Hi no tori 2772: Ai no Kosumozon Daihyakka |
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Japan • 1980 • 122m •
  • Directed by: Taku Sugiyama. • Starring: Kaneto Shiozawa, Keiko Takeshita, Hiroshi Ôtake, Katsue Miwa, Kazue Takahashi, Kazuo Kumakura, Masatô Ibu, Osamu Kobayashi, Shûichi Ikeda, Shûichirô Moriyama, Toshiko Fujita, Yasuo Hisamatsu, Chris Hilton. • Music by: Yasuo Higuchi.  The 2720s: The Earth is in decay and so are many of its colonies. A young'n'terrible kid is growing up by himself in a single-room "kindergarten cell" surrounded by the high-tech of the new millenium. For one of his birthdays, he receives an android nurse: beautiful woman-transformer, programmed to teach and protect the kid. Eventually the kid grows, gets accepted in the Space Academy and discovers enemies and friends as he races through the known Universe in the search for the Space Firebird, a semi-mythical creature of energy. In an effort to know the race of such a tenacious explorer, the creature "enters" the android and falls in love with its master and friend. Back to a crumbling Earth, the youngster trades his life for the life of his planet. The Firebird accepts and The Earth is the new Phoenix: reborn out of its own ashes.
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Review:
You kind of have to understand the author and have a really open mind (and a tolerance for less-than-stellar delivery--more on that later). Osamu Tezuka was not your average manga author: He wasn't content to just tell stories of heroes and villains, but of deep characters with human personalities. His stories usually had some form of moral to them, but he didn't hamfist it or deliver it in a package, like in a Disney cartoon, but rather told sweeping, epic stories wrapped around the point he was trying to convey, but delivered in such a way where it was never shoved down your throat. Moreover, he felt stories shouldn't be limited to feel-good adventures or comedy, and thus most of his stuff had a very emotional quality to it. I personally feel Phoenix 2772 delivered on that.
Yes, the film won't immediately make sense if you go in, expecting a Disney-esquire song and dance number with a lot of feel-good moments and a "good guys always win" message. What instead needs to happen is that one needs to forget how things "should" work and instead prepare for anything. With an open mind and a little bit of thought, the story of this film makes perfect sense.
The weak point is one that's not a fault of the story or the creator, but rather of the translators: The English dub is bad. Mouths move, yet no one is talking. The voice actors sound like they're trying to sound natural, but forget that they're voice acting for an animated movie, so we have moments where mouths are moving yet no one is talking, and things like that. One flaw I particularly noticed is that the Phoenix of the title is always referred to as "272" instead of "2772," and no one could quite decide how to pronounce the main character's name (is it Godah, Gadoh, Gardoh, etc.) But... if you can overlook this and you can stand films that require you to think instead of just delivering all the answers to you on a silver platter, then this one is worth a try, even if you can only find the English dub version (which DOES seem to have been edited).
Review by nes_star from the Internet Movie Database.
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