So...this exists. And apparently it's come into the limelight now because somehow, for some reason, the streaming website Mubi somehow got their hands on it, gave it English subtitles, and put it up for streaming. That's how I learned about it, along with following the Twitter account WTK, which is a good source of home video news, licensing news, streaming news, and so on. But most old school animation afficionados know something pretty interesting about the Yuki's Sun pilot: This is actually the solo directorial debut of one Hayao Miyazaki. Miyazaki worked with Takahata on plenty of TV shows and directing some episodes of stuff during the 70s and 80s before moving onto movies, but this was the first time where he was the only one in the director's seat. But you're probably wondering just what the hell Yuki's Sun is about. Based on the 1963 shoujo manga by Tetsuya Chiba, Yuki's Sun follows a little girl named Yuki, who lives a happy, peaceful life in an orphanage until she's adopted by the affluent Iwabuchi family. When circumstances leave the Iwabuchi family penniless, Yuki finds herself on a journey to make a new life for herself, and maybe even rediscover her real family, with the only clue she has being the wooden cross necklace she always wears around her neck.

Being made in 1972, Yuki's Sun was actually meant to be a pilot for a TV series, but unfortunately, that went nowhere. If one were to judge Yuki's Sun on its own merits, what with it being a 5-minute short film...yeah, this has 70s shoujo melodrama written all over it. But if you can believe it, that's not the pilot's biggest problem. The biggest problem holding Yuki's Sun back as a film is that the whole thing comes off like an animated summary of the series, or a literal commercial for the manga, rather than a story on its own merits. Let me put it this way: Remember all those VHS commercials for the old animated Disney films back in the 80s and 90s, the ones that would basically summarize the entire movie to the point of flat-out spoiling important plot twists? Yuki's Sun feels like one of those but without the eighties power ballads or corny nineties music in the background. And yes, I'm not kidding you when I say this short film basically blitzes through the manga's entire story, complete with dropping plot twists like candy. "Hey, Yuki's adopted family had shady dealings with townspeople! Hey, Yuki has to save her sick adopted sister and walk through a literal blizzard! Hey, Yuki reunites with her biological father but he dies immediately afterward! Hey, Yuki hops a train and then reunites with her biological mother!" With literally no cohesion or explanation for how any of this plays out. If a TV series had managed to get made, I bet Miyazaki probably would have given these plot developments the proper build-up and pathos they deserved, but just throwing them in a five-minute short film doesn't really work.

It doesn't help that 95% of the pilot consists of a narrator talking over it and explaining everything. All she really does is summarize the entire premise of the manga, and the only other bits of dialogue come from Yuki, who has a grand total of three lines throughout the entire short. But even with the pilot's super short length (Literally five minutes long), Yuki's Sun is basically one of the earliest shoujo melodramas, rife with tropes and cliches that would fit right in with a soap opera: Missing biological parents, blunt force drama, bad things happening to the MC at every corner, adoptive families who have shady stuff going on, so on and so forth. Yuki's Sun might as well be Candy Candy before Candy Candy came into existence. I think Yuki's Sun choosing to just be a summary/commercial for the manga may have been what did it in, because it crams so much into five minutes, making it feel really rough and half-baked, and Miyazaki's early inexperience as a storyteller does unfortunately play a part in this. Also, how the hell is Yuki able to go through a friggin' blizzard without a coat or winter clothing?! She wears nothing but overalls and a short-sleeved shirt as she's dragging her sick adopted sister through a blizzard, she should have succumbed to either frostbite or hypothermia from that! I don't know how the manga makes this story play out, as no English translation of it exists, official or fanmade, so I can't read the manga for myself, though I admit I'd certainly like to.

Honestly, the pilot's only real saving grace is its animation. For a short film that came out in 1972, it's surprisingly polished, reveling in beautifully painted backgrounds and fluid movement. Animation as a medium was still fairly in its infancy, yet there's traces of his signature crispness in the way Miyazaki animates the characters, especially in one sequence where Yuki is running along a river, which was unheard of in animation at the time and wouldn't be refined until the eighties at the earliest. And keep in mind, this was six years before Future Boy Conan. Granted, Yuki's Sun wouldn't really make Miyazaki as a household name, as his later movies wound up doing that for both him and Ghibli. So yeah, while Yuki's Sun as a pilot film is an interesting piece of unearthed animation history, it's kind of an amateurish, cliche short film that is unable to stand on its own and feels more like an animated commercial. It's a shame a TV series for this didn't get made, because it probably would have been pretty good, especially since Chiba-sensei's manga is already so short (Four volumes), and Miyazaki probably would have done the story justice if he was given the opportunity to do so. I'm glad that whoever at Mubi found this put it up for streaming to make it more accessible for people, but it's not really going to interest anyone who isn't interested in learning about Miyazaki's early oeuvre.