winter 1976
Loading...
Loading...

Based on a short section of the novel Cuore by the Italian Edmondo de Amicis, Marco is a young boy living in Genoa, Italy, together with his father Pietro. But the family is not complete, for Marco's mother left for Argentina around a year earlier in order to find work. Letters from her arrive regularly until one day they suddenly stop. Worry for his mother and what might have happened to her overcomes the young boy. Marco thus decides to embark upon a journey to Argentina in the hope of being reunited with his mother. At first, Pietro is opposed to Marco's plan, but moved by his son's enthusiasm, he eventually allows the boy to go. So begins Marco's long journey of the heart. Marco encounters many people throughout his travels, and finds maturity and self-acceptance as a result of his experiences. (Source: Nippon Animation)

Alien invaders take over Great Mazinger who is at the entrance of a museum next to Mazinger Z as symbols of peace. Grendizer fights the evil invaders and Great Mazinger is recovered. When the Vegan empire dispatches a new general to oversee the takeover of Earth, he quickly manages to capture Koji Kabuto and, learning of Great Mazinger through interrogation, quickly commandeers it from a museum where it was kept as a symbol of peace. It is now up to Duke Fleed aboard Grendizer to stop humanity's former defender from becoming its destroyer. (Source: ANN)

Based on Mark Twain's well known masterpiece about Huckleberry Finn, the bright and merry orphan, this film is full of life, laughter, and will be loved by children around the world. When Huckleberry runs away from his orphanage, he teams up with an escaped slave. Together, they travel the Mississippi on a raft, encountering all kinds of people and adventures. (Source: AniDB)

Brave cat Pero once had a bet with treacherous multimillionarie Grumon that he can travel around the world in 80 days. The stake is high, in case of success Grumon will give all of his fortune to Pero, but in case of failure Pero becomes slave of Grumon for the rest of his life. Pero departs together with his faithful friends behemoth Kato and brave Small Mouse. Grumon tries everything to prevent their arrival to the finish. (Source: AniDB)

Based on an ancient legend, Dojoji Temple tells the story of a young priest who finds himself the object of intense infatuation and lust from a young woman. As he rebuffs her advances she becomes more and more desperate eventually turning herself into a gigantic serpent. The priest is hidden under the bell of the temple but the woman's passion is so intense that escape is impossible. A short animation from filmmaker Kihachiro Kawamoto. This film utilizes both stop motion and standard animation techniques.

An omnibus-format TV series consisting of anime adaptations of Japanese folk tales, this is one of Japan's longest-running TV series, and Group Tac's second TV series (the first was The Road to Munich, a documentary anime about the 1972 Olympics). The governing rule of the series was that the creative staff change from episode to episode. While later other anime series like Nippon Animation's Famous Works of Japanese Literature would attempt the same, none would be as long-lived or successful. The rotation idea was that of director Sugii Gisaburo, a visual visionary unequaled in Japanese film history who has revolutionized anime several times in his career, be it in the 1967 TV series Goku's Big Adventure, in which he sought to shake anime free from the dominance of story development by yanking it back to a more cartoonish form, or The Belladonna of Sadness, where he broke the Disney full-animation mold, creating a full-length animated film in a completely new style that was a hybrid of still drawings and animation. The reason for rotating the staff each episode was so that each episode would have a completely different look and feel from its predecessor, and in this it was eminently successful. This is a series that is genuinely rewarding to watch, and is visually one of the richest in anime history. While this system also meant that quality varied, there were also occasionally superb episodes, as on the staff were many veterans like Group Tac founder SUGII Gisaburo himself, SHIBAYAMA Tsutomu, FURUZAWA Hideo, RIN Taro, and HIKONE Norio. Old episodes started being repeated more and more frequently as the years went on, and production of new episodes finally ceased completely in late 1995, but the series is still widely broadcast. (Source: Pelleas)

A stop-motion puppet animation adaptation of the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale.

Based on a traditional Chinese novel of the same name. Bewitched by his concubine Daji, who is actually a vixen spirit in disguise as a beautiful woman, King Zhou of Shang oppresses his people and persecutes those who oppose him, including his own subjects who dare to speak up to him. Ji Fa (King Wu of Zhou), assisted by his strategist Jiang Ziya, rallies an army to overthrow the tyrant and restore peace and order. Throughout the story, battles are waged between the kingdoms of Shang and Zhou, with both sides calling upon various supernatural beings – deities, immortals, demons, spirits, and humans with magical abilities – to aid them in the war. Yuanshi Tianzun bestows upon Jiang Ziya the Fengshen Bang, a list that empowers him to invest the gods of Heaven. The heroes of Zhou and some of their fallen enemies from Shang are eventually endowed with heavenly ranking and essentially elevated to their roles as gods, hence the title of the novel. (Source: Wiki)

A series of ten short stories featuring anthropomorphic animals animated with yarn by Tadanari Okamoto, and music by Yasuo Higuchi. "Looking at the mischiefs and soldiers in the story, the kids themselves can be kind, kind, beauty, miserable, I hope to discover something, I created it with such a wish."
