Back to CopyrightedName's Profile CopyrightedName's Profile

The last great entry in the Toei Doga series of animated films, Animal Treasure Island is a fun and visually sumptuous kid's adventure film.

The film's animation is some of the best I've ever seen, full of lively and snappy movement, and bolstered by simple and appealing designs, bold, crisp colors (in the animation cels and the background art), and good, if simple layouts. The narrative is an extremely loose adaptation of Treasure Island, basically keeping the treasure hunt aspect and some characters names, and the initial setup and nothing else. The standout original character among the cast is Cathy, a tough, fierce, no-nonsense girl that ... feels inspired by the bandit girl in the Soviet animation The Snow Queen. The film maintains a light atmosphere throughout, high on slapstick and hijinks all the way to its conclusion. The film does drag in parts, most noticeably in some unnecessary musical sequences, but for the most part it's an engaging watch.

On some level, I actually admire this movie. Given the Space Runaway Ideon TV series' lack of widespread popularity, the show's staff decided that they couldn't risk a series of compilation movies bombing before they made it to the new ending for the series (which was, after all, the point of the Ideon movies project). This left them with the hopeless task of trying to stuff a somewhat episodic 39-episode television series into a single 90 minute movie. It would have been so easy to take the Yamato compilation movie route and simply narrate half of the series to us, but the filmmakers here made ... a genuine effort to make a "real" movie out of the material, with a flowing story and everything. Much of the narrative streamlining here is actually quite elegant: an early failed jump into Deep Space (think warp drive or lightspeed) is combined with a slightly later successful attempt, a character death is tied into an assassination attempt that occurs episodes later in the TV show, and quick lines of dialogue allow the filmmakers to skip details and story arcs that the movie didn't have time to explore.

Ultimately, though, a hopeless task is still a hopeless task. Forget a flowing story, this movie can't even fit in all the necessary plot details - the movie only covers up to episode 32, and a viewer who only watches the movies would still be clueless about numerous story details brought up in its follow-up, The Ideon: Be Invoked. The film barrels through the story (or stories, more accurately) at a whiplash speed, likely losing even fans of the TV show, and character development and introductions are left behind in favor of hurried, cramped exposition. The movie simply doesn't work as a substitute for the series, and it's too breathless to work as a film in its own right. All of this is a shame, because the show's slightly uneven and episodic nature, not to mention its length, would make a streamlined, condensed version of the story ideal for new viewers, but there's not much that can be done about it now.