Guest Post: Unearthed Baubles with Firechick – The Flying Phantom Ship 74/100

Show of hands, who here has ever heard of this old movie from 1969 called The Flying Phantom Ship before 2022? No? Me neither. I never even knew Flying Phantom Ship existed until Discotek Media announced on their Twitter page that they licensed it in May of 2022. Not only that, they even made an English dub for it because the original music and effects tracks, which are required to make dubs in different audio, were actually preserved, something which wasn’t considered a common practice back in the sixties. This effectively makes Flying Phantom Ship the oldest anime to ever receive an English dub in the modern era. I was already intrigued and decided to buy the movie just based on its history and significance in terms of dubbing, but hearing that Mona Marshall, one of many voice actresses who defined my childhood, was cast as the lead character pretty much cemented that decision. But what about the movie itself?

If you can believe it, Flying Phantom Ship is only an hour long, but it has a LOT packed into it. Based on a short manga by Shotaro Ishinomori, the story centers on a boy named Hayato Arashiyama, whose parents are killed by a giant metal golem that tore through his hometown. But a few days before that, he and his parents helped a corporate bigshot named Kuroshio after he and his wife got into a car accident, and had to hide away in a seemingly haunted mansion that was once home to a ship captain. Said ship captain possesses an old ship that was said to have been set ablaze. In his quest to avenge his parents, Hayato uncovers secrets that are not only tied to the mysterious phantom ship, but the corporation whose products sell like hotcakes, and even his own origins. Basically, Flying Phantom Ship has a whole kitchen sink full of stuff packed into it, like robotic marine animals, critiques on capitalism and the avarice of corporations, haunted houses, people literally dissolving into foam, and a flying ghost ship.

Well, I won’t deny that Flying Phantom Ship has ambition, and it’s absolutely bonkers. It goes through a lot in the span of an hour, but I feel like the movie could have benefited from having an extra hour and a half to flesh out its concepts, themes, and characters more. Hell, one character only appears in the final 15 minutes and that’s it! The movie just sort of speed runs through its content. One good thing about this is that the movie never feels boring because its pacing is very fast, and there’s always something going on. But it doesn’t really give you time to breathe and get to know the characters or process what’s happening. I feel like the genre shift added to this problem too, because the movie initially starts off as a horror movie, but after the 15-minute mark, it swerves HARD into sci-fi territory out of nowhere. The movie does do a great job at using its initial horror atmosphere to good effect in the beginning, though.

Since the movie was made in 1969, animation was still fairly in its infancy, and I’m sure the movie’s animation was considered absolutely amazing during its time. When viewed from a modern standpoint, it borders on being pretty inconsistent at times. At some points, there are some amazingly fluid and well-animated shots, like a dog escaping from a destroyed city and military machines shooting missiles at the titular phantom ship, which for their time look fantastic. The robot golem segments were actually animated by Hayao Miyazaki, back when he was a relative newcomer to the animation industry, so of course those segments look amazing, especially for the time period. But other times, the animation is pretty limited, to the point where cels will just literally slide into the frame that are supposed to indicate a character is walking, but the model remains still and static. The character designs wouldn’t be out of place in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, but the backgrounds and machine designs are very well made.

Because of the movie’s short length, it also doesn’t have a lot of time to flesh out its characters much beyond their most basic archetypes. Hayato is the brash, hot-blooded shounen protagonist who wants to avenge his parents, Chairman Kuroshio is your typical evil corporate CEO who wants power and money, Ruriko is the love interest (Who, ironically, is a lot more proactive and interesting compared to a lot of other female characters that were present during the sixties), Jack is the perpetually cowardly Scooby Doo knockoff, and so on. Hell, the final villain doesn’t even get much screentime, and by the time the movie ends, we still don’t know much about it at all! They’re not bad or anything, but other stuff that would come after Flying Phantom Ship would utilize their archetypes and flesh them out much more in the future.

That being said, Flying Phantom Ship as a movie is pretty fun if you want to kill an hour and have some off the wall action, and it’s a pretty nice piece of animation history. Plus, it’s actually available on home video now, with an English dub, surprisingly enough, so you can actually watch it! Definitely watch the English dub if you can. It’s great! How can you go wrong with Mona Marshall as the lead character, Patrick Seitz as the phantom ship captain, and the dub itself being made by the studio that made the much beloved Akudama Drive dub? I don’t know if Flying Phantom Ship will be available for streaming in the future, as it currently isn’t, but I still recommend buying the movie on blu-ray. Oh, and the dub has a blooper reel. It’s hilarious. That was pretty much my main reason for buying the movie in the first place. But yeah, Flying Phantom Ship is bonkers and fun, even if other movies did its premise and themes better after it came out.