Fans of Japan’s Studio Ghibli and its co-founder Hayao Miyazaki will remember this plotline from his first official Ghibli movie, 1986’s Castle in the Sky: A dark-haired boy stumbles across a mysterious pigtailed girl who seemingly materialized from thin air.
But the most fervent Ghibli fans will know that Miyazaki used the exact same premise eight years earlier for a different story: the 1978 anime TV series Future Boy Conan.
The release, available as a four-disc Shout! Factory Blu-ray or a digital download, features a 4K digital restoration and a new English-language dub produced by Vancouver’s Ocean Productions .
Conan came with its share of problems: Miyazaki initially hesitated over directing the series, which constantly fell behind schedule, and received low ratings when it first aired on Japanese television.
Twenty years later, two survivors eke out a life on Remnant Island, where affable 11-year-old Conan lives simply with his adopted grandfather, swimming and fishing and bounding with endless energy.
Like so many Miyazaki protagonists, he manifests a deep, intrinsic loyalty once he connects with someone — one memorable visual shows him using all his strength to produce a single drop of water for her to drink.
She occasionally feels too much like a damsel in distress, but she has her own arc and talents.
Bumbling Captain Dyce and his crew provide comic relief, and they undergo an antagonist-turned-ally arc reminiscent of Dola’s pirate gang in Castle in the Sky, while Industria government agent Lepka is one of Miyazaki’s rare traditional villains.
Inhabitants of the island Industria eat synthetic food made out of plastic; High Harbor inhabitants live off the land, connecting with nature.
Where Castle in the Sky riffs off a steampunk aesthetic, Conan is all about ’70s retrofuturism, building a vibrant visual language of slick teal spacesuits, tangerine seaplanes, and beeping computer rooms. The ocean provides the central backdrop, but the environments vary from abandoned underground cities to endless deserts.
Some of Key’s plot points and offbeat details, like Lana’s avian telepathy, make it into the show, but Miyazaki remixes Key’s basic idea of a watery dystopia into a tender-hearted children’s adventure.
In a 1983 interview with Animage Bunko , the director explained, “In the original story, you have what seems to me to be a world without hope.
The story goes that the author saw an early version, hated Miyazaki’s interpretation, and instructed his estate to block it from coming to the States.
Pixar’s Luca is largely an attempt to make a Studio Ghibli movie within the Pixar framework — for one thing, the Italian seaside village setting is called Portorosso, in a salute to Ghibli’s Porco Rosso — and director Enrico Casarosa took visual cues from the playful multi-limb physicality of Conan, showing his team episodes for reference.
The directorial debut of Hayao Miyazaki , Future Boy Conan is a landmark in animation history.