Mike Toole (@michaeltoole) saw episode 3 of Battle of the Planets,
“The Space Mummy,” on TV in the autumn of 1980. He was 4 years old.
He didn’t know it was from Japan, but he did know he dug the hell out
of it! More than 30 years later, he’s still digging the hell out of
Japanese animation. He’s written for Animerica, Otaku USA, and Sci-Fi
Magazine, and currently writes The Mike Toole Show, a biweekly column for Anime News Network. (Full disclosure: Mike's one of my closest anime chums. Friendship is magic, guys. - Ed.)
I don’t remember 1975 too well, because I hadn’t shown up yet. I did show up in March of ‘76, so I guess I existed for the last few months of ‘75, at least nominally. There’s something fascinating about studying events from before you were born, isn’t there? In some ways, looking at the pop culture landscape makes it all seem closer and more real, so let’s check out Japan’s animated pop culture landscape of that fiftieth year of the Showa period.
1975 would start off right with a wonderful, painterly, heartbreaking TV adaptation of Ouida’s novel
Nello Dies at the End, better known to us folks as
The Dog of Flanders. What we’ve got here isn’t just a beloved adaptation of a famous story—it’s the first of Zuiyo Eizo’s numerous animated works (we know ‘em as
World Masterpiece Theatre) to feature the contributions of animator Yasuji Mori. Mori-sensei’s one of those guys whose obscurity among younger fans is a little frustrating—I’d describe him as Miyazaki before Miyazaki, although he didn’t boast the Ghibli co-founder’s scriptwriting talents.
What he did do was build, from the ground up, the animation aesthetic of Toei Doga itself, starting right with their first feature film,
Hakuja-den, for which he provided storyboarding and key animation duties. 1975 started with one of Mori’s best and most well-remembered works, and after the studio changed its name to the somewhat more memorable Nippon Animation later in the year, Mori would work on another adaptation of a famous novel,
Prairie Girl Laura, which we westerns would more immediately recognize under the story’s original title,
Little House on the Prairie.
1975 wasn’t really the year of animated classics of children’s literature, though. Yasuji Mori did great stuff in that field, but if I had to point to a single creator whose work dominated the mindshare of Japanese cartoon dorks in 1975, I could really only point to Go Nagai and his seemingly limitless army of super robots. The super robot occupation started in March with theatrical screenings of
Great Mazinger vs Getter Robo, a short feature film that began with the titular titans squaring off and ended with them teaming up to face an even greater threat. This, of course, wasn’t merely a chance to set little kids’ minds afire with the spectacle of two awesome robots in the same cartoon-- it was a prelude to the TV debut of
Getter Robo G in May.
