in fact they are a whole lot of fun. In one episode,
the villagers, upset by some infant mortality, and armed with pitchforks
etc., march on Camilla's cottage bent on burning her as a witch. In the
next, "Lord Richmond" and his wife appear at the mansion to hold a hunt
with foxhounds. The nasty-looking hounds chase after Dickon's cute animals,
but the hunt is hilariously subverted by childish mischief. At one point
Lord Richmond and wife burst into Camilla's cottage and [I swear] demand
"Is that your cat, madam?"
The original English text is available online,
or check your local bookshop.
Synopsis of book: Mary Lennox, a neglected and disagreeable
child, is suddenly orphaned by a cholera epidemic in India. Brought to
her uncle's Yorkshire mansion overlooking the moors, she is left much to
herself, and presently discovers a locked walled garden. She makes friends
slowly with the maid, Martha, who brings her meals, and later with Martha's
brother, Dickon. Later she discovers an invalid boy, her cousin Colin,
who is kept in a room of the mansion. The book is a morally improving tale
of how Mary becomes a better person and helps Colin recover his health.
Other Adaptations:
There's a recent live-action movie, available on video. There's also
a feature-length US/UK produced animated adaptation, voiced by British
& American actors. It takes even more liberties with the original than
the Japanese version, with songs and talking animals. The only plus point
is that the child characters are quite realistically drawn, wheras in the
Japanese adaptation they definitely aren't.
LITTLE WOMEN ( Wakakusa no yon shimai =young grass-four sisters) (NOT the WMT anime)
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Title credit | Amy | Town | Family Group (The 1980 adaption of "Little Women" made by Toei Animation and directed by Yuugo Serikawa.) See 1980anim Unfortunately the bulk of this show on Maxi TV is blocked by SYSTER encryption. The opening credit sequence is 100% Japanese, and the Japanese title is something like "Young Grass-Four Sisters". It doesn't look anything like the WMT version, though the opening credit animation, with a lot of bizarre flying sequences, isn't bad. Apparently there is also a dubbed movie length version. The "young grass" in the literal translation probably means "spring" or "youth". |
BOW (from the manga by Terry Yamamoto)
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The manga was featured in the magazine Mangajin. "That's Bow as in Bow-wow. Terry Yamamoto's slapstick dog comedy appears in Shogakukan's weekly men's magazine, Big Comic Superior. Unlike most Japanese dogs, whose spoken vocabulary is limited to variations on "ワン ワン" (katakana for bow=wow), Bow speaks his own language. In fact, he was named after his favourite word : バウ. Bow (a bull terrier) lives with the Inugami family, comprised of a tough-talking Grandma, her gangster son Daigorou, and his daughter Sayaka. Inugami 犬神 is a real surname, but it's amusing here because it literally means "dog god". It was Sayaka who brought Bow home from school." (Mangajin) |
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Boy & robot cat | Boy, mother & robot cat Famous anime about a boy and his robot cat. The cat has been sent back from the future by the descendants of the dozy Nobita, in the hope that he won't grow up useless and leave them a pile of debt and disgrace. The cat has a hatch in its body from which it can produce all manner of objects. A lot of the gags are rooted in real-life settings, and each episode has several almost independent sketches. There were two TV series and several movies. According to the "Anime Movie Guide", the series provides a whimsical but basically accurate picture of a Tokyo childhood in the 1960's. I saw an Arabic edition; the dialogue is incomprehensible but it still looks funny. |
