Experience the Hayao Miyazaki masterpiece that influenced a modern anime favorite

On Friday, Future Boy Conan finally comes to streaming on Retrocrush. Anime enthusiasts will recognize the series for being Hayao Miyazaki’s directorial debut, premiering one year before his first theatrical film, Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, and several more years before he founded Studio Ghibli with Toshio Suzuki and Isao Takahata. The 26-episode anime was released on Blu-ray in the U.S. in 2021, but this marks the first time it’s been available for Western audiences to legally stream.

Set 20 years after an apocalyptic event caused by a terrible war, Future Boy Conan centers on a precocious 11-year-old raised on an isolated island by his kindly grandfather. After Lana, a mysterious young girl pursued by shadowy operatives, washes up on the shores of his home, Conan and Lana embark on a globe-trotting quest to the far corners of this strange and wondrous world.

It’s obviously a series with an enormous pedigree, inspiring generations of animators and cementing Miyazaki’s legacy as an indelible creative force from the outset of his career. If that’s somehow not enough to move the needle of interest, Future Boy Conan is so important, it was even referenced in one of the best anime series of the 2020s.

Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, Masaaki Yuasa’s 2020 anime based on Sumito Ōwara’s slice-of-life manga, is about a misfit trio of high school students who start a film club with the intention of creating the greatest anime series ever. Each of them has their own unique strengths: Midori Asakusa, an energetic and imaginative young girl, is a born character designer who believes “concept is everything”; Sayaka Kanamori, Midori’s classmate, has a knack for coordinating projects and producing anime despite her utter disinterest in the art form; and Tsubame Mizusaki, an amateur model with wealthy parents that forbade her from creating anime, is a prodigiously talented animator. Together, the trio tackles project after project, becoming more proficient and confident as they conjure fantastic universes to life on screen.

In the anime’s first episode, Midori is shown watching an episode of Conaso of the Lost Island, a fictionalized version of Future Boy Conan, while waiting for her mother to return home from picking up her father at the airport. “It wasn’t something I could do myself, but the big, epic world of adventure I wanted to experience was right in front of me,” Midori is heard saying as she stares agog at Conaso of the Lost Island from her desktop chair, gradually scooting forward with each scene. “That was the first time I realized that someone made the anime I watched.”

It’s a sentiment that many animation lovers, myself included, can no doubt sympathize with. Midori dedicated all of her energy and passion to becoming an animator. During a screening of Conaso of the Lost Island, Midori gives an energetic beat-by-beat explanation of the fundamentals of animation when Sayaka asks why anime is so special to her, mirroring a similar scene from the live-action comedy series Blue Blazes where protagonist Moyuru Honō enthusiastically dissects the animated opening of Cyborg 009.

It’s fitting that Future Boy Conan, however fictionalized, would serve as the in-universe catalyst for Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!’s own bubbly protagonist. Yuasa and co. were so dead set on including a nod to the series in Miyazaki’s anime, they recreated the footage from it frame by frame in order to skirt copyright violations.

“We didn’t get permission,” Eunyoung Choi, co-founder of Science Saru, the animation studio behind Eizouken!, told CBR in 2019. “They’re owned by Nippon Animation and the situation was very complicated. They supported us a lot but we couldn’t get permission to use the original footage, so we had to retrace every single drawing. Since we wanted to make it precisely, we copied exactly how it was. I’m a big fan of Future Boy Conan and just seeing exactly the same shots in our project was very exciting. It’s the same for the voices, sound effects and music; We had to remake everything all over again. But we wanted to do it as it was very important for our series.”

All of which is to say: If you’re a fan of either Hayao Miyazaki or Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, you owe it to yourself to seize this opportunity to finally watch the former’s directorial debut. It’s an enduring masterpiece that deserves every ounce of the praise it’s garnered since its premiere, and a wonderful testament to the power of animation to spark an audience’s imagination.

Future Boy Conan is available to stream on Retrocrush. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! is available to stream on Crunchyroll.