How to Adapt an Unadaptable Story

About 'Night on the Galactic Railroad.'

A still from Night on the Galactic Railroad (1985)

Welcome! It’s time for another edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. And this one is all about Night on the Galactic Railroad, one of the very best anime films.

Kenji Miyazawa isn’t a household name in the Anglosphere. Things are different in Japan, though. He died a writer of modest renown in 1933 — but his work swept his home country in the decades after. Children grew up with it, lived with it into adulthood and passed it down.

Japanese animation, too, was touched by his poems and fiction. Hayao Miyazaki drew from Miyazawa to create his giant panda — and Totoro. Isao Takahata turned a Miyazawa story into a feature film in 1982. A few years later, Night on the Galactic Railroad brought a novel of Miyazawa’s to theaters.

Director Gisaburo Sugii handled that last one. Now 84, he’s from Miyazaki’s generation: the people who built Japanese animation as we know it. Only he isn’t from the Ghibli circle, and his films aren’t like Miyazaki’s films. Galactic Railroad, maybe his finest work, shows that clearly. It’s a slow, deeply mysterious piece that replaces visceral reality with mental reality, concrete with abstract. Yet it reaches the emotions anyway.

Miyazawa’s novel leans mysterious as well — and Sugii wanted to bring its strange power to animation. “My only focus,” he wrote, “was whether an anime could be created that could express the emotion of Kenji’s world.”¹

Stills from the film