Ginga Tetsudō no Yoru

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Movie
Original title 銀河 鉄 道 の 夜
Ginga Tetsudō no Yoru
Country of production Japan
original language Japanese
Publishing year 1985
length 113 minutes
Rod
Director Gisaburō Sugii
script Minoru Betsuyaku
production Masato Hara
Atsumi Tashiro
music Haruomi Hosono
camera Yasuo Maeda

Ginga Tetsudō no Yoru ( Japanese 銀河 鉄 道 の 夜 ), also known under the English title Night on the Galactic Railroad (Eng. " Night on the Galactic Railroad "), is an anime film from 1985. Director of the fantasy film led Gisaburō Sugii .

The film is about two boys who experience a surreal journey through the universe on a train and is based on Kenji Miyazawa 's novel of the same name from 1927. The biggest difference between the novel and the anime is that almost all characters are shown as cats, which can be traced back to the collaboration of the manga artist Hiroshi Masumura , who also uses cat figures in his comic versions of Kenji Miyazawa's works, which in turn goes back to Miyazawa's fairy tale Neko no jimusho ("The Office of the Cats").

action

The boy Giovanni (voiced by Mayumi Tanaka ) has to work in a print shop and deliver newspapers so that the poor family has some money. His mother is sick and his father has disappeared, it is said that he has traveled to the northern sea. In school, Giovanni is annoyed by everyone except Campanella (spoken by Chika Sakamoto ). Campanella's father and Giovanni's father have been good friends since childhood.

The Centauros festival in honor of the stars takes place and the whole city seems to be on its feet. Giovanni goes to a secluded property at night to get the milk for his mother, which the milkman did not bring that day, but is scrapped. He should come back later. He lies down on a meadow and looks at the stars when suddenly a train comes down from space and stops next to him. Giovanni gets in, but apart from him there seems to be no one in the vehicle. Campanella appears out of nowhere and tells him that none of his classmates except him made it onto the train.

The train stops at the Schwanenstation for twenty minutes and the two of them decide to get off. There's nobody at the station. Giovanni and Campanella go through a door and down a long stone staircase and come to a small town, see walnuts twice the size, and meet researchers digging fossil stones. On the way back to the train station, they discover that the city has turned to stone and is crumbling. On the train Giovanni looks at the walnut he has taken with him; it turns to dust.

A bird catcher travels with the train for one stop and sits next to Giovanni and Campanella, who tell him they want to go to the end of the universe. A second bird catcher appears, the first gets out at the next station and the two boys can watch him catching herons. The first bird catcher is then back on the train and a blind man enters. They lead him to an intercom, from which he takes a message. A woman repeats the words.

A conductor wants to see the passengers' tickets. It turns out that Giovanni has a very rare, special ticket that you normally get in the third dimension. The first bird catcher disappears, although Giovanni and Campanella would have spoken to him more. You are now the only travelers besides the second bird catcher.

Three human children sit down next to them. You were on a ship that hit an iceberg and then sank. There weren't enough lifeboats and so the eldest of the three decided that the three should not save themselves on one of the few lifeboats, but should find their happiness with God. The human girl tells a story about scorpions, in the window the girl and Giovanni see a scene from Giovanni's childhood and later drive past the village of Centauros. The human children and Giovanni and Campanella become friends. The three get off at a station that is like heaven in Christian imagination.

Only Campanella and Giovanni are on the train. They want their train journey to last forever and don't know where they're going. In the window they see a hole in the universe. Campanella suspects his mother is there. Just as Giovanni is talking about staying together forever, Campanella leaves and gets off the train and disappears into the darkness. Giovanni is alone on the train and crying Campanella's name.

Giovanni is back in the meadow where the train picked him up. He's now collecting the milk for his mother. In town he meets a classmate who tells him that another classmate fell into the river at the Centauros Festival and that Campanella jumped after him and saved him. Campanella itself is lost in the river and the search for him is difficult because of the darkness of the night. Giovanni runs to the river. After 45 minutes you give up the search. He looks up at the stars and says he knows Campanella is up there.

backgrounds

Ginga Tetsudō no Yoru is set in a fictional world in which Esperanto is spoken. That's why all signs and texts in the film are in this language. The film is subtitled Nokto de la Galaksia Fervojo .

reception

At the Mainichi Eiga Concours in 1985, the film won Ōfuji Noburō Prize , which is awarded to artistically valuable animated films in honor of the animator Noburō Ōfuji .

In the Anime Encyclopedia , Helen McCarthy and Jonathan Clements compared the anime to Leiji Matsumoto's Ginga Tetsudō 999 . They praised the direction and the music and praised the train and the respective stations are "as rich and believable as any location in the real world" . They also wrote that “the poetic beauty of symbolism” would be combined with the abundance mentioned “to give the long journey a powerful, emotional weight” .

Web links

novel

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Helen McCarthy, Jonathan Clements: The Anime Encyclopedia. Revised & Expanded Edition . P. 448.