ANI-MOVIES, *Phoenix 2772

One of Osamu Tezuka's earliest manga titles was Phoenix, an unusual anthology taking place at multiple times in human history all tying to the otherworldly entity of the Phoenix, a shapeshifting firebird. The manga ran for year in 1954, even though Tezuka never got around to doing a conclusion for it in the other 35 years of his life. In 1978, there was a full-length anime movie based on the manga that bombed, so another one in 1980 titled Phoenix 2772 was made to focus on a single person's adventure instead of several lifetimes chronicled in the prior film. This was released in English and retitled Space Firebird, and an even shorter cut of the dub was released in America with much of the coherence chopped out of it. Phoenix was Tezuka's big space opera outside of Astro Boy, but this second attempt at trying to adapt only a small chapter of the manga was met with some strong highs and lows. Tezuka himself directed it along with Taku Sugiyama under his Tezuka Productions, so the "God of Manga" was fully involved in this project. The entire experience was a nice chance for Tezuka to flex his animation muscles and get creative, including having the first ten minutes done with no dialogue at all. The downside to allowing Tezuka having this much freedom with his own production made a good portion of the movie being padded out with pointless cartoon shenanigans and instrumental suites that pad the film out and considering that this second adaptation of the manga was even shorter than the previous one, that is staggering in hindsight.

Set in the way off future, humans are created in test tubes and raised by robots. One such child is Godo who always treated his robot caretaker Olga as a friend, which is understandable as she gives off the appearance of vivacious blonde that is capable of multiple vehicle transformations. Godo becomes a pilot and falls for a rich girl engaged to his greedy brother who punishes him for this by sending him to a labor camp. Olga along with some wacky cartoon critters bust Godo out after he befriends fellow inmate Dr. Surata who plans on going in search of the legendary Phoenix to help revitalize the Earth which is dying from all its resources being plundered by humans. Godo and his crew take a shark-shaped ship away from yet another variation of Tezuka's central character of Blackjack who here is a prison warden. After a long intergalactic chase, the Phoenix damages Olga but revitalizes the robot and gives Godo an ideal life on a fruitful planet. Godo decides to bring much of this new planet's vegetation back to the dying Earth to harvest, although his efforts are for not as the planet just then starts going all Krypton. Godo and Olga are two of the only ones remaining and the Phoenix entity inside the robot says she'll reformat the Earth for the remaining survivors if Godo gives up his life. This works and humankind is given a fresh exodus while Godo is reborn as a baby and Olga turned into a living woman who has to raise her new child in a post-apocalyptic world.

After watching Phoenix 2772, you'll swear that End Of Evangelion ripped off its finale from this as they are hauntingly similar. Both the full-length and edited versions of the British dub suffer from standard acting usually done in Hong Kong kung-fu flicks. The original but incomplete manga has been released several times in English, and the Space Firebird dub was readily available on VHS through several different shady distributors from the 80s-90s due to their being no known existing license on it at the time. There's not currently a version of this streaming in North America, nor is there one on official DVD or Blu-Ray, so keep your eyes open for an old bootleg copy at your nearest used video store.