In 2010, I watched an old anime that Anime News Network happened to start streaming called Ie Naki Ko, based on a French novel which was about a boy who traveled with an old minstrel in order to escape being sold off into slavery. I thought the anime was amazing and it's still one of my favorites. But the 1977 Ie Naki Ko anime was only one anime that the late great director Osamu Dezaki worked on, alongside his team, among many, many others that would continue until his untimely death in 2011. I've seen a few of the anime he worked on, with Rose of Versailles being my favorite for obvious reasons, and just recently I finished an anime that he worked on just a year after Ie Naki Ko included, another adventure anime based on a Western novel. I will admit, the only reason I even decided to watch Treasure Island was because Discotek picked it up for a blu-ray release in the US fairly recently, the first time it ever got licensed here, and I checked it out to see if it was any good. I'm certainly glad I did, and I still continue to be surprised at how anime, even in its relative infancy, was able to churn out genuinely awesome creations that you just don't get anymore. Granted, I still like Versailles and Ie Naki Ko better than Treasure Island, but seriously, TI is a damn good anime in and of itself that you should really check out if you want a fun, tense, swashbuckling adventure that isn't afraid to get dark when it needs to.

Based on the 1883 novel by Scottish writer Robert Louis Stephenson, Treasure Island stars Jim Hawkins, an energetic 13-year-old boy who helps his mother run the Admiral Benbow Inn on England's Bristol Channel. His life is fairly normal until a pirate by the name of Billy Bones stays at the inn. Billy Bones is a drunkard who is always causing trouble, but when sober, he's paranoid that he's being followed. After several events involving violent sword fights, Billy Bones dies, leaving Jim his most prized possession: A map that supposedly leads to Treasure Island, where the famous Captain Flint hid a mountain of treasure so sought-after that nearly every pirate wants to get their hands on it no matter the cost. Jim wants to get in on the action and find this fabled treasure, wanting to be a sailor like his father once was. With help from some friends of his late father, Jim manages to get a spot on the ship named The Hispaniola and has a chance to find the treasure. But he is woefully unprepared for all that sailing the high seas come with, like dealing with low food supplies, in-fighting amongst the sailors, pirates, betrayal, and if the treasure is even real to begin with.

While it has been a decade since I've seen Ie Naki Ko (I really need to rewrite my review of it), I do remember a lot of details about it, and since Treasure Island was made right after Remi ended, comparisons to it are inevitable, both in terms of their animation and their approaches to storytelling. I adore Remi to death, but if there's one thing I really didn't like about the 1977 anime, its the narrator, or rather, the anime's overusage of him. Seriously, the narrator in that show not only talks through a good majority of every single episode, there are several moments where said narrator outright spoils important plot twists long before they get revealed in-universe. It's like the creator didn't trust the viewers to figure things out themselves, even when the show had an episode where characters find out about the truth behind Remi's real parentage, which the 1997 series remedied by cutting out the narrator completely. It seems like even Dezaki realized this and toned down the narration a LOT in Treasure Island. Granted, there's still narration in every episode, but the narrator is Jim this time around, which makes sense as this is his story and it's framed as him telling his mother about his adventures, and luckily, the narration doesn't spoil important plot twists or completely take over the story this time. Thank God!

Unlike Remi, which had 52 episodes to tell its story, Treasure Island only has 26, which in my opinion wound up being the perfect length for it. TI is made into two arcs, with the first half focusing on Jim and his team simply getting to Treasure Island and all that sailing across the sea entails, and the second half being about them surviving on the island and their ongoing conflict with the pirates. I do want to say, if there's one thing TI as an anime is really good at, its establishing and maintaining tension. The story is constantly moving from one beat to another, with characters' loyalties and motivations either remaining ambiguous or constantly changing, so you never know what's going to happen throughout every episode, and the way TI manages to keep this tension going for its entire run without resorting to cheese, melodrama, or cheap shots is amazing. It did an awesome job at making me feel invested in what was going on and wondering just what was going to happen in the next episode, or even in the very next scene, and it never drags anything out for the sake of unnecessary padding. Not a single moment in TI was wasted, and everything and everyone got their moments to shine.

Another reason why the tension works so well is the cast of characters, all of whom are fun, interesting, and well fleshed out, with each of them serving their own roles in the story and having their own strengths and flaws that make them compelling and fun to follow. One thing I also really appreciate about TI as a series is that the pirates are not only portrayed as being absolutely ruthless, but also extremely smart and cunning. Many stories about pirates tend to make them out to be little more than dumb brutes who only care about treasure and nothing else, and while the pirates in TI also care a lot about finding treasure, they're not made out to be a bunch of brainless buffoons who kill anyone they see. They dedicate a lot of time planning their actions down to the letter and spend a lot of money and resources on trying to pull them off, while trying to make sure Jim and the other good guys don't catch on to their plans. For example, in the second half of the series, Jim and the crew of the Hispaniola stay in a fort on Treasure Island that happens to have a working well. When the pirates try to mess with them by contaminating their water, I was sure they would do something like poison the water supply and straight up kill them off, but instead, they throw the corpses of dead animals into the well, contaminating the water that way with intent to drive them mad or indirectly kill them through dehydration. I admit I haven't read the novel so I can't comment how this plays out in the book, but seriously, considering the novel was the progenitor for all other pirate stories to follow, I'm amazed at how much mileage Stephenson, and by extension the anime team, managed to get out of having the Hispaniola crew and the pirates engage in a battle of wits as well as swords and guns. Tension doesn't always have to come from just fight scenes, and TI absolutely nailed it in my book. Eat your heart out, Fena: Pirate Princess.

Granted, as much as I want to praise TI up the wazoo, it's not without its issues, though they're pretty negligible in the grand scheme of things. For one, the animation for TI's time is pretty good, and at times even improved compared to Remi. Dezaki still gets good mileage out of his usage of water colored freeze frame stills that make scenes look more epic than they are, the backgrounds are realistic yet vividly imaginative and well layered, and the character designs, done by the great Akio Sugino, have this great rustic look about them that really make them look like rugged people and not like your typical anime characters, though I do have to question why they made Jim's design a lot more round and cutesy compared to Remi's more slightly realistic look. Note that Jim's face and nose are much more round and cartoony.

There is one thing about Dr. Livesey's design that really bothered me, and I don't know if this was intentional or not, but early in the series, his skin has this really ugly looking beige/green color that makes him look weird. And no, it's not because of the lighting either, for a good majority of the show, his skin looks like a mix of beige and green. It gets better over the course of the series, but I have to question whose bright idea it was to make him look like that in the first place. Furthermore, there are times when a character's hair changes color out of nowhere, and pretty drastically even if it's for just a second. For example, Long John Silver's hair is brown, but in some scenes it looks black, and other scenes randomly change it to blonde, and not because of stuff like him being in front of a campfire. Consistency should not be this hard! But other than those things, the animation is still pretty good for the time, and since TI has a more action-oriented feel to it, the fight choreography is a nice mix of fluid, dynamic movement and quick cuts to characters beating the crap out of each other complete with 70s sound effects.

Speaking of sound, the soundtrack is also surprisingly versatile, with heavy usage of trumpets, electric guitars, drums, and a LOT of 70s electronica that actually manages to work a lot better than you'd expect. Oh, and the opening song is absolutely badass and fits the show to a T. Plus, all the voice actors play their roles wonderfully...though I'm not gonna lie, Mari Shimizu's Jim can get really, really shrill at times, especially when he's angry or yells. Not all the time, thankfully, and she'd get better about this later on, especially when she'd reprise her role as Astro Boy in the 1980 remake of...well, Astro Boy. Plus, as shrill as Mari Shimizu can be, she's nowhere near on the level of the auditory nightmare that is Misaki Kuno. Or the God-awful car alarm/alpaca screams of Susanoo from The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon.

You're probably wondering why I haven't talked much about John Silver, the secondary main character of the series. Don't get me wrong, he's just as interesting and fun to follow as all the other characters are, and is the main driving force behind a good portion of the plot. But I honestly found it really hard to believe that a one-legged man who doesn't even use a peg is capable of pulling off a lot of the feats he does, especially in an era where prothestics didn't exist yet that I know of. Seriously, this guy survives a crap ton of things that literally no human could ever be capable of surviving, and because of this, along with a staggering lack of any real weaknesses, he comes dangerously close to superhuman territory. Plus, I'm sure a lot of people in the modern day will take issue with the fact that a disabled man is portrayed as the villain, even though he's presented as much more complex than that. I kind of wish the anime had taken some time to show him actually struggling more, whether with his disability or grappling with his own faults. That's not to say Silver is a bad character in any way, and I love how the anime really played with the father/son dynamic he had with Jim and the conflicting feelings Jim has about him as a result of his inevitable betrayal. Furthermore, there was one episode that I found hard to take seriously, with said episode involving a ghost ship that kind of felt out of place, considering TI as a show prided itself on being as grounded in reality as possible. Luckily, nothing of that caliber happens again, so it's not a huge issue. Also, several promo pictures show a lady in a veil, including the one I'm using, and taking up a good portion of the poster. Usually that implies said character is going to be important in the show, but if you're convinced she's going to be important, don't get your hopes up. She literally only appears in episode 25 and then never again. False advertising, much?

So yeah, the few flaws it has notwithstanding, I think Treasure Island is a fantastic anime that absolutely deserves to be seen, and now that Discotek Media put it out on Blu-Ray this past March, it's more widely available! Treasure Island is pretty much everything that Fena: Pirate Princess tried to be but couldn't, as the latter thought it could get viewers by throwing in endless fight scenes and a million plotlines without actually developing them or checking if they'd actually work. Treasure Island knew what it wanted to be, had a clear goal in mind, and cared enough about its premise to flesh out its characters and make it exciting. I don't recommend showing it to kids though, because there's quite a lot of violence, death, and uncensored blood in this, along with two instances of Jim drinking alcohol while underage. But seriously, just check out Treasure Island if you want an epic, exciting, tense swashbuckling adventure that'll actually have you at the edge of your seat.