Nobody’s Boy Remi: Beautiful, Heartbreaking Drama…in 3D! - Anime Ai 🤖

Osamu Dezaki cemented himself over a storied career as one of the best to ever direct anime, full stop. Many of his efforts are widely known and praised around the world, from his timeless take on Asao Takamori and Tetsuya Chiba’s Ashita no Joe to his adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack and beyond. And then there’s Nobody’s Boy Remi, which isn’t as well known outside of Japan, but thanks to AnimEigo we now have a full view of its beautiful and endearingly gimmicky 51-episode run in all its gut-wrenching glory.

Remi is a sweet young boy who lives with his mother in a French village. They live a modest life, working the day away and scraping by, but times get even tougher when Remi’s father, Barberin, who works in Paris, gets injured and entangled in a hopeless lawsuit. After sending most of their money away to pay his legal fees, Remi’s mother finally gets to see her husband again in person, but Remi’s reunion with his father is anything but joyful.

Instead of embracing his son, Barberin is surprised to see he’s even still there. He soon lets Remi know he’s nothing more than a foundling they saved from the streets as a baby, and eventually sells him off to a traveling performer named Vitalis for a pittance. Now Remi is more alone and afraid than ever, separated from his mother and on the road with a stranger and his troupe of performing animals. Every day is another trepidatious step down an uncertain path, and whenever he starts to get comfortable you can rest assured Remi will have the rug pulled right back out from under him. What happens, then, when he discovers that his real parents may be alive after all?

To say that Nobody’s Boy Remi is a tumultuous journey would be a major understatement. Dezaki sets the tone from the very beginning, with isolated bursts of joy serving as peaks to the frequent valleys of despair in which Remi finds himself. Like many of the director’s works, despite the subject matter, Remi manages to be highly stylized at times, punctuating emotional beats with wild kaleidoscopic energy that serves its central gimmick well.

One of the first things you’ll notice when you pop open AnimEigo’s Blu-ray collection is the pair of 3D glasses unassumingly slotted into the case. These aren’t your traditional red-and-blue specs; rather, they use a special technique called the Pulfrich Effect to create a false sense of depth using one lens that is dimmer than the other. This makes anything scrolling horizontally pop as if layered in three dimensions, so as a result the entire series is loaded with stunning parallax vistas and dramatic foregrounds. It works surprisingly well under the right conditions, even if Nobody’s Boy Remi may seem like an odd choice for a 3D gimmick in the first place.

That choice makes a little more sense once you learn that Remi was created as a 25th anniversary project for broadcaster Nippon TV. The 1977 series would mark the first and only time for any country to attempt to produce a year-long animated series in 3D, and as such each half-hour episode was given a budget more in line with a full hour-long series.

There’s a ton of fascinating history behind Nobody’s Boy Remi, which makes the series interesting enough on the surface. This is Osamu Dezaki, though, so you know you’re in for something special regardless of how the show was initially budgeted and marketed. Nobody’s Boy Remi is a long, emotionally-draining series that simply has a very sweet boy at its core. Watching him deal with the harsh realities of life at such a young age can be a lot, so it’s not exactly the type of anime you’ll feel like knocking out in a few marathon sessions.

Much like NTV did in its initial year-long broadcast, you’ll want to take your time with this one. You don’t even have to wear the 3D glasses while you watch, though the effect is cool and enough of a historical curiosity to warrant trying it for at least an episode or two. As expected, the restoration work here is wonderful; Remi really pops on Blu-ray, and I’m a sucker for the preservation of grain, cel smudges and other artifacts of film production. Mostly, though, I’m still reeling from the ups and downs of Remi’s arduous journey. As the inaugural release in AnimEigo’s new Ruined Childhood imprint, that exhaustion is more than fitting.

Distributor: AnimEigo
Rating: 13+
Available: Now

For more from AnimEigo, check out our Riding Bean review!

from Otaku USA Magazine https://ift.tt/40OG9pi
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