The sheer joy of animation: Mirai Shounen Conan

I’m not the only one who fell in love with Eizouken ni wa Te wo Dasu na! when this scene came up in the first episode, right?

There have been several series, most noticeably Shirobako, showing what working on anime is like and plenty more series that just celebrate otakus and fandom, but I can’t recall any other series being this explicitly about the joy of animation. It came at just the right time for me, the enthusiasm and genuine love Eizouken ni wa Te wo Dasu na! has for animation rekindling my own flagging interest in it. And it was this scene in particular which triggered that. It’s that experience of settling down to watch something just to be entertained for a little while and then getting hooked, of discovering a world you did not know existed. The anime Midori watches is a thinly disguised version of Mirai Shounen Conan, a 1978 anime series directed by Miyazaki Hayao. Thanks to his involvement it’s fairly well known, but it’s still a somewhat obscure choice to make as Midori’s gateway anime, a fortytwo year old series. Especially when, as far as I know, this isn’t available for streaming outside of Japan nor is currently in print as a DVD or Bluray.

Midori herself explains why this series in particular made her realise anime is something that people actually make, rather than something that just exists. She and her friend are visiting her new high school’s freshmen’s festival and they go to the anime club’s screening of an episode of “Conan of the Lost Island“. Her friend asks her why this is entertaining to her and she responds with the sort of exhaustive detail you should expect from an unfiltered anime nerd. In particular, she explains how an unexplained nonsense idea like an antigravity device powered flying car is made real by how the characters interact with it. How the extraordinary is made plausible by how it affects the characters. How showing a character running with his upper body bend forward against the wind makes him running over the wing of a flying aircraft look real even when you know it’s impossible.



Eizouken‘s high praise of the series made me want to watch Mirai Shounen Conan myself. I finally got around to it late last year, watching it over New Year’s Eve, making it the last anime I started in 2020 and the first I finished in 2021. Even without having been primed for it by Eizouken, I think I would’ve noticed Mirai Shounen Conan‘s physicality. Just take the clip from episode eight above. Conan and Lana have been running from Lana’s abductors, but their boat got hit by a cannon shell and sunk. Conan, still in magnetic cuffs from having been captured before, is stuck to a piece of debris and has to free himself. The way this is shown through Conan’s straining against his cuffs, how you can almost feel the effort he puts into trying to bend the metal he’s stuck to, the liberation once he is free, is rare in anime. Action can feel weightless in modern anime, especially when reliant on CGI. Not so in Conan. This would be impressive in a movie, but in a weekly television anime it’s even more so. The high standard set in the first few episodes is never let up. Nor is this physicality limited to key scenes. Everything is treated with the same care.

Mirai Shounen Conan: A very Miyazaki aircraft

If you didn’t know Miyazaki was involved with Mirai Shounen Conan, it should be clear by the time the Falco, — the airplane above — shows up. It’s such an obvious Miyazaki design and it reminded me of the plane from The Castle of Cagliostro. A pity such a cute plane is being used by the bad guys. The underlying theme of the series may be about how science unleashed in service of greed is bad and humanity needs to return to a managable technology level, but Miyazaki still makes that technology look hella seductive. Even the world destroying monster planes featured in the narration that starts each episode look cool. That conflict between morality and aesthetic we see a lot in Miyazaki’s later works, but Mirai Shounen Conan was the first time it was displayed like this. Miyazaki can’t help but display the glamour of the very technology that his stories want to condemn. The weapon destroying the world being monstrous airplanes rather than more mundane nuclear missiles is telling in itself. A romantic touch even in armageddon.

Hortensia Saga: young Monsley encounters the moth-like areoplanes that destroyed the world

Miyazaki’s essential humanity is also on display here: as with Terry Pratchett, few of his villains are completely unredeemable. Throughout the series there are hints given as how the sheer desparate struggle for survival made Industria into the horrible dictatorship that it is when Conan is taken there. It’s clear that in a system where people are reduced to solely how useful they are to the survival of Industria, the competition for safety, the desperation to not slide down into the unwanted masses, people become villains. As a contrast there’s High Harbour, which like Industria found itself having to rebuild civilisation from scratch, but without even the advantage of a fully functioning nuclear reactor at their disposal. High Harbour had no choice but to settle for roughly a 19th century level of technology and build a society you could live in comfortably. Industria, for all its technical prowess was still operating on “lifeboat rules”. At best it’s a system that breeds opportunists like captain Dyce, eager to do whatever it takes to earn a safe spot within it, but ready to sell it out the moment it becomes advantageous to do so.At worst, you get would-be tyrants like Lepka, eager to re-use the same weapons that destroyed the world to make himself its master. The only person with any true loyalty to Industria is Monsley, the captain of the Falco, who as a young girl saw her parents die in the apocalypse right before her eyes, she herself only saved by her dog having run away. The crimes she commits are not done out of self interest, but purely for the survival of Industria and its people. Both Monsley and Dyce are not irredeemable villains, just people driven by their terrible situation to do what’s necessary to survive.



Another way you can tell this is a Miyazaki production is through the character acting. The physicality that is key to making the fantastic believeable in his work, is also used to show the emotions and character of his personages. The first time I saw Conan running I knew this was a Miyazaki series; by the time I saw the sequence above, in episode three I was certain. The sheer physical joy in the animation is a dead giveaway. Here too physical impossibilities like Conan and Jimsy almost running vertically up that cliff side are sold both by the sheer confidence of the animation and the fact that they struggle to both fit through a bifurcated tree trunk seconds later. Each of them straining to out run the other, as shown through how thye throw their bodies foreward, stretching to gain even a centimetre of advantage. Then later, as they lose control running down hill, how it’s shown through them leaning back, attempting to break their speed without losing ground. While the movement and speed are exaggerated, the way it’s shown is firmly anchored in real life experience. You see kids running like this. Little dialogue is needed to show the stubbornness and competitiveness of Conan and especially Jimsy here.

What Mirai Shounen Conan offers is the unpolished version of what Miyazaki would perfect at Studio Ghibli. It’s a study in what you can achieve even with the limitations and the budget of a television anime. If you love animation for its own sake you need to watch this. Getting a great story and likeable characters as well is a bonus.

Anime is beautiful — Eizouken First Impressions

If Shirobako was about keeping your love for anime while working in the industry, Eizouken is all about the pure love for anime and why anime is worth loving.

Eizouken_anime: do you want to make anime or not?!

Yuasa Masaaki. This is the second or third series of his I went in blind only to be knocked out by the sheer majesty of his imagination. Devilman Crybaby, two years ago, was the last time that happened. I went in only having seen the cute pictures of monster girls and their girl friends on anitwitter and was completely unprepared for the maelstrom of feels that happened when I binged it one Sunday. For Eizouken ni wa Te wo Dasu na! I only had the MAL description to guide me, which made me think it would be a more fluffy Shirobako. A slice of moe version if you will, cute girls in a high school club making cute anime together. And while there are school girls, an anime club and a desire to live your life to the fullest doing what you love, it’s all a bit more hard edged.

What it shares with Shirobako is its love for anime. The scene shown above was basically my experience watching this. There’s so much to like in this scene. First, there’s the simple pleasure of watching the protagonist Midori settle down for a night casual anime watching, only to get drawn in slowly to the point she almost crawls into her screen to see everything better. Second, the fact that it’s Mirai Shounen Conan/Future Boy Conan, a 1978 anime series directed by Miyazaki Hayao. Finally, that it takes the time to actually show scenes from the anime, lovingly recreated and still recognisably in the style of the original. You see Midori fall in love with anime and you see why she falls in love with it, why a 42 year old anime could stir her this way. I don’t know why exactly Mirai Shounen Conan was chosen as the series that made her fall in love in anime, but it fits so well. The town or city that Midori lives in could as easily be part of the world of Conan, it has the same sort of aesthetic, though it also reminded me a little bit of some of Moebius works.

The true story only starts with a time jump to Midori just starting high school, badgering her friend Kanamori to go to the Conan showing in their school’s anime club, not wanting to go by herself. Kanamori agrees, but only if she treats her to no less than four bottles of milk from the local bath house. Kanamori is a bit mercenary, hard headed, not that interested in Midori’s obsession with anime, but a good friend who goes along to support her. When she asks what Midori actually enjoys about all this, the result is the rant above, where she painstakingly and in great detail explain just what makes Mirai Shounen Conan so good until her friend stops her.

What’s so great about this is that Midori’s rant is one you could’ve read on Sakbugabooru. It’s all about the art of animation, not the cool plot or cute characters, let alone the usual otaku consumerism. Midori is all about how the animators create a whole world by taking reality and “exaggerate it in a way that makes sense”. As we watch the same scene with the antigravity vehicle they’re watching, we have Midori explaining that by picking it up as if you would try and push a car to get it to run, you lend it an air of realism. She elaborates further, as we watch a typical Miyazaki impossibly big airplane take to the sky and Conan running around on its hull, how the way the plane moves and debris circles around it again makes it believable, with the sheer physicality of how Conan moves atop of that ship makes you accept it when it’s clearly impossible.

And the best part is that having explained and set out all these rules, the show immediately goes and demonstrates how to use them. Everything Midori said about Conan goes for her own series as well, up to and including the idea of “seeing a character wandering around a mysterious world filling you with a sense of adventure”. Most obviously in the chase scene right after Midori’s rant, as she and Kanamori run into Tsubame Mizusaki, child actress & model. Mizusaki’s parents have forbidden her to join the anime club and now her bodyguards are chasing her to stop her doing her so. As she’s confronted by the head bodyguard in some sort of theatre stage, the other two rescue her, being chased by the guard, fleeing to the top of the stage. As the guard approaches, Midori pulls a rope and opens a trap door, which he avoids. She pulls another which does nothing useful, he smirks but as she pulls the third rope, the steps collapse, forming a slide and he slides down them into the trap door. It embraces all the principles Midori set out just before and adheres to the rule of three of comedy. It’s a neat, physical scene in an episode that has a lot of talking heads otherwise.

Once the three escape Mizusaki’s minders they take her to a laundrette to clean her strawberry milk stained school shirt. It’s there that she and Midori bond about anime, showing each other their sketch books. Whereas Midori is all about concept art, Mizusaki is more about character sketches and the like. As Kanamori looks on, she asks whether they would like to make an anime together. Midori demurs, but Kanamori asks if not now, when and she has a point. As high school amateurs they have nothing to lose, nobody expecting anything from them, so if they fail, so what?

Her little motivation speech leads to a bout of inspiration for the other two, bouncing of each other’s ideas to create an entire world from a small doodle in Mizusaki’s sketch book. I’ve included the start above, but the full sequence runs over five minutes. As they creating, Mizusaki asks about Midori’s interest in concept art and she answers by asking if she ever created layouts for a secret base as a child. For Midori, concept art is her creating a whole new world as best as she can. Even before she got into anime we saw her sketching and mapping her new city. Having somebody to do this with must be heaven for her.

When the scene switches from them creating a new world to them having an adventure in that new world, we once again see everything that Midori ranted about earlier, everything that we saw in those Mirai Shounen Conan excerpts, being done here as well. The vehicle they created should not, could not fly as it does here, but it works because the way it behaves is consistent with the visual cues we are given about it. When one of the wings is damaged and no longer works, Mizusaki and Kanamori jump out and use their body weight to shift the vehicle, so they can fit through a narrow crevice in the landscape. You can feel them do it as you’re watching. It feels right.

Honestly, something very good has to be released this year for Eizouken ni wa Te wo Dasu na! to not be my anime of the year at the end of it. This is not just a good anime, it’s something that completely rekindled my love for anime, made me excited about anime after a year in which I watched much less anime than I used to. I was a bit burned out on it all, but this was just what I needed. Having characters fall in love with anime to the point of wanting to create it themselves, without all the usual otaku nonsense surrounding it, is so refreshing.