Gulliver no Uchuu Ryokou

A charming 60s anime film. It's quite similar to style other animated children films of the 1960s, including Disney. It's actually not an adaption of Gulliver's travel, but more like a kind of sequel, featuring an old Gulliver as a major (but not the main) character, many years after his original adventures. It is a dream-like adventure movie where the heroes travel through space in a rocket on their way to the Blue Star of Hope. The message of the film is that you should never give up, no matter how dark life seems. It was clearly intended for children, which explains the many extended ... musical sequences. Overall, a decent children's animated movie meant to evoke old Disney movies.

A lot of famous people or well-known people worked on this film. This is one of the first films Hayao Miyazaki worked on. Kyu Sakamoto, the first Asian artist to have a #1 single on Billboard, voiced the protagonist. Also Yasuo Otsuka, the most important animator in anime in the 1950s and 1960s, worked on this film, and the screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa wrote a bunch of kaiju films, including Mothra. Despite its impressive acting and production cast, the film was not the international hit Toei was hoping, and ended Toei's hopes of an international audience permanently.