MIYAZAKI HAYAO: FUTURE BOY CONAN (1978), PART II

The conclusion of a two-part review

In the first part of this review, we took a close look at the first eight episodes - roughly a third - of the 1978 anime series Future Boy Conan, and hopefully gained a fairly good idea of the primary themes of the show and how they are explored: the obligations of friendship, the long-term victory of nature over short-term human destruction. That's all the farther I'll be taking such a close analysis of the series narrative, as the remaining 18 episodes are (on the one hand) so broadly similar to what we've already seen that a thematic reading would be repetitive, and (on the other hand) so specifically different that I'd feel like a bastard if I gave away some of the surprises.

So let us leave Conan, Lana and Jimsy to their destiny, and scale back to consider some of the things I couldn't get to in the episode-by-episode framework: the overall aesthetic of the show, its place in anime history, and in the development of the career of its director, Miyazaki Hayao - who is, after all, the reason we're all here.

Viewed with thirty years of hindsight, knowing how staggeringly lush some of Miyazaki's later works would be, it's somewhat hard not to immediately respond to Future Boy Conan with a touch of dismay: it frankly looks a bit cheap. Especially in the character design and animation, where figures are deliberately drawn with a lack of fussy details, so that they can be quickly and efficiently painted in mostly solid blocks of color.



Moreover, the series is consistently animated at a much-reduced framerate: by my reckoning, never more than "on the twos" (a new image every second frame, i.e. 12 images per second), and nearly always "on the threes" (every third frame, i.e. 8 images per second). There is at any rate a definite jerkiness to the movement throughout all 26 episodes of the show that never lets you forget that you're watching a cartoon.

That being conceded, let us not forget the world in which Future Boy Conan was released. The 1970s were a fairly awful period in animation history, in every country; the state of American cartooning I will let speak for itself - SuperFriends, anyone? - and while my specific knowledge of 1970s anime is fairly limited, the scraps that I'm familiar with have suggested that on the whole, the Japanese animation industry had receded from the already uninspiring work being produced in the 1960s - Astro Boy, anyone? A quick survey of Japanese film history can at least confirm that the period was marked by a significant belt-tightening, both on television and in theaters, and this extended to the production of animation like everything else.

(And yes, I recognise that both SuperFriends and Astro Boy have their earnest defenders. Sadly, just because you liked something when you were six, does not mean that it is actually good.)

So even though it was "cheap", obviously produced quickly for television (public television, at that), Future Boy Conan actually holds up better than most of what was being produced around the world in 1978. For a start, the backgrounds are absolutely gorgeous. And, while the characters may not have the richness of movement or design that a bigger budget would have permitted, they've all been drawn with no small attention to developing their personality through facial features and expressions. We might even say that this is the more impressive feat than more outwardly "accomplised" animation would have been: given a small resource pool, the animators and designers - "designers" pretty much means "Miyazaki" - could create simple, instantly recognisable figures that could move through a great many emotions, which all had to be instantly recognisable themselves. That the biggest complaint I can lay against the animation is its framerate says quite a lot about their success: most animators of the same era wouldn't have even tried to do what the Conan team did. It's something like playing a symphony using three guitars and a drum.

It's hardly likely to be the case that Miyazaki was individually responsible for the high quality of this series, but not impossible to believe that his personal stake in the project gave him the passion to lead his animators to do their very best work. Let us not forget that Miyazaki himself was an animator on this series, as he'd been one of the country's premier animators for a decade at that point; as I mentioned before, this is indeed an essentially arbitrary place to begin a Miyazaki retrospective, given the number of projects he'd designed before this, and the number of stories he'd helped to develop. Really, the only point of distinction concerning Future Boy Conan is that it is the first project that Miyazaki largely guided from story concept to completion with only minimal input from others. But by 1978, he was something of an old pro, and the jump from supervising animator to director can hardly have been that pronounced.

So this is, in essence, the work of a seasoned filmmaker, and it shows. There's a certainty to the progression of the narrative, a faith that the audience will follow along without having things explained in tiny detail, and a willingness to put in twists and turns that would bring the whole edifice crashing to the ground if they weren't perfectly executed; the animation bears the stamp of someone with a marked gift for efficiency, getting the point across visually in the smallest number of steps. It's a bizarre thing to say of a 13-hour serial, but Future Boy Conan is a remarkably disciplined work: little is put in that isn't necessary to either further the plot, advance characters and theme, or craft a solid gag. The last of these isn't given any less weight than the other two, by the way: above all things, Future Boy Conan is awfully entertaining, and the goofy slapstick that dominates its humor is never frantic or pushy, as it so often is in children's entertainment across the globe: it too is expressed at a nearly perfect pace.

The show was a hit, and rightfully so: its intelligence, humanism and precise craftsmanship all added up to a very worthy entertainment that never speaks down to its audience or assumes that they can't keep up. Indeed, other than its frequent use of very broad slapstick and its privileging of child heroes as the most able and brightest members of the cast, there's no indication that it's "for kids" at all: it's "for audiences", and it does a damn good job of making sure that nobody of any age is going to be restless. That would in due course prove to be arguably the key element of Miyazaki's cinema, but of course that's in the future. Let us leave him for the moment in 1978, where the bright artist has continued his string of animated successes with his first "authored" work, though I can hardly suppose he or anyone thought of it in those terms at that time...