Space Shark Versus Fire Bird: The Movie

Early in 1984 I was a teenage nerd at something called the Atlanta Comics Festival, a show hosted by a local comics distributor so that 80s Marvel junkies could witness a panel of X-men inkers roasting editor-in-chief Jim Shooter. I'm pretty sure the hotel was a Howard Johnson's, I can definitely recall attending a presentation about Marvel's upcoming "Transformers" license, and I know I spent a few hours digging through long boxes in the dealer's room. But what I mostly remember about this event is a dark function room the size of a large closet, occupied by a giant top-loading VCR and a big old-fashioned console television.

 

Sure, the memory cheats sometimes, but it seems I can recall walking past that doorway and seeing a glimpse of the TV inside and saying to myself, holy cow, that's Phoenix 2772, Cosmozone Of Love. It's a film I knew about because people like Fred Patten, Jim Wheelock (seen here) and Ardith Carlton had been writing about Japanese animation in magazines like Comics Scene and Fangoria and Starlog.

Writing about Japanese animation for the wider market in the early 1980s means starting with the big guns, and back then the big gun was Osamu Tezuka, the God Of Manga, the guy behind a lot of the Japanese cartoons those readers would have seen in the 1960s and 1970s, and you have to lead with what Tezuka had been up to lately, besides 18-hour manga-drawing days, navigating bankruptcy and producing anime about insect people and instant puberty pills. And what Tezuka had been up to lately was Phoenix 2772.

So I knew what this movie was and who made it. What I didn't know was if I'd ever get to, you know, actually see it. At that time, Japanese animation was afternoon TV half-hours interrupted by ads for Fruit Roll-Ups and Hot Wheels. The prospect of watching a Japanese animated film that wasn't a Sunday afternoon rain-delay broadcast of an old edited-for TV Toei fairy tale, well, that was something I never thought would happen, and having that particular belief shattered was a fundamental experience.

Four decades, two VHS copies, and one DVD rip later, Phoenix 2772 sticks with me. I can still hear echoes of the flat “International” dub actors working their way through the script, still get a kick out of that rotoscoped boxing match, still marvel at how a movie can blast us with dystopian technofascism, psycho-robo-sexual hangups, and eight kinds of hallucinogenic effects as a Space Shark battles an eternal Space Firebird, and yet remain an awkward watch, unable to get out of its own way enough to really come together as a singular piece of cinema. Like the Phoenix itself, it’s a mystery.

Legendary in myths across Asia and Central Europe, the Phoenix dies in fire and returns to life, its blood delivering eternal life and its legend inspiring seekers and philosophers eager to either find immortality or to tell us how bad immortality would be, because we mere humans lack the wisdom to endure a forever existence. Japan’s manga legend Osamu Tezuka used the legend as fodder for a metaphysical and metahistorical story cycle beginning in the 1960s and continuing until the end of his life. Tezuka first serialized Phoenix - that’s Hi no Tori in Japanese - in Gakudosha's venerable Manga Shonen, and later in Shoujo Club, Tezuka's own COM, Asahi Sonorama's Manga Shonen, and Kadokawa's Yasei Jidai (Wild Age). An English version of Phoenix published by VIZ Media now commands impressive secondary-market prices.

There would be a live-action Hi no Tori film in 1978. Based on the "Dawn" chapter, the film was directed by Kon "Tokyo Olympiad" Ichikawa and starred Tomisaburo "Itto Ogami" Wakayama as Sarutahaiko, Mieko Takamine as Queen Himiko, and, uh,  Astro Boy as Astro Boy.

Kon later said that as a fan of Tezuka’s original work and challenged by the idea of mixing live action and animation, he’d been eager to work on the project. But the film’s technical difficulties were perhaps too difficult, and as Kon said, he might have been too in love with Tezuka’s original. At any rate, the film is a dusty, prehistorical affair shot largely in quarries and forests and in spite of Wakayama’s lively, prosthetic-nose portrayal of Sarutahiko, the movie wasn’t a success.

Tezuka mostly spent the 1970s concentrating on manga, completing gekiga-style serials Ode To Kirihito, Alabaster, and Ayako, Unico for the kiddies and superstar surgeon Black Jack for Shonen Champion, while also continuing his Phoenix saga. Additionally he was also navigating his way around the consequences of a decade’s worth of financial difficulties.

In Tezuka animation terms, the 70s meant mediocrity and misfires. Melmo’s TV anime metamorphosed away after 26 episodes and Umi no Triton swam out of Tezuka’s hands and into compilation films. Tezuka produced none of the experimental shorts he’d enjoyed making in the 1960s (and would create again in the 1980s), while Toei-produced Tezuka projects like 1973’s Microid S and the 1977 ersatz Astro Boy Jetter Mars failed to grab an audience.

However, in 1978 Tezuka would get a decently-budgeted opportunity to shine thanks to NTV and their “Love Saves The Earth” telethon. One Million Year Trip: Bander’s Book was the first of nine Tezuka specials for NTV’s annual telethon. 1979’s special would be the all-Tezuka-star murder mystery/time travel mashup Marine Express, and the internationally successful 1980 Astro Boy series would debut on NTV in October.

 
Phoenix 2772: Cosmozone Of Love was a big part of Tezuka’s animation renaissance. Budgeted at 800 million yen (about four million USD at the time), 2772 was the most expensive Japanese animated feature to date, with individual animators assigned to each character, extensive rotoscoping, composited live images, “scanimation” barrier-grid animation and slit-scan special effects. Tezuka would write and direct along with Taki Sugiyama, while mechanical designs would be by Satomi "Nora" Mikuriya. Yasuo Higuchi would orchestrate the soundtrack. Animation direction would be by Kazuko "the most beautiful animator at Toei Animation" Nakamura and anime-industry MVP Noboru Ishiguro. The end result would be like no other anime film before or since.

You know how an Italian Star Wars ripoff still feels Italian, still has those Cinecittà Hercules-movie sets, too much eye makeup, and the inevitable cavemen? How a Japanese Star Wars ripoff still manages to put Sonny Chiba in there kung-fuing the hell out of hapless goons?  Well, when Tezuka made his own Star Wars - and don't tell me Phoenix 2772 isn't in part a response to Star Wars, because come on, we're not blind - it wound up 100% Tezuka, the Tezuka who loved animation and loved hurling budgets and schedules into its maw. The film didn’t simply adapt the “Future” chapter of Phoenix (COM, Dec. 1967-Sept. 1968), but used “Future” to springboard an entirely new story, a story that winds up being more 2001: A Space Odyssey than Star Wars, but again, that’s Tezuka. He does it his way.

Speaking of Kubrick, Phoenix 2772 begins with an overture of 2001-style colorscapes set to lush Higuchi orchestral movements as our titular, very cartoony, very Tezuka Space Firebird glides past the camera, giving viewers fair warning they’re about to watch a film about the personification of a universe-encompassing life force that resembles nothing so much as a breakfast cereal mascot. Don’t get me wrong, I think Phoenix is a masterpiece and all, but sometimes the title character fails, to my eyes at least, to inspire the requisite awe and wonder necessary to sell its larger concepts. Maybe it’s me.

The overture ends with a minimalist title sequence, and Phoenix 2772 for-real begins with a shot right in the computerized test-tube baby-maker of the future, following our zygote hero Godoh through his decanting, infancy, childhood, adolescence and finally manhood, raised in a techno-crib by a crew of servo-robots, view-screens, holograms, and what turns out to be the film’s breakout star Olga, the transforming robot nanny that sings the body electric while turning into jet planes or power sleds.

 
Olga may be the final expression of Tezuka’s lifelong fascination with transformation, of humans who turn into animals, robots that turn into humans, girlboys and boygirls, children that become adults and back again, aliens that turn into humans or animals, of the whole parade of Zero-men and Ningen Mokodi and robot-rocket boys that march through his work in all their various malleable forms. The transmogrifying blonde Olga spends 2772 rescuing Godoh and asking after his well-being in her little-girl voice, provided by veteran seiyuu Katsue “Miki Rando From Acrobunch, also Unico” Miwa, a voice that’s slightly jarring to hear every time it comes out of this doll-faced fetish-gear mom-robot. Actualizing the feelings both have for each other becomes the pivot around which revolves the fate of the world, and of this movie.

But first we have to get Godoh out of that future-crib. This happens courtesy of a 45-second, transcendentally masterful hand-animated sequence, shifting perspectives, zooming and panning through the future-city as Godoh and Olga travel to Space Fighters Training School, where Godoh learns he’ll be trained along with the rest of his cohort of genetically selected star pilots. This sequence is also where, at eleven minutes in, we get our first spoken dialog when the sadistic drill instructor Borukan sneers “we don’t serve their kind here” at Olga.

Godoh is selected by Science Minister Rock to fly the super starship Space Shark and seek out Cosmozone 2772, a mysterious creature somewhere in the galaxy that has the power to revive the dying Earth, or maybe just grant immortality to the elite. This is due in part to Godoh’s top-notch space piloting, and in part because Rock and Godoh are clone-brothers, each genetically crafted to suit a different role in the world of the future. Success means he can have the freedom he desires, completely at odds with what awaits Godoh if he screws up - a life sentence in Iceland working on Rock’s pet project, a Berg Katse-style scheme to drill down to the Earth’s mantle and harness the geothermal energy that is Earth’s last energy resource.

During Space Shark training Godoh happens to meet Lena, an elite-class beauty who not only is the daughter of a big shot official, but is the betrothed of Rock. Doesn’t matter, it’s love at first sight for Godoh, on account of this is the first actual girl he’s ever met. Soon they’re meeting secretly in the Elite’s nature reserve park while Olga’s jealousy circuits spark and Lena’s alien companion Pincho obsessively sweeps and cleans. Sadly Lena and Godoh’s star-crossed romance ends with a literal squadron of makeout cops interrupting their date night. Godoh is headed for Iceland, where as the English dub assures us, the labor camps are “all Hell!”

 

Breaking rocks and dodging cave-ins at the work camp, Godoh’s unusual regard for human life comes to the attention of camp physician Dr. Saruta, last seen as Sarutahito from the “Dawn” chapter of the Phoenix manga. Saruta has an escape plan and also seeks the Phoenix, but he lacked only a pilot for the conveniently parked Space Shark helpfully located at the Iceland Space Shark Depot. Meanwhile an irate Pincho and Olga interrupt the Rock/Lena nuptials, where they learn Godoh is in Iceland.

Olga shifts into jet plane mode and literally vanishes from sight as she blasts off just in time to rescue Godoh from one of the molten rock magma explosions that really should be expected when trying to tap the Earth’s core. It’s almost time for this film to blast off in the Space Shark and seek the Phoenix, but first Godoh has to duke it out with the labor camp commandant, none other than Black Jack. Look out Godoh, he’s got knives in that cloak and he knows how to use them!

Joe Of Many More Tomorrows

 

Even after Space Shark liftoff there’s a gauntlet of security planes to dodge. Olga flies interference against the police fighters, mainly by, uh, jamming her robot butt up against the windshield, enabling our heroes to achieve escape velocity and the film to reach that full Heavy Metal vibe of  wild spaceships, weird aliens, and sexy robots. All that’s lacking is ads for rolling papers.

First stop is Antares, a planet filled with zany creatures and managed by Tezuka stalwart Shunsaku “Mr. Mustachio” Ban. It’s on Antares that the blob alien Pook and the dice alien Crack promise to lead our heroes to the Firebird, and also where the movie pauses for slapstick comedy alien fun as Tezuka again turns the dial abruptly from ‘adventure’ to ‘kooky.’  

En route to the Phoenix, Godoh tries to explain to Olga that he needs a real human girl to love, and her robot heartbreak can only be soothed by the second of the film’s two, count ‘em, two comedy space alien musical numbers. We learn the hideous fate of Borukan in a destroyed Space Shark, and things only get worse when they finally find the Phoenix on its planet of live-action smoke effects, a full hour and ten minutes into the film.

 

This isn’t your cutesy big-eyed manga Phoenix, but a rampaging space-monster, smashing everything, setting everything on fire, and then changing into a wide variety of shapes and sizes as the Space Shark gives chase.

 
In the cosmic struggle that ensues, Pincho is swallowed by the Firebird, Olga is contaminated by some sort of fried-egg mind-control space parasite, and the cinematographer forgets everything he ever knew about not breaking the 360 degree rule. At the end of the battle the Space Shark is crippled, Saruta’s dead, Olga’s flash-fried, Pook and Crack are eaten, and the Phoenix has been destroyed. Or has it?

 
As a heartbroken Godoh attempts to master Olga Repair, he finally admits that he’s been in love with his robot nursemaid all this time, and whether this is honest emotional attachment, or that he’s merely psychologically imprinted on something he’s known since childhood, well, the film refuses to say. The heart wants what the heart wants, okay? The classic manga-style Phoenix returns, intrigued by Godoh and the fundamental power of his robot love.

 
Fascinated by this unlikely bond and what we can only assume is the prospect of getting to make out with Godoh, the Phoenix possesses Olga, restores her to “like new” condition and hands Godoh the keys to a brand new paradise planet where they can consummate whatever you want to call their relationship. Even Pook, Crack, and Pincho are there, having been spared by the Firebird.

 
But this new Eden isn’t enough for Godoh, who still thinks of a ruined Earth, and how he can help by loading the Space Shark up with fruits and vegetables and hauling it all back to feed mankind. However, he arrives on a planet shaken by vast tectonic upheavals. It turns out Rock’s “mantle project” is a terrible idea that is cracking the Earth and destroying all life. Thanks, Rock.

Trapped on a doomed planet, surrounded by dead friends and enemies, Godoh is forced to choose by the Phoenix; either live forever alone, or revive the Earth by sacrificing his own life. Since this is a movie made by a guy also making yearly TV films under the theme “Love Saves The Earth,” Godoh’s choice should not be a shock. The giant chasms close back up, the inner-Earth fumes dissipate, and the Earth revives as Godoh regresses to infanthood, to be once again raised by Olga, who is now a real human woman, who might miss those super robot powers when Godoh reaches the terrible twos. So long Phoenix 2772, you truly were a Love’s Cosmozone.

Blazing a trail followed by other overlong, overwrought 80s anime space epics, Phoenix 2772 is an ambitious film made by a peerless crew of talented animators. The movie is filled with beautifully-animated Space Sharks versus beautifully animated Phoenixes, flashing electrical halos as Olga short-circuits her runaway emotions, skilled rotoscoping as Godoh fistfights Black Jack, and world-class animation genius, like that early tracking shot zooming past and through the future city. And it’s a beautifully animated sequence, a master performance that took animator Junji Kobayashi an entire year and a physical mockup built in a Tezuka Productions hallway to complete, a factoid that’s first up whenever Phoenix 2772 is mentioned, inspiring awe as well as serious questions about the film’s staffing issues, production schedule, and editing decisions.

And that’s the problem with Phoenix 2772. Like so much of the rest of the film, this scene looks great, it’s impressive as hell, and yet it doesn’t advance the plot and tells us nothing about the characters. The cut is a superfluous drum solo killing time while the lead singer gets a drink and somebody hands the rhythm guitarist a new guitar. Ultimately it’s emblematic of why the film came and went, why the kids today don’t know about Space Sharks, Pooks, and labor camps in Iceland which are all hell. 2772 the film is all drum solos, lurching from one beauty shot to the next, ignoring anything that doesn’t involve expensive multi-camera special effects or some poor guy ruining his health making seven hundred cuts by himself.

 
The pacing isn’t the only uneven thing about the film. 2772’s tone swerves drunkenly between comedy and tragedy at whiplash-inducing speeds, and I’m not just saying this because it’s jarring for Western audiences who haven’t been seeing Tezuka’s star-system characters in all sorts of situations for decades, even though it is. You can feel the gears grind as one minute we’re looking at silly aliens and their silly alien a-fussin’ and a-feudin’, and the next minute someone’s screaming in flame-engulfed agony. Slapstick comedy, sight gags, and cuddly space creatures slam up against heartbreak, horror, and existential devastation? Pick a mood and stick with it, movie.

 
When Phoenix 2772 finds a lane and stays in it, the film connects. The detailed character animation delivers subtle movement not often seen in anime, and once the film gets to outer space we’re treated to swift, dramatic action set against a cosmos deep with color and texture. The Space Shark itself is a marvel, a perfect bit of SF design that looks great on the screen, particularly when all the hatches and missile ports open and all the lasers and beams and everything starts blasting out. This spaceship, which ought to be an expensive diecast toy for me to spend too much money on, was the brainchild of Phoenix 2772’s mechanical designer Satomi Mikuriya, whose own manga version of 2772 would be serialized in monthly Manga Shonen.

 
Along with Mikuriya’s manga, the film’s marketing tie-ins would be limited to a few books, some film comics, a couple of soundtrack LPs, a novelization, and maybe an Olga resin kit or two. Even the home video releases were paltry. A 94-minute edited version would air on Japanese TV in 1983; this same cut would appear on VHS and LD a few years later. Japan wouldn’t get an uncut home video release of Phoenix 2772 until Toho’s 2003 DVD. The UK’s Mountain Films would market a 116 minute VHS of the film in the mid ‘80s, and France saw 2772 as "Les Vengeurs de l'Espace.”

Apart from a NYC screening in 1982, America wouldn’t see the film until Peregrine Films marketed a 102-minute English dub of 2772 as “Space Firebird” in their 1987 Dynamagic package of anime titles, with an uncut Best Film & Video release to follow.

 

It’s stated frequently online that Phoenix 2772 won the Inkpot Award at the 1980 San Diego Comic Con. However, a quick glance shows that the Inkpot Award is handed out to people, not films. Tezuka was a guest at the SDCC that year and did receive the award, and Phoenix 2772 is one of his works, so sure, why not. Reportedly, the film also won Best Animated Feature at the first Las Vegas Film Festival, a film festival about which absolutely nothing else is known. Perhaps its only purpose was to grant awards to Phoenix 2772? Sure, why not.

Okay, so Phoenix 2772 whiffed at the box office, failed to catch an international art-house audience, and spent two decades a stranger in its own home town. But there’s a reason people still talk about this film, a reason I keep remembering that now-demolished Holiday Inn and that console TV and that fuzzy VHS, and it’s because there isn’t another movie that dares to take us to the Cosmozone Of Love. Tezuka could have played it safe; he could have made a simplistic space opera where the good guys team up with friendly alien robots to defeat evil in the galaxy. Instead he threw deep, he delivered a long, experimental, special-effected, weirdly horny karma-bomb straight past the goalposts, out of the stadium, and right into a philosophy department window, tackling big questions alongside his doomed dystopias, musical aliens, and transforming robot mom/girlfriends.

Phoenix 2772 is one of the few films that puts the confusion and the transgression of human-human and human-cyborg relations right on the screen, with characters tortured by wanting something they know isn’t right, but can’t live without. Maybe wrangling this and all these other disparate concepts into a successful two hours is an impossible task. But that Tezuka, he couldn’t not try, he didn’t know how to not go full-throttle towards the technically challenging and the tonally confusing. Isn’t that what we really need? The occasional unsettling misstep, maybe a little too revealing, unfamiliar, pretentious, something where people really did spend a year animating one scene that would be promptly cut right out of the movie’s first American release? That’s why on that afternoon in 1984 I took a path away from super-friends and licensed toys, towards a fuzzy VHS copy of something unlike anything I’d seen.

actual screen cap of that 1984 VHS

Right now we’re seeing a lot of vintage anime classics find new life in boutique North American releases, and the question is always, when will Phoenix 2772 see a fiery rebirth? Other Hi No Tori stories were adapted after the film, starting with three late 1980s OVAs, a 2004 TV series and film, and releases in 2019 and 2023 of varying degrees of availability in the West. But 2772 remains a dusty VHS staple in America, even as the “Love Saves The Earth” films get European Blu-Rays. The top elite scientists all agree the only thing that can save our world is the Space Firebird. Let’s get Godoh and Olga into that North American blu-ray Space Shark already, somebody. There are vast new audiences waiting to be confused, amazed, and maybe even a little turned on.

Special thanks to Bill Ritch, who screened that 2772 VHS at that Atlanta comic show so many years ago. Thanks again, Bill!

-Dave Merrill