Night on the Galactic Railroad | Mayumi Tanaka, Chika Sakamoto

Night on the Galactic Railroad | Mayumi Tanaka, Chika Sakamoto | What's "Polaris" in Esperanto?

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Night on the Galac...

	Night on the Galactic Railroad Mayumi Tanaka, Chika Sakamoto Central Park Media, 2001 average customer review:based on 16 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Based on a short story by the popular children's writer Kenji Miyazawa, Galactic Railroad offers viewers a slow-paced, dreamlike journey through space and time. When Giovanni, a lonely boy in a hill town, goes to get milk for his ailing mother, he finds himself crossing the Milky Way on a faster-than-light steam railroad. The stations he visits in various constellations, like the planets explored by St. Exupery's Little Prince, offer curious adventures and an assortment of human "types." Reality and fantasy blur aboard the train, and its travels across the light-years sometimes suggests the journey through life. The characters as depicted as cats, presumably to avoid the problems of animating humans.

Filmmaker Gisaburo Sugii's long career as an animator, director, executive director, and screenwriter began on The White Snake Enchantress, the first postwar Japanese feature. He has worked on projects ranging from the mildly erotic Cleopatra, Queen of Sex (1970) to Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy to a feature adaptation of the 11th-century novel The Tale of Genji. In the U.S. he's best known as the director of the movie version of the popular video game Street Fighter II. The contrast between the deadly battles of Street Fighter and the almost hypnotic pace of Galactic Railroad is striking. --Charles Solomon

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Mind-blowing, heart-breaking

I'm usually pretty conservative when it comes to dishing out stars, but this is one of the few films to which I would give ten without hesitation. The original story (by Japanese children's author Kenji Miyazawa) is a masterpiece in itself, but Sugii's screen interpretation is nothing short of amazing. Some of the best scenes are the quietest, such as when the protagonist is setting type in the printer's shop, or when he goes to the dairy to get milk and finds only an old woman there.

What's "Polaris" in Esperanto?

Oh so slowly did this film coax a tear from each my eyes. Don't believe twits who either couldn't finish it or (gasp) see it as a christian fable, they're obviously impatient christians! (as far as i know, the author was a confirmed buddhist...)

"In Chinese mythology, the constellation Cygnus is the site of the once-a-year magpie bridge which connects the lovers Niu Lang and Zhi Nu (see Qi Xi)." -from Wikipedia

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A film with all the beauty and pace of a painting

The animation in Night on the Galactic Railroad is good, in some places quite beautiful, with images reminiscent of those Miyazaki will later use in Spirited Away to much better effect. This is a poignant film and the sentiment is clearly heartfelt. The main problem is the movie just crawls. At one point the character says he's in a hurry and then proceeds to shuffle across the screen for about 70 seconds, perhaps pondering Zeno's paradox. The heavy breathing and ubiquitous "Uhhh" in the dialogue would be a distraction except that often that's the only thing going on, so there's nothing to take your attention away from. I watched this film with my seven-year old daughter and after a while we were making jokes just to pass the time. There were several sequences both of us watched with interest. I also found the metaphorical meditation on death intriguing. But this movie could have done all it was intended to in about half the time.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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