Soratobu Yuureisen

This is quite a terrible film. It started out promosing enough but quickly unravels and falls by the wayside. The movie is filled with manipulative writing to connect with the protagonist, but none of it is earned and by the end of it, you just want to move on and forget about what you watched. Nothing that occurs feels like it belongs. The dog looks like Scooby-Doo and comes across as goofy. After just recently watching The Dog of Flanders, the dog in The phantom ship might as well be a stuffed animal or toy as it doesn't emit anything genuine. The main protagonist isfar too assertive and everything just falls conveniently into his lap as the movie progresses. There are boring exposition scenes through narration that are intended to spoon feed the audience constantly. The art direction is ugly and has very limited redeeming qualities to it -- it kind of looks like something Tezuka might dream up if he were hungover. That is to say, it would be one of his weakest works of his career. I watched this film due to Miyazaki being attached, but unfortunately, there was nothing here that gave me a sense of his involvement. If not for that, I never would have come across it and that would have been for the best. I have watched a bunch of classic anime of late including: The Orphan Brother (1961), The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon (1963), Gulliver's Travels Beyond the Moon (1965) and Horus: Prince of the Sun (1968). While none of those films are perfect and all suffer their own, sometimes signficant flaws, they each had a unique vision to them with some fantastic, memorable moments. That cannot be said of The Phantom Ship and it might be a good thing that this film has fallen into obscurity.

This is a strange Toei film. Dealing with loss of family and addiction to soda seems to be the points of this film, and I'm not joking. The movie switches focal points of the plot from a giant robot terrorizing the city, to a revenge plot on an ever escalating scale. Some points of this movie range from good such as showing familial love to an adopted child, to bad as the children towards the end of the movie seemingly embrace suicide as an attempt to stop the enemy, when an escape pod was ready and available the entire time. Overall, this movie is agood watch just to see what an adventure movie from Toei would be like back before anime exploded into what we know today.

Pretty standard sci-fi fare for the time, with giant monsters and Tetsujin-type giant robots. Decent for what it is, but with only an hour runtime. Miyazaki worked on this anime, and you can tell by the art style, especially the main heroine who unfortunately appears for only the last 20 minutes. Character and plot development is minimal, and the film could've benefitted from an extra 30 minutes. Compared to anime just a few years ago, the animation is great and looks more like anime would in the 70s. There's an environmentalist or anti-capitalist message in this film, but because of the short runtime it's hardto make sense of it here.

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