1965: The Year Anime Went Beyond The Moon

Right now it's 2025, and that means it's as good a time as any to take a look back sixty years and see what Japanese animation looked like in 1965. Except it wasn't called "anime" back then, the term of art was "terebi manga," largely because a lot of what was showing up on Japanese TV in cartoon form had started as newspaper comics, or weekly comics, or comics in general.  However, by 1965 those lines were beginning to blur.  Mass media marketing began its synchronized attacks upon the spare change of Japan's youth. We're still living in the Dentsu age where animation is but one part of a vast promotional machine, and it all got started in those days of the 1960s. But what did what we'd later call "anime" look like, six decades ago? Well, it kind of looked like this. 

Space was the place in 1965! America and Russia both sent probes to the Moon and Mars, while both astronauts and cosmonauts ventured outside their space capsules for the first time. Meanwhile on TV screens, Tatsunoko's first-ever series Space Ace arrived... from space! Based on Tatsuo Yoshida's manga, Space Ace is a boy from the lost planet Parum who was separated from the rest of his people and landed on Earth. Found by Doctor, uh, Tatsunoko, Space Ace uses his amazing Parum abilities of having a stretchy body, a silver energy ring, and a platinum ray to help his new friends and the Earth. Ace replenishes his energy by chewing special energy gum - candy company Kanebo Harris (now Kracie) was a sponsor, and Ace also appears in the bubble gum commercials that air during the show. Tatsunoko pitched Space Ace to American syndication, but nobody in the US took the bait. I've long heard rumors of an English pilot for this series, but so far all that exist are rumors. 

 

Meanwhile in '65, the TCJ crew responsible for Tetsujin-28 aka Gigantor were hard at work bringing Space Boy Soran to Japanese TV, where it would air from May 1965 until March of 1967. Soran is the son of noted scientist Dr. Tachibana who designed a super bomb and then fled with his family to outer space, as one does. Only Soran and his sister survived the crash of their spaceship. Soran was raised by space aliens who rebuilt him into a cyborg and he returns to Earth years later with super powers and a sidekick, Chappy the Space Squirrel, to search for his sister and also to battle evil, of course. Was Space Boy Soran's space squirrel adventure a little too similar to Osamu Tezuka's "No. 7" manga, and did Soran's production cause Tezuka to forestall production of a No. 7 anime series and instead retool the concept into Wonder 3? Only Galactic Command has the answers.

TCJ's Super Jetter is the story of Time Patrolman 723567 who flies from the future in his time-ship Ryusei-go (“Shooting Star”) in pursuit of the criminal Jaguar. Trapped in the 20th century, Super Jetter finds himself using his future powers to battle for justice! This series was commissioned by TBS as an original work rather than adapting an existing property; after TBS found out they'd inadvertently sold all the international rights to Eight Man to ABC Films, they wanted another show they could control exports of. Super Jetter was created by Fumio Hisamatsu, who also did manga for Ultra Seven, Godzilla Vs Mothra, Mighty Jack, UFO Warrior Daiapollon, and Yatterman. The series was originally in black and white but 26 episodes were remade in color for export, screening in Mexico as "El Hijo de Meteoro."

Also from TCJ, starting in June of 1965, was Planet Boy Papi, the story of the boy from the planet Clifton sent to Earth to sell Glico candy - the show was the second after Tetsujin-28 to air in "Glico Theater" time slot -  and fight evil with his powerful Metalizer pendant and the help of a top evil-fighting combo made up of an Arabian wizard, a professional wrestler, and a little girl. We here at Let's Anime were deeply affected by Prince Planet in our youth, and subsequently have written extensively about this series and its English language release as Prince Planet, which was dubbed by Miami's Copri International Studios and syndicated by American International Television.  

Toei's Space Patrol Hopper was sponsored by Daimaru Department Store and later was retitled Patrol Hopper: Space Kid Jun. The titular Jun is an Earthling who got caught up in a conflict involving space aliens. Injured, Jun was rescued by planet Hopper's Space Patrol. The Hopperians, or Hopperites, or Hopperutians, whichever, those guys rebuild Jun as a cyborg using their scientific power, and he becomes a member of their Space Patrol, fighting to protect peace in the universe and on Earth. The terrific Yasuji Mori character designs are all over this show, which is peak mid century design throughout its 44 episodes, airing from February to November 1965.

The year's only Japanese animated theatrical release was also an outer space adventure. Gulliver's Space Journey is a Toei film about a homeless boy named Ted; he and his friends come across Gulliver, you know, the one from Jonathan Swift's 1726 satirical novel Gulliver's Travels. Our modern Gulliver is about to take off in his rocket ship to the Hope Star, which has been conquered by robots! Gulliver's Space Journey has an all-star pedigree. The film's screenplay is by Shinichi Sekizawa, who wrote the lost film "Fearful Attack Of The Flying Saucers" as well as cinematic milestones like Godzilla Vs Mothra, Latitude Zero, Destroy All Monsters, and Jack And The Witch. Gulliver's music is by Isao Tomita, who would also score Jungle Emperor for Tezuka's Mushi Pro. 

Key Gulliver animation was by Yasuo Otsuka, with in-betweening and certain scene concepts by Hayao Miyazaki. Ted's voice actor is Kyu Sakamoto, the first Japanese singer to hit number one on the US charts with his hit song "Ue o Muite Arukō", or, as it was incongruously renamed in the States, "Sukiyaki." The English language version, retitled Gulliver's Travels Beyond The Moon, would be released in US theaters by Walter Reade - Continental in 1966, with new music by Milton & Anne Delugg and Darla Hood from "Our Gang" voicing the Princess. The film would continue to play US theaters through 1975, and would be the last Japanese animated film to hit America until 1971's The World Of Hans Christian Andersen.

  

A more earthbound series from Toei's 1965 stable is Hustle Punch, which might be the closest Japan ever got to the Hanna Barbera style zany talking animal slapstick comedy adventure formula.  Punch (a bear), Touch (a mouse), and Bun (a weasel) all live in a scrapyard and battle the evil plans of Professor Garigari, a wolf who wants to build his own city over their hometown. This TV show delivered rollicking fun from  November '65 until April '66. Hustle Punch creatives Yasuo Otsuka, Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki would later bring this sort of chaotic amusement to human-being shows like Lupin III.

Fujiko-Fujio's Obake no Q-Tarō becomes animated in a 1965 series broadcast on TBS and produced by A-Production and Tokyo Movie, who would later become TMS. Q-Tarō is a friendly, sometimes timid ghost somehow attached to the Ohara family. Our ghostly star is voiced in a breakout role by the protean talent of Machiko Soga and lives, if that's the right word, to cause mischief. This is much to the chagrin of elementary school student Shōta Ohara, Q-Tarō's best pal. The success of this goofy ghost's adventures caused what was called a "Q-Tarō Boom" which would later inspire, among other things, the ghosts in Pac-Man. The Fujiko-Fujio team would also create Ninja Hattori-kun, Kaibutsu-kun, Perman, and Doraemon, which is to say they're behind some of the most popular cartoons in Japan, and in some cases, the world. The 1971-72 Q-Tarō series was broadcast on some US television stations as "Little Ghost Q-Tarō."

Perhaps the biggest star of 1965 was Mushi Pro's Jungle Emperor. Based on Osamu Tezuka's 1950 manga, the TV series was the first color animated series produced for Japanese television. The story of (stop me if you've heard this one before, Disney) how the son of the king of the jungle returns to regain his rightful place as leader of the animals, this show was animated by Tezuka's Mushi studio and began airing in October of 1965, Wednesdays 7-7:30pm on Fuji-TV. The animation may have been simplistic, and the character designs cartoony even by Tezuka standards, but the epic scope of the series, punctuated by Isao Tomita's grand soundtrack, elevates Jungle Emperor into legendary status. 

NBC Films helped to finance the production and exported the series to America as "Kimba The White Lion." Consequently, the series episodes didn't feature continued storylines, violence was toned down, and as the corporate history states, "particular care was taken in the depiction of black people." Absent NBC financing, Mushi's 1967 sequel series "Go Leo" was more faithful to the original manga storyline. Go Leo featured continued stories and more violent content, and subsequently did not air in America until 1982. 

1965 brought us some impressive milestones, but also some confusing missteps, in the shape of Mysterious Thief Pride. Otherwise known as Dr. Zen And The Magic Machine, this weird Tele-Cartoons Japan series of five minute shorts stars the titular thief Pride and his canine companion. Pride & Co. commit zany robberies while being pursued by boy detective Doublecheck, his big pal Broken, and their honeybee fairy friend Honey. Airing on Fuji TV at 6:10pm, this series was in black and white, but was colorized and dubbed for export under the "Dr Zen" title. It's unclear if this series ever made it to air on North America. And why would it?
 

 

1965 continued anime's path towards lucrative property licences and blizzards of toy tie-ins, into increased international audiences and full color productions, a year 1966 and 1967 would build upon in new and exciting ways. Other shows of 1965 include warring-states period boy ninja Fujimaru Of The Wind, the Tezuka cyborg Big X, the live-action/animation hybrid Bibi The Alien, and of course Wonder 3, the Tezuka adventure of a bunny, a duck, and a horse, sent here by Galactic Control to save or destroy the Earth. 

 

Sixty years later, what remains of 1965? They're making another Jungle Emperor. You can still buy Obake no Q-Tarō merchandise, TCJ still exists as Eiken and still has animated shows on the air every week. Sponsors still build ad campaigns around TV animation and studios like Toei, TMS and Tatsunoko continue as major players in the biz. 1965 helped build the pipeline that fed the superhighway that laid the rails that blazed the trails that brought us to today, a world where kids of all ages around the world still watch Japanese animation. Next up: 1975!

 -Dave Merrill

 
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Robotech II: The Sentinels?

 

When the anime series Robotech came to the rescue of syndicated American TV in the mid 80s, its success created an audience eager for more, and producers Harmony Gold were ready to capitalize on that desire. The trouble with continuing that story was, well, Robotech was originally three different Japanese television shows, all with their own writers, artists, production teams, schedules and budgets, all completed before “Robotech” was even a trademark. Harmony Gold’s role in rewriting, editing, and repackaging the material, while not insignificant, was still less work than coming up with an entirely new series from scratch. Which is probably why HG’s first Robotech sequel took the easy way out. Robotech The Movie was a dubbed and rewritten Megazone 23, amended with some Southern Cross footage and some dialogue intended to fit the whole business in with the Robotech storyline. The result, immediately suppressed after test screenings, was an incoherent mess.

However, Harmony Gold’s next shot at a Robotech franchise opportunity took a completely different approach. New characters and mecha were designed, new storylines were composed, the production team constructed a galaxy-spanning epic that would reveal the mysteries behind the foundation of the entire Robotech saga. And the final result was… also an incoherent mess.

 

pre-production trade advertisement for Robotech II

But in 1988, all we fans knew was that show that had brought a lot of us into Japanese animation now had a sequel titled “Robotech II: The Sentinels,” and that this sequel had finally been released on home video, and that we were about to watch it at our local anime club meeting. Then we watched all 74 minutes of that video and we finally knew the truth, which is that Robotech II: The Sentinels is terrible.

Rather than being assembled, rewritten and recut from disparate elements, The Sentinels was conceived and commissioned from the ground up by Harmony Gold. Yet, due to production problems and various financing crises, The Sentinels we eventually wound up with was, ironically enough, also assembled, rewritten and recut. Production on Sentinels began even as the original TV series was airing. However, HG’s 65 episode plan ran into problems when on September 22, 1985 the Plaza Accord was signed, which among other things revalued the Japanese yen against the US dollar. What had at one time been cheaply produced Japanese animation was now significantly more expensive to produce. As a result, the price tag on The Sentinels ballooned and sponsor Matchbox pulled out, leaving Harmony Gold with a mere three episodes of usable footage. This, along with material from the original Robotech television series, is the Sentinels video release we were given. 

 

either too much hair, or not enough hair

Robotech II should have been an easy slam dunk, even with the show’s self-imposed goal of showing what happens to the Macross Saga characters after the events of that series arc while also providing connective material to the Robotech Masters (Southern Cross) series and laying the groundwork for the New Generation (Mospeada) batch of episodes. Had it been planned from the start as a direct-to-video special, it might have worked. Fans loved these characters and were ready to see more of their adventures. That is not what we got. 

 

 
What Robotech II delivers instead are once beloved characters redesigned to avoid copyright issues, because Macross copyright partners Studio Nue and Big West had not and would never sign off on any Robotech sequels starring their Macross IP. This results in scenes of the new-look Rick Hunter and retooled Lisa Hayes preparing for their wedding alongside their friends Slightly Off Lynn Minmay and Is That Claudia Grant, I Guess It Is. Yes, this wedding is taking place ten years after the end of the Macross Saga, because good space station caterers are hard to find, maybe. 

 

 

Comedy relief is provided by the hilarious little-kid antics of Little Dana Sterling and Little Bowie Grant, who apparently are the only ten year olds left alive on Earth. These domestic scenes are intercut with events across the galaxy on the planet Tirol, the homeworld of the Robotech Masters, who at this point in the story are on their way to Earth to make the Robotech Masters TV series a thing, and who have left their planet in the hands of an elderly man with an amazing beard. 

 

some of the amazing beards of Robotech II

 

A disturbing proportion of Robotech II: The Sentinels is devoted to middle-aged bores lecturing everybody in various contrived accents while sporting a startling variety of facial hair choices, epitomized by Tirol’s chief scientist Kabel as he wrinkles his elderly brow in confusion as their planet is invaded by the robot panthers and humanoid, phallus-dangling mechanoid destroyers of the Invid. You might recall the Invid as the Earth-invading baddies from Robotech The New Generation. 

 

Can this marriage be saved?

Here the foundation is laid for their future Earth attack as the bickering husband-and-wife team of Regent the tadpole-faced slug man and Regis the human-faced slug lady argue and whine their way through scenes which will have audiences thinking about couples counseling or divorce lawyers. Occasionally the slug man talks to a giant brain in a tank, merely one of many Robotech II scenes where dialog is spoken by people without mouths, or people wearing masks, or people with things obscuring their mouths, or people with their backs to the camera, so as to avoid the trouble of animating lip movements.

I watched and enjoyed the original Robotech TV series, and I can assure you that this show was not a success because of giant slugs talking to giant brains. Robotech was a success because it featured transforming robot fighter planes, well-animated action scenes, and cute girl singers. Robotech II: The Sentinels has none of this. All the returning characters are uglier and have stupider hair, and the new characters are also ugly and also have stupid hair. Popular Robotech singing star Minmay gets one song, which she’s forced to share with a brand new character that Robotech II never gets around to introducing. Other familiar Robotech characters are reduced to standing around asking plot-furthering questions, arguing their way through board meetings or sporting what appear to be gimp fetish masks, as we see Zentraedi commander Breetai wearing as he walks Lisa Hayes down the matrimonial aisle.

 

There’s very little Robotech mecha in Robotech II, which might have influenced Matchbox’s decision to yank the plug. The only transforming mecha we see in Robotech II are training flights flown by Alpha fighters, and all the other various Invid destructo-bots and mecha-dogs aren’t what we’d call toyetic. The Sentinels' mechanical design was by Tatsunoko’s in-house mecha design team Ammonite, previously seen mecha-designing shows like Starzan S and Southern Cross. Ammonite would create a slew of original mecha for Robotech II, and several designs would be repurposed for future projects like Red Photon Zillion, an ecological solution that proves every dark cloud has a silver lining.  After 74 minutes of confusing edits, flashbacks to Robotech episodes, a scene where some anonymous captain is profoundly and court-martially  insubordinate to Major General Rick Hunter, ponderous arguments between different sets of boring old guys, and Tirol’s beardo wizard staring into computer screens as robot dogs destroy his planet, viewers may cheer any hope of redemption. 

 

 
Of course, Harmony Gold would wring every bit of profit they could from the remains of this abortive series. Robotech II first got a home video release from Palladium, the Robotech RPG people, choosing for their cover art one of the Invid’s swinging-dick robo-marauders. Is there a better way to sell a Robotech sequel than  images of a scary dong robot? Later Streamline Pictures would offer a Robotech II VHS with distribution from Orion Pictures. A slightly altered version would appear on A&E’s Robotech The Complete Set DVD box, along with other sequel projects like Robotech The Shadow Chronicles and the Robotech version of the Mospeada OVA “Love Live Alive.”
 

yup, that robot has a wang

Robotech II: The Sentinels achieved its greatest success in other media. Del Rey would roll out the entire Sentinels story through five novels, while three different comic book companies released Sentinels-based comics and Palladium released a Sentinels RPG. Perhaps one of these ancillary media iterations dares to tell the audience exactly who the Robotech Sentinels are. This video never does. 

 

Robotech is a franchise that spawned novels, comic books, games, a large toy line, and a fandom that continues to this day.  What it hasn't spawned is a satisfying sequel, in spite of the efforts of Harmony Gold and a myriad of creative hopefuls, and in defiance of all the 80s nostalgia, remake obsession, and reboot mania that Hollywood can muster. Currently Sony Pictures is churning through the third attempt at making a live-action Robotech film. All we can say to this is good luck, go easy on the beards, and don’t put Breetai in a gimp mask.

-D. Merrill

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The Northern Anime

 

It's May, and that means it's Anime North time here in Ontario!  And that also means that I've been doing what I do this time of year every year since, um, let me check, since 2005. That's a solid twenty years of me doing panels and things at Anime North, long enough for me to sit back and think, wow, that's a long time.

 

It helps that Anime North is staffed by understanding folks who took a chance on me showing up out of nowhere, who have let me experiment and trial-and-error my way through a wide variety of video formats, panel topics, and event rooms. It also helps that the attendees are a kind and accepting crowd willing to put up with technical snafus, schedule changes, and every other sort of problem endemic to the world of volunteer-driven pop culture events. 

Anime North is happening May 23-25 this year, mere days away as I write this, still with panel clips to edit and flyers to print. But the con will come whether I'm ready or not. If that weekend you happen to come down to the Toronto Congress Centre and the Delta Hotel over on Dixon Road out by Pearson Airport, you'll find yourself wandering through a wonderland of guest panels and autographs, the Doll North area, a dedicated show of Gundam model kits, the secondhand Nominoichi sale, giant vendor halls, gaming halls, artists' alleys, and exhibits. Vtubers, voice actors, artists, translators, guest speakers and experts hold forth on a variety of topics, while fashion shows, masquerades, late night outdoor raves and maid cafes will also distract your attention. Panel topics include Anime Northstalgia, The Food Of Spy X Family, Canadian Anime Heritage Minutes, Explaining Anime To Your Mom, Greatest Anime Deaths, and Fire Emblem War Crimes. 

 

But wait, you ask. Dave, what are YOU doing this year at Anime North? Well, I'll tell you. What I'm doing on Friday is hitting the Nominoichi. And then I'll be in the ballroom at TCC North for another edition of Anime Hell. 

 

It's roughly two hours of roughly edited shorts, clips, trailers, commercials, educational films, and unidentified and unidentifiable audio-visual materials pursuant to our interests in Japan, animation, Hell, or all three. 

And on Saturday noon I'll be looking at three very specific years and extrapolating  entire decades worth of artistic development out of them. Maybe this one's a stretch but it gives us a chance to look at a lot of different, sometimes rarely seen anime, as we speed through 1965/1975/1985: Decades That Shaped Anime.

Later Saturday it's time to explore one of Japan's most notorious anime studios and find out how they turned clunky ineptitude into viral marketing success!

Sue Cat, Ultra Granny, all the stars you know and love will be there to celebrate the unique style of Knack.  All of which may in some way prepare you for what's happening 8pm Saturday night, which is of course Totally Lame. 

Host Neil Nadelman will take you on a two hour tour through the lost worlds of really lousy Japanese cartoons! Worth the price of your Anime North admission alone. 

Sunday noon, myself and a panel of other middle-aged white guys will do what middle-aged white guys can't stop themselves from doing, which is talking about World War Two, specifically the battleship Yamato and how the real thing differs from the cartoon that blows up entire planets. 

And if that isn't cataclysmic enough for you, stick around and see Neil and myself provide live commentary to a newly restored version of the long-suppressed Toho masterpiece of apocalyptic cinema, Prophecies Of Nostradamus.

Ending the convention with the end of the world? Well, if there's a better way to wrap up a fun weekend, well, I'd like to see it. And we probably will. In the meantime, start packing your bags and putting the finishing touches on your cosplay, and we'll see you at Anime North!

-Dave M
 

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Revenge Of The Kickstarter Of The Dagger Of Kamui

It was the 1980s. There was no way this movie wasn't going to be treated like exploitation trash, have half an hour hacked out of it and wind up in video stores with a dopey new title. This is how the world worked back then, Asia was a sweatshop cranking out cheap movies, cheap cars, cheap electronics, cheap cartoons, it was all fodder for the K-Marts, the Zayres, the Richways. They all needed discount junk for the ninja-obsessed kids and the developmentally-disabled adults who'd traded the sticky seats of the downtown grindhouse theater for the sticky buttons of their VCRs. After all, there were shipping deadlines to make and shelves to fill, everything was raw material for this machine, even big-budgeted Madhouse-animated Japanese films directed by Rintaro, which is what we're talking about today, the movie about the orphan with nothing but a sword and a secret and a destiny that would shake nations, we're talking about Dagger Of Kamui, a film that came and went and whose Blu-Ray revival is about to once again reveal its hidden treasures to a North America that might pay attention this time.

I've mentioned already how teenage me first saw this film, as a copy of a copy of a copy on a hotel TV during an Atlanta Fantasy Fair, sitting on the hard floor, ignoring the heat and whatever else I was missing at the convention, mesmerized in spite of the film’s punishing length and lack of English subtitles or dialogue. For those 132 minutes Dagger Of Kamui became our entire universe, our perception focused on the sweeping vistas of Bering Sea ice, mystical Hokkaido mountains, the American West, the neon slashes of ninja blades shattering the night with glowing crimson, and the surprising introduction of what we’d soon call Ninja Dog, all set to a pulsating rock soundtrack. When the film was over, returning to the beige suburban reality of the mid 1980s was hard.

Anime fandom wrote this film off in the 90s. Lumped in with other mid-list Just For Kids releases like Technopolice 21C and Dallos, Kamui wasn't lurid or extreme enough for the Ninja Scroll crowd, didn’t star outer space bikini teens or combination robots, was too long to fit on the tape-traders’ standard T-120, and even when AnimEigo released it on VHS (1993) and DVD (2003) the only reaction was to give Rintaro doubters something besides Harmagedon to poke unwarranted fun at.

Tetsu Yano's Kamui novels

How did Japan react to this boom-era epic from Haruki Kadokawa’s media-mix hit factory? Middling box office and a PC-88 game, that’s how. Kadokawa's third animated film after the groundbreaking Harmagedon and the mystifying atavism of Shonen Kenya, Dagger Of Kamui would come from author Tetsu Yano, whose path to fiction began by collecting garbage on US military bases. Intrigued by the lurid covers of discarded American SF pulps, Yano would go on to translate writers like Heinlein, Herbert, and Pohl into Japanese, as well as write SF himself, becoming the first Japanese SF author to visit the US. First novelized in 1970, Yano would continue Dagger of Kamui for Kadokawa Shoten in 1984 and 1985. The 80s editions of Yano's Kamui novels were illustrated by Moribi Murano, who would design characters for this Kamui film, and who also did character designs and manga for Toho's 1984 feature Lensman, bringing us full circle to the pulps.

Pulp is indeed what we're talking about here, mass-market historical pulp fiction. If Dagger Of Kamui was an American novel, it'd be 500 pages wedged into a drugstore rack, a bare-chested pioneer on the cover struggling for survival and glory while manhandling a busty wench against the backdrop of a savage frontier, a promise of sweeping melodrama built partly out of history and partly on the need to have something exciting happen every fifteen pages.

Of course, to fully enjoy historical fiction it helps to know the history, but where this film is concerned, well, they aren’t teaching the Meiji Restoration in American high schools, so pay attention. In the tail end of the Edo period, the Tokugawa Shogunate was losing its grasp on power. Desperation leads to extreme measures, which is why one day in the northwest Shimokita peninsula, way up there near Hokkaido, our hero Jiro returns home and finds his adoptive mother and sister dead in the darkness, mother fallen over a short sword wrapped in Ainu cloth, the same short sword and cloth that were found with infant Jiro 14 years before. Jiro unsheathes the flashing blade, the soundtrack kicks in with hypnotic drums, jangling guitar, and unearthly chants, and ladies and gentlemen, we have Dagger Of Kamui. Chased out of town during the opening credits, Jiro runs straight into the care of Tenkai, head monk of Tengen temple, and incidentally also the leader of the Shogun's secret shinobi squad, who takes Jiro and trains him in the ways of the shadow warriors, which this film is careful to never call “ninja.”

A hidden treasure, a secret warrior caste, an orphan destined for glory raised as a warrior, Japan itself at stake in a struggle that spans the Pacific, it doesn’t get pulpier than this. The story moves across what was then called Ezo and is now Hokkaido, as Jiro rescues an Ainu kid, reunites with his own Ainu mother, finds a treasure code in his father’s empty grave, realizes he’s a pawn in Tenkai’s game, and learns his own short sword is the titular Dagger, the Of Kamui one. Kamui in this case doesn’t mean the Sanpei Shirato manga, but the divine spirits of the Ainu, embodied in Hokkaido’s holy mountain Kamuinupuri, which we’ll see a few times in this film. The idea of a vast treasure connected with the Ainu should come as no surprise to viewers of what might be the Hokkaido indigenous people’s most comprehensive representation in anime, 2018’s Golden Kamuy, but in 1985 Dagger Of Kamui might have been one of the earliest, most realized representations of Ainu culture we’d see in the anime and manga field, apart from the Tetsuya Chiba manga (and Hayao Miyazaki TMS pilot) Yuki’s Sun and the Osamu Tezuka manga Brave Dan. Of course, later series like Samurai Champloo and Shaman King would feature characters of Ainu ancestry.

For Dagger’s Jiro, defying Tenkai means battling every one of Tenkai’s henchmen and henchwomen, from Shingo’s mind bending paralysis poison to the beautiful Oyuki and her duplication jutsu, their fight turning the Ezo hot springs landscape blood red in a flashing, possibly seizure-triggering hurricane of colors while cranking the soundtrack electric guitar up to eleven.

Samurai dropout Ando Shouzan shows Jiro a globe of the world and Japan's small place in it, and together they find the Dagger’s secret pointing to America and Santa Catalina Island, later famous as the shooting location for a bad Tommy Kirk beach movie. But before Jiro can embark on his own Catalina Caper, he must battle Tenkai's next killers, the Matsumae Trio, aptly named after a northern Japanese clan who ruled the northernmost approaches to Hokkaido and the Ainu. This trio of Toad Guy, Blowgun Hippy and Boomerang Samurai battle Jiro in a psychedelic nightmare showdown of eerie pastel fire accompanied by a soundtrack of ominous groaning and ethereal bells.

At a Kunashir Island port, Jiro saves the black American sailor Sam and defeats Oyuki in a struggle onboard Sam’s whaling ship and we’re halfway through the film. Jiro and Oyuki are on their way to America, until suddenly they’re ditched in Kamkatcha, to share backstories of being raised as assassins by Tenkai. In the snow they find both a puppy and maybe puppy love, but whoops, there's Tenkai who gives Oyuki a six-gun and tells her to get the job done. What Tenkai fails to realize is "the job" means "causing an avalanche that allows everyone to escape."

Smash cut to Nevada – yes, this is a film that handwaves 3500 miles of ocean - where a raggedy Jiro once again arrives to rescue a total stranger, saving the blue-eyed Indian maiden Chico from being assaulted by two outlaws. Reminiscent of Natalie Wood in The Searchers, Chico turns out to be not Navajo but actually French, orphaned and raised by the tribe, whose chief is, of course, Geronimo. In Carson City, Jiro inquires after Santa Catalina Island, has a Wild West high-noon shootout with the two outlaws, and gets directions from celebrated author Mark Twain, who tells him of the legend of Captain Kidd's gold.

Fun fact, the real Captain Kidd actually did leave a prize ship at a Santa Catalina Island in 1699, while he travelled to New York City and later London to defend himself unsuccessfully against charges of piracy. However, that ship didn't have any treasure on it, and Kidd's Santa Catalina was/is a completely different Santa Catalina Island, offshore from the Dominican Republic instead of Los Angeles.

If you want to put a message in your movie, maybe the best way to get it across is to have a world famous author deliver it. That’s what happens here when Mark Twain looks right at the camera and tells us all how he saw something wild and vital in Jiro, something that humanity might be in danger of losing in our fast-paced modern world of telegraphs, steam locomotives and ninja movies.

On California's Santa Catalina, Rintaro's cinematic skill reveals the treasure’s secret in a signature spectacle of light bursting out of darkness, a shining cross marking the crumbling cave in which there is only a throne and one solitary chest of coins - and Tenkai, sending Oyuki against Jiro in a final showdown interrupted by sudden betrayal and faithful Ninja Dog attack. Hidden behind a secret wall, the full treasure hoard is inadvertently revealed by Tenkai’s corpse – if it IS Tenkai’s corpse, because in true pulp fiction fashion it turns out secret shinobi bosses always have two or three body doubles, just in case.

Chico And The Man

Meanwhile in Japan, the real Tenkai's master the Tokugawa Shogunate is challenged by the Satsuma-Chōshū army, in what will be known later as the Boshin War. As the film says, "the 300 year reign of the Tokugawa Shogunate is crashing down!" But Tenkai meets with Lord Sadonokami (a real person) and Lord Kozukenosuke (another real person) and in spite of the Kidd treasure not working out for them, another plan is proposed, to mortgage Hokkaido to foreign powers in exchange for money to continue the war. Is their no end to their perfidy?

But Jiro, enriched by the treasure, hires his own band of Iga shinobi to carry on his own personal war with Tenkai. We see the down payment travel from woodblock-print Osaka to Nara, back to Iga, and into a ninja double cross that turns into a ninja triple cross! Soon Tenkai’s temple is in flames and he’s left to linger in defeat, just as in real life the Tokugawa government retreated to Hokkaido to set up the Republic Of Ezo with the military help of defecting French advisors. This was the first democratic government in Asia (well, okay, only samurai could vote) and it lasted almost a year before it fell in the Battle of Hakodate, the setting for Jiro’s final battle with Tenkai, set among artillery duels between the Imperial Navy and the star fortress of Goryōkaku.

Shellfire and explosions punctuate the percussive soundtrack as Tenkai, throughout the film thwarted by the infants he himself trained, defeated by his own intricate plans, halted even by the sacrifice of children and the elderly, is finally defeated both by Jiro and by historical forces no amount of ninjutsu can conquer. In the aftermath of the battle Jiro sees Tenkai for what he was, one more power-hungry monster in the service of any number of governments far removed from the people they supposedly govern.

And that’s Dagger Of Kamui, a movie where Jiro either saves or fights pretty much everyone he meets, sometimes both at the same time, in which randomly appearing characters turn out to be vital narrative anchors, a film that inserts real life famous personalities into the narrative to tell us how amazing the hero is, where we’re given not one but two body-double fakeouts and two - wait, three completely different sets of murdered relatives, and an intricate scheme that involves raising a ninja from birth and turning him loose to...let’s see, he’ll kill all your other ninja, how did that work out for you, Tenkai? In lesser hands, the bare-faced ridiculousness of Dagger’s melodrama would devolve into campy parody or get bogged down, like this review, in historical details.

But this is Rintaro we’re talking about here. He puts Madhouse and Project Team Argos to work delivering the shining sparks and neon traces of shuriken and kunai zipping through the darkness, animating bakufu armies and Old West steam locomotives and shifting Kuril ice floes, depicting shinobi bouncing across the landscape like Adieu 999 Mechanized Empire stormtroopers, artillery barrages and Ainu villages alike with consummate skill, all set against the beautiful landscapes of art director Mukuo Takamura, fresh from his location scouting trip to Hokkaido. Dagger screenwriter Masaki Mori and character designer Murano Moribi worked on the Madhouse adaptation of the similarly set late-Edo period Haguregumo together, and Murano also contributed to Madhouse's mid-80s animation domination with his work on child-frightener Unico In The Island Of Magic. Dagger Of Kamui’s visuals are by a top-tier list of talent, every minute driven forward by the amazing soundtrack largely the work of Ryudo Uzaki and his Ryudo Group, a whirling mix of traditional and modern, intense and propulsive, the perfect companion to the mind-bendingly hallucinatory visuals of shinobi vs shinobi combat that are the film’s highlights.

These animated psychedelic showdowns would have been lost had Kadokawa gone with their first choice and shot Dagger Of Kamui as a live-action film. Thankfully for anime fans, budget challenges dictated a move to animation. Sonny Chiba protege Hiroyuki “Burning Fire” Sanada, featured in Kadokawa's GI Samurai, Ninja Wars, and Legend Of The Eight Samurai, would voice the role of Jiro. Seen recently in the FX on Hulu remake of the historical miniseries Shogun, Sanada was no stranger to ninja danger, having done voice work in the anime series Igano Kabamaru, as well as starring in its live-action adaptation. You might recognize Tenkai’s voice actor Tarō Ishida as the voice of Count Cagliostro in Lupin III Castle Of Cagliostro – or he might have been your local Kyoto Buddhist priest, because he was one! Oyuki was voiced by Mami Oyama, whose career runs the gamut from Candy Candy’s Annie Brighton to X-Bomber’s Lamia to Arale in Dr. Slump. Mark Twain’s voice actor, Iemasa Kayumi, was the go-to actor for Frank Sinatra and Donald Sutherland’s Japanese voices, as well as the evil Lepka in Future Boy Conan. 

Distributed by Toei and released in March of 1985 on a double bill with the modern-day surfer romance Bobby’s In Deep, Dagger would make 210 million yen at the Japanese box office, a mediocre showing in a year when both The Burmese Harp and Be-Bop High School would break the one billion yen mark. Dagger Of Kamui merch would include a four volume film comic by Fujimi Shobo, a FM-7 cassette tape-loading PC-88 computer adventure game that required several minutes of load time with every move, and of course the motion picture soundtrack by Ryudo Uzaki and the Ryudo Group, featuring Noriko Watanabe singing the insert song "Kamui's Lullaby.”

Only a few years later the movie would find itself on VHS in North America, retitled “Revenge Of The Ninja Warrior,” cut to 96 minutes and released along with other anime titles in Celebrity Home Video’s “Just For Kids” package. Pioneering anime localizer AnimEigo would release an uncut, subtitled Dagger Of Kamui on VHS and Laserdisc in the 90s and later on DVD, the sleeve of which even highlights Rintaro's direction and namechecks his "Space Galaxy 999," whatever that is. North American anime fandom of the 90s and beyond sometimes dismissed Dagger as overlong, nonsensical, pompous and boring – and hey, I’ll give you those first three. For non-Japanese audiences the film definitely needs subtitles, and most of us wouldn’t be seeing it with English subs until that AnimEigo release, which failed to change the fortunes of a film that never really found an audience on either side of the Pacific. Who knows, perhaps the film was too historical for the ninja movie crowd and too weird for the historical fiction fans. Maybe the thing was twenty or twenty five minutes too long for moviegoers who had spent the past five years grinding through Be Forevers and Super Galaxys,  Cosmozones Of Love and other animated endurance contests.

However, don’t bury this treasure yet. In August of 2024 AnimEigo founder Robert Woodhead announced the Kickstarter for The Dagger of Kamui Treasure Trove Edition, a deluxe limited edition Blu-Ray featuring an HD transfer of the original film with English subtitles, art galleries, a digital archive of production materials from Kadokawa, and a new commentary track featuring Rintaro. The successful funding campaign is over, and discs should ship sometime around June 2025, but don't worry, you can still get one of these limited edition Blu-Rays for yourself.

It’s been a forty year journey of 7000 miles from Hokkaido to California and back, but if the gods of Kamuinupuri are with us and the Kamui wind is at our backs, maybe this time Dagger Of Kamui can finally find the audience it deserves, an audience of viewers able to enjoy both preposterous historical yarns and high-definition hallucinogenic hypno-shinobi, all in the same movie. I can’t be the only one!

-Dave Merrill

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