Space Pirate Captain Harlock

Arcadia of My Youth • Endless Orbit SSX

space pirate captain harlock 1978–79. TV series. (42 X 30 min.) Science fiction/space adventure. org Leiji Matsumoto (manga). dir Rintaro. mus Seiji Yokoyama. des Kazuo Komatsubara.

arcadia of my youth jpn Waga Seishun no Aracadia.

1982. Movie. 130 min. dir Tomoharu Katsumata.

endless orbit ssx aka Endless Road SSX. 1982–83. TV series. (22 X 30 min.) dir Tomoharu Katsumata, Masamitsu Sasaki. -bc

Captain Harlock is manga pioneer Leiji Matsumoto’s most lasting creation, a romantic figure who rides free in the sea of stars, a 19th-century hero let loose in a highly stylized universe one thousand years in the future.

The original TV series introduced Harlock as a noble outlaw, a space-going pirate with a code of honor. The setting is Earth in 2977, when the planet has bounced back from environmental disaster and humans have colonized space and built robot-run space farms that provide food and resources to the people of Earth. Harlock steals from Earth freighters and colonies and gives to the poor. He maintains contact with a little girl on Earth, Mayu, daughter of a now-dead friend of his, who stays in an orphanage run by cruel administrators working in collusion with Kuruta, commander of the military, who has made it his mission to capture Harlock. A threat emerges in the form of the Mazones, an alien race of plant-based organisms that once colonized Earth millions of years ago. Harlock picks up a young sidekick named Tadashi Daiba, whose scientist father had been killed by a Mazone warrior, and outfits him in a uniform and treats him as a protégé. The Mazones take the form of beautiful women, a fact which initially vexes young Tadashi and causes him to hesitate in combat. Harlock’s ship, the Arcadia, was built by Tochiro, his late engineer, and its crew includes Kei Yuki, his second in command, and Yattaran, his first mate, as well as the psychic, Mime. Harlock engages in battle with the Mazone race on Earth and throughout the galaxy while also continuing to wrangle with authorities on Earth, including the ever-persistent Commander Kuruta, who is not above using Mayu to entrap Harlock.

Arcadia of My Youth offers an alternate version of Harlock’s origin story and takes place after the Earth Fleet has been defeated by the invading alien race of Illumidans who establish an occupation authority on Earth. An officer with the defeated fleet, Harlock runs afoul of the occupation forces thanks to his increasing involvement with Maya, the leading voice of the burgeoning resistance movement, whose plaintive radio broadcasts are heard throughout the film. Caught between the Earth rebels and the Illumidans is another group of aliens, the Tokargans, whose own planet has been subjugated. Harlock has his first meeting with Tochiro, the engineer, and encounters Emeraldas, a self-proclaimed “free space trader.” Tochiro has built a massive space battleship, dubbed the Arcadia, and Harlock joins him on its first flight upward from its hidden underground dock, breaking through the surface and soaring into space.

When Harlock learns that Planet Tokarga has been marked for destruction by the Illumidans, he and his tiny crew—Tochiro, La Mime, an alien woman who’d been working for the Earth’s puppet government (and a different character from Mime in the original series), and Zoll, a senior Tokargan officer—rush in the Arcadia to try and prevent it. In the meantime, Zeda, the Illumidan commander, captures Emeraldas and Maya and schedules their execution in the hopes that Harlock will halt his futile mission and come back to try to rescue them. Everyone on Earth waits to see what Harlock will do. . . .

Endless Orbit SSX takes up where Arcadia of My Youth left off and follows Harlock’s early adventures in space, predating the first series but not exactly corresponding to its continuity. We see him gather more members of his crew, including Kei Yuki, a reporter who he rescues from an attack by the Illumidans, and another boy sidekick named Tadashi, who’d initially tried to collect the bounty on Harlock. Also on hand are Tochiro, the engineer, La Mime, now the Arcadia’s communications officer, and pirate queen Emeraldas. Harlock engages in battle with the Illumidans and often finds himself confronting old comrades from the Allied Earth Fleet who are now working for the occupiers, including female officer Leotard, with whom he has a memorable duel, and Captain Bentselle, who pilots Harlock’s old ship, the Death Shadow, and makes it his mission to take down the Arcadia, until he is unwittingly reunited with his long-lost daughter, Revi, who had been rescued in space by Harlock. Through it all, Harlock’s mission, and that of Tochiro, is to seek out the legendary planet Arcadia.

Queen Emeraldas (1998, OAV, 4 eps.)

Harlock Saga (1999, OAV, 6 eps.)

CosmoWarrior Zero (2001, TV, 13 eps.)

Space Pirate Captain Herlock: Endless Odyssey (2002, OAV, 13 eps.)

Harlock is a truly baroque figure, a tall, slender man with long brown hair, a scarred but handsome face, and an eyepatch. He is dressed in his own brand of pirate costume, with a long black cape (with red lining) over a black jacket and black boots. He often stands immobile on deck looking out into space, or on land confronting various enemies, whether soldiers, former comrades now working for the enemy, or hapless souls looking to collect the bounty on his head. He generally stands impassively, waiting for his challenger to make the first move and then outdraw them with his sword-ray gun, or waiting for the Arcadia to come and get him in the middle of a standoff. Rarely does he even flinch.

The first series is done in a particularly stylized fashion, with subsidiary characters drawn to look far more exaggerated and cartoonish than in the later versions, and a production design with more abstract designs and images. The series goes all over the map in terms of locales, including the pyramids of Egypt, ancient ruins below the surface of Venus, a “fake” Aurora Borealis encountered in the North Pole, and a “red sea” in space where Tadashi finds himself trapped when in the mind-control grip of a female alien. Characters often hallucinate or find themselves in the midst of surreal settings. The series’ visual strategy was limited only by the animators’ fevered imaginations.

Arcadia of My Youth is much more detailed and streamlined than the TV series, with more lifelike and expressive characters and more fluid animation. It avoids the cartoonish aspects of the supporting characters. With a movie-quality budget, the imagery boasts a visual beauty rivaling the best of such anime stylists as Rintaro and Yoshiaki Kawajiri. The space vistas are quite breathtaking, as are the planetary landscapes, even when reduced to rubble and ruins. Amidst all the bleakness and tragedy, there are frequent memorable images throughout the film, especially in the scene where Maya and Emeraldas are tied to posts awaiting execution in the overcast dawn, surrounded by brick ruins in a Western-style setting as Harlock watches on a TV monitor aboard the Arcadia.

The later series, Endless Orbit SSX, is actually a sequel to the Arcadia movie and its look is more in line with the movie, something of a necessity since it uses footage from the movie. The characters are sleeker and more polished than they were in the original series and the backgrounds a tad more realistic. The planets they visit have distinctly Earth-like settlements, including Western towns with high-tech touches such as a fax machine spewing out newspaper reports. There are moments that recall Galaxy Express 999, which also had numerous Western-style settings. In fact, Tadashi, the new sidekick Harlock picks up, is outfitted and designed in a way that seems modeled on Tetsuro of the Galaxy Express 999 movies.

Matsumoto’s two most characteristic series, Galaxy Express 999 and Captain Harlock, both premiered in 1978 and yielded his most memorable characters, from Harlock, Tochiro, and Emeraldas to Tetsuro, Maetel, and Boss Antares. Both are deliberately stylized, although in significantly different ways. While Galaxy Express had more of a storybook or fable quality, with fanciful tales centering around parent-child separation or regret over the replacement of one’s human body with a machine one, Harlock is more of a swashbuckling adventure, but with a distinct mythological flavor as the crew encounters otherworldly creatures and strange locales on different planets, like some of the more bizarre elements of Greek myth. Either way, neither series should be confused (or compared) with the more “realistic” space series of the time, Space Battleship Yamato, Mobile Suit Gundam, or, a little later, Macross.

Harlock is a 19th-century figure that has survived somehow into the 30th century. He is destined to be free, and every move he makes or refuses to make is predicated on that. There is an existential, fatalist quality to him. His actions are less those of a moral man sticking to a code than those of someone following a destiny in which his code and his fate are intertwined, and there’s nothing he can do to change either, as if his history was written a long, long time ago.

The Arcadia of My Youth movie is probably the starkest dramatization yet of the tragic romanticism that distinguishes so many of Leiji Matsumoto’s works. There’s a mood of sadness and bitterness in every scene with “bright” spots provided only by those willing to die, to stand alone, to sacrifice every­thing for a lost cause and a hopeless ideal. Promises are made and kept, but love is never requited. There’s a sense of connections to a long history, with flashbacks to Harlock’s ancestors of a thousand years earlier.

Underscoring the whole mood is the frequent use of a piece of classical music from the Baroque era, Albinoni’s Adagio. The entire film is a stunning, if slow and dramatic, space epic, molded more on character, individual fate, and destiny than on spectacular space battles and rash moves. While Matsumoto’s work has been masterfully served by most of the animators adapting it over the years, one has to single out Arcadia as perhaps the finest single achievement in the entire animated Matsumoto oeuvre, in which a high standard had already been achieved by Yamato, Galaxy Express 999, the Harlock TV series, and Queen Millennia.

More than twenty years after the original series, Harlock sequels were released, starting with The Harlock Saga, a six-part OAV series which adapts Richard Wagner’s famous Ring Cycle opera, Der Ring des Nibelungen, to the Harlock universe. A new TV series was produced in 2002 called Space Pirate Captain Herlock: Endless Odyssey, directed by Harlock’s original helmer, Rintaro. As enjoyable as it was to see the old crew back together for new adventures, something was missing. The visuals were much slicker and more streamlined than the original. Everything was done digitally, which meant no more line drawings and no more washes of uneven color in the stark backgrounds. No more 19th-century feel to it all. Everything was just a little too clean and polished. No longer was there a sense of Matsumoto laboring at the drawing board for each frame. A strictly analog creation, Harlock was never meant to be digital.

Rintaro directed the Captain Harlock TV series and went on to direct both Galaxy Express 999 movies. He reunited with Harlock in 2002 for a thirteen-episode OAV series, Space Pirate Captain Herlock [sic]: Endless Odyssey.

Arcadia of My Youth was directed by Tomoharu Katsumata, an underrated veteran animator with a long string of superb credits, including Great Conquest: Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and the second Yamato feature, Farewell Yamato: In the Name of Love. He also codirected Endless Orbit SSX with Masamitsu Sasaki.

Arcadia of My Youth includes historical flashbacks to Harlock’s distant ancestors, Phantom F. Harlock, an early German aviator, and his son, Phantom F. Harlock II, a pilot for the Nazis in WWII. In an extended opening sequence, we see the original Harlock attempting to fly his biplane over the Owen-Stanley range, a difficult set of mountain peaks in New Guinea. When he “hears” the laughter of the “Owen-Stanley Witch” and sees her awesome visage in the clouds, he becomes even more determined to make it. This Harlock is the author of Arcadia of My Youth, a book that remains the treasured possession of Space Pirate Harlock some thousand years later. Later in the film, after Captain Harlock has met the brilliant Japanese engineer, Tochiro Oyama, who takes him underground to see the secret ship he has built, we are treated to a flashback to World War II and the fateful meeting of Phantom Harlock II and Tochiro’s ancestor, another Japanese engineer (and possessor of a copy of Arcadia), to whom Harlock entrusts his prized Revi C-12/D gunsight. He then distracts the French resistance and gives himself up so that Tochiro can escape into Switzerland.

Captain Harlock Space Pirate was seen on some individual public TV stations and UHF stations in the U.S. in Japanese with English subtitles.

Four episodes (1–3, 9) of the original series were dubbed into English in 1981 by TV syndicator Ziv International in an attempt to market the series to American TV stations. There wasn’t enough interest, so the four dubbed episodes were licensed to home video distributor Family Home Entertainment and sold as two VHS volumes.

In 1985, the original Captain Harlock episodes were finally seen on commercial television, although in altered form. Following the success of Robotech, which edited together three different anime space series to make one eighty-five-episode show for syndication to the U.S. market, the same people intercut two Leiji Matsumoto series, Captain Harlock and Queen Millennia (1981–82) to make one sixty-five-episode series which was then called Captain Harlock and the Queen of a Thousand Years. Unfortunately, it didn’t have anywhere near the success of Robotech and aired in few markets. Queen Millennia has yet to be seen in any other form in the U.S.

Despite these earlier releases of Harlock TV episodes (all out of print or syndication by now), most anime fans of recent vintage (1990s on) have seen the character only in Arcadia or his two cameos in the Galaxy Express 999 movies, both of which are currently available only in dubbed versions. Until the original series is properly released in the U.S., Arcadia of My Youth is the best way for fans to see “classic” Harlock in his original voice, as acted by Inoue Makio.

Matsumoto has stated in interviews that the title for the Arcadia movie came from a French film he saw in his teens, Marianne de ma Jeunesse (Marianne of My Youth, 1955).

violence Standard space combat violence, including ray-gun blasts and spaceship explosions. nudity Some nudity among the Mazone “women” in the TV series.