Sanrio is well known for marketing their cute characters like Hello Kitty, My Melody, Batz Maru, and so on. But back in the seventies and eighties, they actually made very ambitious original movies that were considerably darker in tone than the image the company is known to project. Ringing Bell, Nutcracker Fantasy, the Unico movies, Sea Prince and the Fire Child, and the subject of this review, A Journey Through Fairyland, also known as Fairy Florence. I'm going to refer to it by its Japanese title, as the English one is too long to say. After finishing Sea Prince, Sanrio tagged Masami Hata to direct another original movie, and he was more than happy to take up the task. Unfortunately, he wound up getting too ambitious with Fairy Florence for his own good. The film took four years to produce, and it cost a lot of money to make, so much so that it basically caused Sanrio Films to shut down. Fairy Florence wound up being a bomb at the box office and there was no way it could make back the money put into its production. It didn't help that around that time, Sanrio wanted to move away from making big budget original movies and move into merchandising characters such as Hello Kitty for all they were worth. These are very likely the reasons why it's the most obscure film in Sanrio's movie catalog. But why did it fail to gather an audience?
The story is a fairly simple one. Michael is a young boy attending a prestigious music academy. He's under a lot of pressure to succeed, as his late parents were famous musicians, but he can't seem to play his oboe during orchestra practice. He spends most of his days at the local greenhouse, caring for the flowers as if they were his children. But he's often late to class and ill-practiced, unwittingly becoming the class clown as a result. The teacher tries to be patient, but after one incident too many, Michael is kicked out of school. Crushed by this outcome, he goes to the greenhouse one last time...and meets a beautiful flower fairy named Florence, who reaches out to him and invites him to the magical Land of Flowers, where they can live in escapist harmony. But they have to find a way to get there without Treble, the mischievous sprite, and his gang of lazy musical blobs, the Mokomoko. But Treble winds up becoming the least of their problems.
I first discovered the movie through this article here, as I did other anime that I've come to like, but it wasn't until Discotek Media released it on DVD in 2017 when it came back into print. I immediately bought the set as soon as I was able. One thing Fairy Florence absolutely has going for it is the animation, which is simply incredible, especially by 1985 standards. Animated with one cel per frame, which is considered a very massive undertaking that not even Disney or Ghibli does. Every movement is smooth and lifelike, and the visuals absolutely burst with color. It's like it came straight out of the 1940s, which is apt considering Hata was a huge fan of Disney's Fantasia. The giant bug monsters near the end are especially well animated and visceral. Visually and musically, Fairy Florence is very Fantasia-inspired, with segments dedicated to characters dancing across the screen in musical montages with very impressionistic direction. You'd be forgiven for thinking this was a direct spin-off of Fantasia. The soundtrack mainly consists of famous pieces of classical music used to set the mood, atmosphere, and feel of the various adventures Michael experiences in the magical lands Treble and Florence take him through. One thing I appreciate about the movie is that it displays the names and composers of the various pieces used throughout the movie for anyone who isn't familiar with them, which is definitely a plus for me, as I've never heard of Offenbach's stuff, or singular pieces like Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee, or Johannes Brahms' Hungarian Dance. Of course, composer Naozumi Yamamoto sprinkles in his own BGMs as well. The soundtrack is an absolute joy, and every piece of music used here works to the movie's advantage.
However, pretty animation and a gorgeous soundtrack can't exactly hide the fact that the movie's story and characters are...rather trite and juvenile. The entire story is just Michael being whisked away into a magical land consisting of long scenes where flowers twirl, fairies dance across the screen, musical notes fly all over the place, and so on. The basic plotline is pretty thin, and Michael and Florence are rather bland as characters. Michael's just a kid who does go through decent development, but said development is pretty predictable for characters like him, and Florence is just an overly sweet, idealized woman who loves Michael just because and does everything solely for him. Treble is pretty okay, as he's just a mischievous sprite and probably the personification of Michael's love for music. Personally though, I think the movie works better if you imagine Treble and Florence being anthropomorphized personifications of his interests competing for his attention, and the worlds they create being metaphors for his differing passions. The musical sequences themselves mostly look pretty but don't further the story much, though one could argue that the story and characters were never meant to be the focal point of the film. Oh, and the English dub, while technically okay, is kind of heavy on hammy and melodramatic acting, name changes, and unneeded narration.
So basically, Fairy Florence is just a gigantic love letter to Fantasia, putting more emphasis on the animation and music than the story and characters, and I can understand why Hata wanted to go hog wild with it and make this his personal magnum opus, even if it meant Sanrio couldn't make more movies like this ever again. Sadly, audiences didn't appreciate his efforts for this movie and it didn't make its money back at the box office. Not only that, movies like this one just can't be made in this day and age anymore, and it's a pity, because Fairy Florence showcases Japanese animation at its absolute zenith and was clearly made with a lot of love and passion that you don't see in modern anime. Of course, now it's more widely available thanks to Discotek rescuing it from obscurity. Basically, Fairy Florence is an avant-garde family art film that, while nothing to write home about in the story department, is visual poetry personified, and even if it may not be one of Sanrio's best films, I do think it deserves more love than it got, especially if you're an animation fan in general.