One of the unfortunate things about the anime industry and fandom is it tends to favour trendy, new projects over genuine classics. Which explains why Isao Takahata’s masterful From Apennines to the Andes (1976) remains unavailable on DVD while this 1999 remake can be nabbed for a fiver. Nevertheless, this is worth viewing for anime enthusiasts willing to venture beyond the clichés of transforming robots and sexy schoolgirls (not that there’s anything wrong with those).
In the early 1900s, a little boy named Marco lives in Genoa, Italy. When the town is hard hit by heavy taxes and recession, Marco’s mother travels to Argentina to earn extra money, leaving her distraught son behind with big brother Tonio and his father, who runs a clinic for the poor. One year later, letters from Buenos Aires no longer arrive, prompting the worried Marco to stow away on a steamship in the hopes of reaching his ailing mother. Thus begins an epic, eventful journey wherein young Marco endures much hardship and suffering that eventually proves the value of his mother’s parting words: “…by overcoming hardship you’ll become successful.”
His mother’s words might as well be the ethos of heartwarming Japanese family dramas, which dwell on stoic orphans, hard times and character-building tribulations to an almost masochistic degree. The globe-spanning story actually comprises only a small part of the source novel: Cuore by Edmondo de Amicis, which was adapted in its entirety as Heart: An Italian Schoolboy’s Journal (1981), directed by family anime veteran Eiji Okabe. Kozo Kuzuha’s remake carries over the understated humanism and insight into child psychology from Takahata’s version, plus the wedding of a storybook Europe to very Japanese values and codes of behaviour. Kuzuha shows a fine eye for period detail and his sunny colour palette evokes the Mediterranean of clear skies and sparkling seas.
Although it suffers from condensing so many characters and incidents into a brisk running time, the plot still packs a weighty emotional punch. Tear-jerking moments include a bar full of strangers who all contribute to buy Marco a train ticket to Cordoba, money that he later uses to help street urchin Pablo and his sickly kid sister Juana. Later, Pablo heroically endures a savage beating just to help Marco sneak onto another train. Marco’s adolescent resentment of his hard-working father is well-observed, as is his relationship with Fiorina, a pretty puppeteer into whose family the young traveller is adopted, and whose own mother abandoned her years ago.
Mr. Peppino and his daughters, including elder sister Concetta and little sister Julietta, endure plenty of tough times along their journey and the film works at its best by not sugar-coating the immigrant experience. There are perilous journeys, prejudice, tragic deaths and episodes that reveal the best and worst aspects of human nature. Treacly theme music sung by Sheena Easton.
