Ready 2 Watch - Space Firebird

A Story by dw817

Phoenix 2772 (Hi no Tori 2772, Love's Cosmozone) is an animated feature film directed by Taku Sugiyama and co-scripted by Osamu Tezuka, based on his manga series Hi no Tori.

R2W Space Firebird

MY LOVE FOR A RARE MOVIE

Now, I know you've been waiting for this and this is your big gift today, this is one Great Movie and I'm gonna tell you about it now, and that is FIREBIRD.

Firebird to me is one of the greatest movies of all time, right up there with K-Pax and Pi. I originally saw it years ago when I was having trouble sleeping so I turned on the TV about 1:30am and was surprised to find it playing there. I hadn't gotten in at the beginning either but where Godo was leaving Earth to find the Firebird to bring back.

I was fascinated by the story and at the end when Olga held Godo in her arms after his life was removed from him, I cried, because it was so terribly and very similar to my own Guardian. When the ending credits started something incredible happened, my phone rang and gosh it was 3 in the morning !

I went to pick it up, and it was Rose, my long-time girlfriend who said that her Mom had just died and she was crying, and then she paused for a second and asked why I was already crying before she called.

I told her of the incredible movie I just saw and it really moved me. She said well, that's fine. She needed to go, but she just wanted to let me know about her own Mom and she'll let me know more later. Then she hung up. Her Mother was well into her 70s and in the nursing home suffering from terminal Alzheimer's and had been battling it for many years.

I know cause both me and her went to visit her in the nursing home and Rose would bring M&M's as a treat for her and I read Winnie The Pooh to her trying to change my voice for each character to make it more interesting

So I Called The Program Director

In the morning though, I called the Program Director from the channel I just saw the show on and asked what the heck was that incredible and beautiful movie I just saw last night and gave the time for it.

He laughed and said, we've been getting calls all morning on it. It's called, "Firebird," and it's not from our normal video library. Late at night, especially on the weekend, we sometimes run videos that our employees or friends bring in. This was one such a video.

This was not the first time I had asked for a video and I knew that simple non-descript name was gonna give me some trouble cause it was so small. I asked him, is there any other name besides just Firebird ?

He said no, that's all he had. Even the VHS tape the guy brought it just had that name on it. But I think you'll find it at a local video store if you take a look.

I finally thanked him and hung up. Then I called up several video places and after a month of serious searching and coming up dry finding some other movies with the same or similar name, I finally found it for sale for $6 cause the guy on the phone said the cover of it looked like a cartoon show with a Fiery Bird on it. That was it !

I rushed right over to purchase it and as soon as I got home I watched it all the way through this time. Man it was awesome ! Then when Rose visited we watched it together.

She said that was is a strange and beautiful film, I'm glad you found it, love and that you like the story so much.

... Lost In The Move

Then the tape got lost when I moved to a new address. I found it again and tried playing it but I guess it got damaged and so it played very poorly and then hung. I had to pull the tape out with the ribbon still stuck in the player.

Man I was very upset ! I looked at Amazon and saw it for sale but only as a VHS and I know I gave my VHS Player to Carlos a year ago cause he needed it. No. I had to find it again, the original on the internet in the best possible quality I could locate. It had to exist and not just in VHS format ! I LOVED this movie !

So after another year I finally found it in the torrents but it was seeded very poorly, which means it would take a really long time to download no matter how fast my connection was which is really fast cause it's a T2 and still is today. Anyways, I started the download for it.

During the time it took to download I was very inspired and excited and all couldn't wait for when it would download completely so I set down and drew some original fan-art of my own for it. (which is seen below).

See where anticipation and excitement about getting something can lead ya ?

Anyways, finally after several months of downloading (cause you can always resume a download with torrents), I got the video, but only to find another problem.

It was encoded with 3 different audios ! Japanese, English, and Spanish. And by a terrible act of fate the English was stored in an entirely differently format from the others using a rare audio compression called DTS. None of my standard encoders could convert it as it encoded a silent film twice when I tried.

Darn it all to heck !

And no player would play it in English either, only VideoLAN would play the audio but it was recorded really really quiet where you could barely hear it, and EVEN THEN the sound was mistracked by more 2-seconds near the end of the film ! Didn't anyone notice all this stuff when they posted it ??

I hadda think about this and then I got a program that ripped out the audio manually. I converted the video itself to a raw format as a silent film. Then I took VirtualDUB, the world's greatest Freeware video editor and manually reworked the audio, streaming it back in using Time Stretch, Resample, High-pass, New Rate, Gain, and Adaptive Reconstruction.

After about an hour of this where I was satisfied I did the best I could so you could now hear it and it was synced in time with the movie, I saved it which took another 2-hours and when it was all done it was saved on my HD as single .AVI that was over 20 gigabytes ! But the audio was perfect, decompressed, and the whole thing could now be encoded properly.

Then last night (Aug 4 2012), before I went to bed, I used my MKV encoder and said, okay, now you're going to make a normal video out of this biggo 20gb monster. I went to bed, woke up later in the day and found it accomplished the task in 7 hours and 43 minutes. And to my relief, it worked ! It's fully watchable, you can hear the English, and it's synced to the end of the film.

And - the video you have NOW is the results of this work ! I still have the original so I'm gonna compress that to DVD size later tonite and back that up as my permanent copy. I'm sorry about the quality of the audio. I really don't wanna fight it again. I'm just glad I got this thing in English so you can enjoy it finally.

And you can find that hard-earned and encoded video right here seen below ! (It can also now be found multi-part in Youtube in Spanish).

HISTORY

Phoenix 2772 (Hi no Tori 2772, Love's Cosmozone) is an animated feature film directed by Taku Sugiyama and co-scripted by Osamu Tezuka, based on his manga series Hi no Tori. It was then released in the UK in 1980 under the title Space Firebird, and later in the United States in 1983, shortened to 79 minutes and dubbed by British voice-actors. A French version had also been released under the title Firebird 2772.

The science fiction film premiered on March 15, 1980 in Japan.

STORY

Phoenix 2772 is set in the distant future where the planet Earth is dying from a lack of energy resources and a disheartening political climate sees all human beings produced by computers to live out certain social roles, the colour of the eyes determining the baby's rank, from pilot to politician, etc.

Godo is one such child brought up to be a cadet and nursed by the beautiful robot-maid Olga. After noticing his exceptional abilities,Rock, a dictatorial candidate for prime minister, selects Godo to fulfill his agenda and travel into deep space and capture the mystical Phoenix, its blood will manifestly heal the Earth (and selfishly make Rock prime minister).

This eventually proves hard for Godo for many reasons, partly because he has a love of all living creatures and he detests his being trained for what appears to be that of a ruthless hunter. He is also to leave his one friend in his adolescence, Olga, to deletion. Most importantly he elopes with Rena, a "daughter of the elite," and bride-to-be of Rock when it is forbidden for his rank to communicate with such a woman.

For his crime, Godo loses his citizenship and is sent to a labour camp in Iceland where mining energy from the Earth's core is being harnessed in a bid to save the world (but adversely causing earthquakes and speeding up the process).

While interned and heart-broken over losing Rena, he meets Doctor Saruta, a prison professor who wishes to counsel the young pilot, only to secretly plot with him a plan to escape, search for the Phoenix themselves and save the Earth. Eventually, Godo is saved by Olga and Pincho (a pet creature of Rena that had helped the lost Olga), and they set into space.

During various displays of then-groundbreaking animation, Godo and the crew of the ship find it almost impossible to subdue the Phoenix and it changes into many monstrous shapes and sizes, from dragons to tentacular leeches. After learning that Rena is to marry Rock, Godo had become stricken with misery and pushes away Olga's advances when she shows signs of love (and previously jealousy) for Godo.

With the crew all killed one-by-one by the Phoenix and the secret of its weakness lost in Saruta's last words the Phoenix finally destroys Olga by burning her to death, and Godo finally surrenders. As he cradles Olga, realizing how selfish he had been towards his only friend in the world, the Phoenix is subdued by the power of love and thus boards the ship in the form of what appears the cross between an angel and a peacock.

Amazed at Godo's love of living creatures, the Phoenix, speaking with a female voice "herself," falls in love with Godo and grants his wish of reviving Olga on the condition he gives her anything she wants of him (not knowing that this involves his carnal love and the Phoenix possessing the body of Olga to obtain this).

After being reunited with Olga and given a paradisal planet to live on, Godo still has feelings towards the dying Earth and sets out to return with vegetables and resources, only to be met with Rock (and a now content and promiscuous Rena) and is arrested.

But what follows is a series of earthquakes that level the whole world and bring about final destruction, Rena dying in the advent by trying to escape on Godo's ship and Rock blinded by a lava emission. Godo gives Rock his last rites and he and Olga appear as lone survivors, he then grieves that so much life has been destroyed.

The Phoenix reveals itself to Godo through Olga and requests his wish to lay down his life for the revival of the Earth and its creatures. After the sombre night changes to a starry dawn and after Godo's death the casualties are resurrected. Olga then lays Godo's corpse on the shore and is freed of the Phoenix, only to have her own dead body (beside Godo's) change into a human being.

Godo himself is changed into a newborn baby again, and claimed by the new human Olga as a kind of virgin birth, and is deified as a god ...

CHARACTERS

Godo	Pilot and focus character of story.
Olga	Female robot and Godo's caretaker.
Rock	Political leader and chief science officer.
Rena	Daughter of Lord Eat and betrothed to Rock.
Lord Eat	Political leader and chief of elders.
Borukan	A supervisor and trainer of pilots.
Ban	Resident of the planet Of Tears.
Black Jack	Warden at Iceland labor camp prison.
Dr. Saruta	Prisoner at Iceland labor camp prison.
Boon	Prison guard at Iceland labor camp prison.
Pincho	A cute alien servant of Rena.
Crack	A smart-talking alien of the planet Tears.
The Phoenix	The mythical bird of legend ...

CROSS-OVERS

Many of the characters themselves appear in Tezuka's past manga and at least one of these characters can be considered a reincarnation. Fans of Tezuka will find Saruta, Ban, Higeoyagi, Boon and Rock in other stories of Tezuka (the latter for instance is the evil assassin in Tezuka's modern epic Metropolis). Black Jack however, who is the warden of the Iceland prison camp in Phoenix, was ambiguously taken from Tezuka's popular manga series Black Jack as the otherwise heroic and macabre surgeon.

INFLUENCES & LEGACY

Beyond Osamu Tezuka's style as a fantastic humanist writer, the film had a curious legacy as a deposit of Western animation influences, coupled with a beautiful score by Yasuo Higuchi. The influences can be seen with the prison mining set of Unisen minors (Fleischer Studios), Pincho and other creatures dancing with a mop (Disney's Fantasia) and the reference to Pinocchio when Olga is given new life.

But most importantly, the film had a flair of Eastern mystical philosophy that was not (and is still not) understood by most Westerners, which involves a likeness to Hindu fairytale fancy and especially Buddhism.

There is no audible dialog until 11min 34seconds. This video can also be found in Youtube

You are Earth Visitor #

© 2013 dw817

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Mark

Wow, you are really dedicated and talented. Love the artwork. I'll get the video when I have a better connection and the data isn't d/l'd on my dime :P