Ginga Tetsudou no Yoru

Ginga Tetsudou no Yoru

Giovanni is a young boy who lives on the outskirts of a small rustic village. His mother is bedridden and his father has not returned home since leaving to work on a fishing boat. An outcast at school, Giovanni has only one friend: Campanella, the mayor's son. During the town's Festival of Stars, Giovanni starts to daydream atop a hill and looks up to find a steam engine train floating in the air. He boards the train only to find his friend Campanella already there. And so, the two begin their journey through the stars where they come across unusual people and visit many beautiful and haunting places. Based on a short story by the popular children's writer Kenji Miyazawa, Galactic Railroad offers viewers a slow-paced, dreamlike journey through space and time. When Giovanni, a lonely boy in a hill town, goes to get milk for his ailing mother, he finds himself crossing the Milky Way on a faster-than-light steam railroad. The stations he visits in various constellations, like the planets explored by St. Exupery's Little Prince, offer curious adventures and an assortment of human "types." Reality and fantasy blur aboard the train, and its travels across the light-years sometimes suggests the journey through life. The characters are depicted as cats, presumably to avoid the problems of animating humans.