“Being human means you have to die, whether you’ve lived out your dreams or not.”
1. Nostalgia
Galaxy Express 999 was one of my early experiences with Japanese animation, back in the days before anime was a familiar term in the U.S. I saw it (in an edited English version) after Speed Racer, Battle of the Planets, and Star Blazers, but probably before Robotech. I think it was before my sister and I saw the Toei Little Mermaid, but we watched it on VHS, so VCRs were available.
The biggest impression it made on me back then, in the early 1980s, was the mingled sense of fascination and horror at the whole idea of giving up your body for an artificial one, and, worse, of being physically transformed into a piece of equipment, consciously but helplessly living for years as a nut or bolt in a gigantic machine. The movie does a poor job of explaining exactly how that was meant to function, but it definitely communicated to young me a quiet, creepy shock of disembodiment, powerlessness, and the remorse of doing something terrible to yourself you could not undo.
There was also the visceral pain of the idea of someone murdering your mother and then setting up her body as a trophy: grief mixed with added outrage over the callousness, the indignity, and the inhumanity of the killers.
2. Practical Background
A few days ago I thought I knew the history of this movie, never doubting it was the condensed version of the Galaxy Express 999 TV series, but the on-disk “liner” notes of the Eastern Star/Diskotek blu-ray tell a different story. Apparently the movie was being made at the same time as the TV show was airing in Japan, so they were parallel productions, two versions of the same story (both based on the manga, which . . . was also not finished yet). That producers and studios were willing to put money into making it in those circumstances was, it seems, attributable entirely to the popularity of creator Leiji (or Reiji) Matsumoto and to the fantastic box-office numbers of the movie version of Matsumoto’s Space Battleship Yamato (the franchise reworked for the U.S. as Star Blazers).
It was a financial gamble, but it paid off, because Galaxy Express 999 was wildly successful in theaters. The blu-ray notes credit this film as a turning point in Japanese perception of anime; after 999 anime was no longer seen as just a children’s medium, and an anime film was appreciated by wider audiences as a film and not just as animation.
3. Length
Still, its roots as a shortened version of a much bigger story are hard to miss, because watching it you can feel like they should’ve shortened it a bit more. The running time is 2 hours, 10 minutes, and you know it. It has a series of mini-adventures—stops on various moons and planets along the train’s route—and it’s easy to start questioning why they’re not moving on with the main plot more directly.
And yet at the end of it, I can’t see much that could simply be cut out, because all the episodic pieces contribute to the story. Yes, it would be possible to make the movie shorter, but whatever you took out would have to be replaced with something that accomplished the same ends, just in less time. (The encounter with Shadow isn’t strictly necessary to the plot, but even that provides a stark example of one way someone responds to having a mechanical body, and it also gives one of the earliest hints that Maetel might be more than a typical rich person. It’s also a well-done scene.)
There’s also something to be said for emphasizing that what happens in Tetsuro’s life is a journey, not a quick resolution to a single problem; he has time to develop and change (and get frustrated) and also build relationships.
4. Relationships
Those relationships are pretty important here.
In fictional media you sometimes have a scenario where the bad guy gets what’s coming to him because he accidentally targets the wrong person—some jerk with a knife tries to mug the super-skilled green beret, or terrorists try to take hostages in the restaurant where Wonder Woman is dining in regular clothing, and they knock her filet mignon on the floor. Particularly in revenge stories this is a popular setup, and even though it might take the course of the whole movie, you know the evildoer is going to pay because he just messed with the wrong dude, starting something too big to handle.
That’s not what happens here. It’s not that the villain “picked on the wrong child this time!”
Tetsuro is not superhuman, or unusually passionate or skilled; he succeeds because of luck, because he’s helped by more powerful people, and because he won’t give up. But his quest could easily have ended up with him getting killed, and to me it feels possible that there were other grieved relatives who might have succeeded too, it just happened to be him.
Yet added to his determination is the fact that people want to help him, and a few of them are quite powerful and important. From the very beginning he’s being helped by others: he can’t steal a train pass without a few friends, friends who aren’t getting anything out of it despite the risks they’re taking. Not just anyone is going to draw out that response from friends, let alone people he or she has just met. So there is something special about him, even if it isn’t unique.
5. Mechanical Bodies
Repeatedly, people with artificial bodies are shown to have lost their humanity in the moral and ethical sense as well as the merely physical. Part of the problem seems to be that in artificial bodies you can be immortal (as long as no one shoots you with a particular weapon or, say, blows up the spaceship you’re on). With your own life secure, you value other lives less, apparently. And, says Tetsuro at one point, knowing we’re going to die makes us try harder to accomplish our goals, and makes us treat other people with more kindness. (I’m not sure there’s much evidence that our own mortality makes us kinder. It seems to me that knowing you’ll die can also make you trample on people in your desperation to stay ahead of death and fulfill your desires while you can.)
And yet it’s not as simple as “machine bodies destroy your humanity.” One of the “good guys” chooses to send his spirit into a machine, and one of the “bad guys” notes that despite her mechanical body, no one could control her warm human spirit.
6. Stray Thoughts
Yes, it is a little odd to have your high-tech interplanetary spaceship shaped like an old steam-driven train. The characters do give an excuse for this, at least.
The train in a few places has levers moving and dials activating on their own. Is this a hint that the train too has a human’s spirit inside it?
Maetel says/thinks some curious things about her relationship to the planet, and I wonder if the original TV show explained what she meant, because it’s definitely not clear in the movie.
Galaxy Express 999 is a significant piece of creator Leiji Matsumoto’s wider Captain Harlock universe. Looking at it from that perspective, some random kid wanders in from one side and plays a pivotal role in the bigger hero’s story, then walks off on the other side. Things get done in the Harlock-Emeraldas world that wouldn’t get done without Tetsuro, but he’ll never be as famous or as powerful as the major players. It’s possible to do something the big names can’t, but it may be the only time the universe notices you.
It might be missed in all the other things that are happening, but an awful lot of characters express a longing for things lost: not only a lost mother, but also lost youth, lost lover, lost son, lost chances . . . lost bodies.