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Based on a short story by the popular children's writer Kenji Miyazawa, Galactic Railroad offers viewers a slow-paced, dreamlike journey through space and time. When Giovanni, a lonely boy in a hill town, goes to get milk for his ailing mother, he finds himself crossing the Milky Way on a faster-than-light steam railroad. The stations he visits in various constellations, like the planets explored by St. Exupery's Little Prince, offer curious adventures and an assortment of human "types." Reality and fantasy blur aboard the train, and its travels across the light-years sometimes suggests the journey through life. The characters as depicted as cats, presumably to avoid the problems of animating humans. Filmmaker Gisaburo Sugii's long career as an animator, director, executive director, and screenwriter began on The White Snake Enchantress, the first postwar Japanese feature. He has worked on projects ranging from the mildly erotic Cleopatra, Queen of Sex (1970) to Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy to a feature adaptation of the 11th-century novel The Tale of Genji. In the U.S. he's best known as the director of the movie version of the popular video game Street Fighter II. The contrast between the deadly battles of Street Fighter and the almost hypnotic pace of Galactic Railroad is striking. --Charles Solomon
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