Adieu Galaxy Express 999

Two years after the events of the first film, Earth has turned into a battlefield. People with machine bodies have taken the planet and the resistance has gone underground. A call reaches Tetsuro: train number 999 is setting out again. Maetel is with him once more, but this time the destination is the last stop in Andromeda, and what Tetsuro learns there will strike out what he learned on his first journey. This is the cinema conclusion of the series that came out of Leiji Matsumoto's manga. Rintaro directed. The first film was about youth and the price of becoming machine; this second one is built directly as a farewell and its tone is markedly darker. At a hundred and thirty-five minutes it stands apart from the television anime of the period; the space sequences and the design of the train are among the best examples of hand-drawn animation. A generation in Japan grew up with these two films.