If you have only just begun to take an interest in Esperanto and wish to know some basic information about this fascinating subject, please start your reading at the first article of this series. Having already completed 47 articles, I am now at the stage of writing articles for those readers who have learned quite a lot about the Esperanto language and movement already, and who are now wanting to find out more than just the basic introductory information. To get to the beginning of this series, please just click here: http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/espe... ______________________________________________________
The information contained in this topic article was mainly provided by Mike Urban in an email message which reads as follows:
"Your survey of Esperanto and cinema omitted the Japanese anime (ca 1985), "Nokto de la Galaksia Fervojo", based on Miyazawa Kenji's classic 1927 children's book.
The makers of the film decided to have all the writing in the film (including the chapter titles and credits) appear in Esperanto -- this apparently was in keeping with the author's approval of Esperanto and the eclectically spiritual nature of the story. The film is very beautiful in places, although quite surreal and enigmatic. But then, so is the book (you can buy English translations at Amazon.com, - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1... - but to the best of my knowledge there is no Esperanto edition).
The use of Esperanto does not quite succeed in placing the film into a sort of no-particular-place (Neniujo?) as the producers may have hoped. This is because they left the names of the main characters as Miyazawa wrote them (and every Japanese schoolchild knew them) -- Giovanni and Campanello. Of course, to a Japanese child, these names are quite exotic and foreign, but to an American, they are obviously and thoroughly Italian, and many people in the audience I saw it with simply assumed that the Esperanto was some odd dialect of Italian.
I may note that the English translation I read recently uses Japanese names for these characters. I think making the names Esperanto would probably work for the film by itself, but would be perceived as a terrible violation of a classic book by the millions of Japanese who (I am told) know and love it. On the other hand, the producers also made the curious decision to make the main characters into anthropomorphic cats. This adds nothing to the story that I can see (it is otherwise quite faithful to the book), and is positively distracting when they encounter human characters later on.
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