ANI-MOVIES, *Alakazam The Great

Saiyuki, also known as Journey To The West, has been frequently adapted into anime, including a little something called Dragonball! One of the first anime takes on this ancient Chinese tale was a 1960 movie, which a year later was released in English under the title Alakazam The Great. God of Manga, Osamu Tezuka, worked as an animator on the Toei produced film, even though he was billed as a being a director in the U.S. release, which is largely due to the fact that Tezuka had created his own take on the Monkey King as a manga, and then later on as its own TV series. The English dub featured regular voice actors like Johnathon Winters and Arnold Stang, including the anime premiere of Peter Fernandez who later went on to voice Speed Racer, even though Frankie Avalon was billed as Alakazam's voice instead of really just during the music numbers.

The movie follows an extremely streamlined take on Saiyuki, Alakazam is a monkey that is made the king of his kind after finding them a divine palace. He then sets out to learn magic by "Merlin", and afterwards goes the heavenly Majutsu Land to challenge the gods, including "Hercules". The divine King Amo sentences Alakazam to imprisoned inside a mountain until his son Amat(the real star of Saiyuki!)comes to release him. Amat gets the rebellious Alakazam into his service after fitting him with a magic crown, and the two set out on a pilgrimage, which has them gaining allies like the shapeshifting pigman Quigley, and the scavenger Maz. Their journey has them getting captured by the evil King Gruesome, who in the original story was the Ox King. They eventually defeat Gruesome and his hellish forces, which eventually leads to the off-screen end of their pilgrimage.

Even though there was a bountiful amount of promotion done for it's American release, Alakazam didn't really sync with Western audiences at the time. Upon watching it at least once, you can see the numerous translation horrors it had to suffer, like musical legend Les Baxter having to completely redo the soundtrack, but mostly due to alot of the plot points being shoelaced together, as well as a good portion of the dialogue being improvised in the style of later dubs like Samurai Pizza Cats and Duel Masters. Quality-wise, the film has excellent animation to it on the same level that Disney had at the time. Tezuka's influence is shown throughout the movie too, including a cameo by his Phoenix character. The movie has seen release on VHS in the 80s, but most Western otaku have probably watched it on streaming services like Amazon. It's worth a watch as its place in the history of anime, but possibly as a rental or viewing it on a friend's cable system.