Future Boy Conan?

[Michael Hopcroft]

What sort of thing would help if I wanted to play inthe world of Kiyazaki's classic post-holocuast TV series Future Boy Conan? (Which, like Detective Conan, has no link whatsoever to Howard's barbarian warrior-hero....)

Basically, a combiantion of war and tectonic disaster has swamped most of the Earth under the sea. Mankinf survivies on scattered islands in the vast world-ocean. Conan, the hero of the series, is a young boy who with his astronuat grandfather are the sole inhabitants of Remnant Island. It's an idyllic life that is shattered when a girl from a distant island named Lana washes up on the shore -- with government agents from Industria (a totaltitaran techno-state) in hot pursuit. Conan sets off to resuce the girl from Industria and the oddessy is on.

The show was made in 1978, but holds up amazingly well. You can see many plot elements and visual tropes that would show up in such later Miyazaki films as Castle of Cagliostro and Laptua: Castle in the Sky. the Conan/Lana dynamic in particular would be strongly continued in Laputa.

[Solomon]

Conan was possibly the best Anime series of the late '70s. No anime fan shoud miss this.

Something that would help recreate the feel of a Miyazaki production is a cast or well-rounded villains. Miyazaki's characterization of opponents is often sympathetic - they're usually likable characters who just happen to be on the other side of the fence, and some of them join the heroes sooner or later in the show. Even though Miyazaki seems to have a pretty clear idea of what is good and moral and what is not, there are no cardboard "doing evil for evil's sake" villains in his works.

[Michael Hopcroft]

Conan was possibly the best Anime series of the late '70s. No anime fan shoud miss this.

Something that would help recreate the feel of a Miyazaki production is a cast or well-rounded villains. Miyazaki's characterization of opponents is often sympathetic - they're usually likable characters who just happen to be on the other side of the fence, and some of them join the heroes sooner or later in the show. Even though Miyazaki seems to have a pretty clear idea of what is good and moral and what is not, there are no cardboard "doing evil for evil's sake" villains in his works.

There is a perfect example of this in the very episode of this very series, when Conan's grandfather squares off with an Industria agent who becomes one of Conan's main adversaries later in the series. They have a brief but very insightful argument about morality. He thinks the Industrians are wrong because they brought weapons to the island for ther own purposes; the Indisytrian agents blames Granfather's generation for the war and the suffering that she, as a child of the postwar era, endured as she struggled to survive the calamity.

It later turned out that grandfather had tried to flee the planet suring the war, but the spaceship crashed -- he suspected that the ship itself "wouldn't let them" abandon the planet as he had orignally planned. Grandfather's fate may be symbolic of those who would run away from a problem rather than face it head-on -- he was the last survivor of the spaceship's crew, and his last request was that Conan go out into the world and interact with human beings rather than live in isolation and repeat his mistakes.

So even realitvely noble charatcers in Future Boy Conan can easily be viewed in shades of gray rather than as a black-and-white dichotomy of good and evil. As I go on in the series I wonder if even the most violent of the characters who oppose Conan and Lana will have good, sound reasons for doing what they do -- even if what they do is horrible. Industria is a totalitarian nightmare of a state, but those who run it actually believe that what they are doing is the best way for mankind to survive even as the spirits of many of the people they command are crushed by their extremely rigid social order. Perahps they believe human beings can't handle freedom in the sense that we understand it and that they need to be dominated and controlled.