1976

Japanese Title	Translation	Other Titles
haha wo tazunete sanzen ri	3000 Leagues in Search of Mother	From the Appenines to the Andes \| Marco (most dubs)

Original Work

Cuore

Heart: an Italian schoolboy's journal, a book for boys

Author

Edmondo de Amicis, 1846-1908 {Italian}

Editions

Heath's Modern Language Series

Story Setting

Genova, Italy, Marco's hometown; then across the Atlantic by boat to Buenos Aires, Argentina

Story Beginning Date

1881: Marco's mother Anna goes to Argentina.

Number of Episodes

Production Studio and Broadcasting Network

Nippon Animation (Fuji TV)

Air Dates

January 4 1976 - December 26 1976

Staff

Voice Actors

Theme songs

Opening:

sôgen no maruko

Ending:

kaasan ohayô

Op:

Ed:

Op:

Ed:

Related Images

Spanish Marco comic book

�薼 Shift_JIS Title:

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Shôjo & General entry

Japanese Home Video Releases

DVD : The entire series available as of 1999. 3800 Yen each, BCBA-0077 to BCBA-0083.

LD : Box set: In two parts, limited-edition set based on pre-orders, is now probably difficult to obtain if not impossible through distributors.

MEMORIAL BOX Part-1: EPs 1-24. 36,000 Yen. Released 6/25/97.
MEMORIAL BOX Part-2: EPs 25-52. ? Yen. Released 11/25/97.

Individual-sale LDS: Seven volumes total, each volume containing two laserdiscs with a total of eight episodes. Each volume contains an insert with an essay and expository visuals on one aspect of the tv series. For example, vol. 1 contains notes regarding Hayao Miyazaki's layout for the tv series, photographs of his B&W storyboards, and photographs of the original character roughs; vol. 2 focuses on the background art; etc. Now OOP?

Released by Bandai Visual, BELL-360 to BELL-366.
First released 09/25/90 to 01/24/91.
Price, tax inc.: Vol. 1-6, 9,800 Yen; Vol. 7, 5800 Yen.
Vol. 1-6, 200 min.; Vol. 7, 100 min.

1980 televised movie version: The Japanese title is gekijou hen haha wo tazunete sanzenri. This is a self-contained film re-organizing footage from the tv series. Released 5/20/1994 by Pony Canyon, PCLP-00510, 4800 Yen. 107 mins. Also available on VHS at the same price, cat. # PCVP-11563.

Marco is an adolescent boy growing up the bustling port city of Genova at the turn of the century. He lives in a typical household, with a loving mother and father, and one elder brother. When one day Marco's mother leaves for Argentina, Marco's idyllic world is shattered. Life continues, but all the while Marco longs to see his mother again, and we witness confrontations between he and his father which no doubt reflect Marco's inner state of turmoil. After an abortive attempt to stow away on a ship, and despite his father's initial objections, Marco is in the end given permission, and he departs alone on a 3000-league voyage across the Atlantic towards the alien city of Buenos Aires, beleiving his mother will be there to greet him. However, in Buenos Aires he discovers that his mother has moved away somewhere and that he must make a long journey to get there. In the days to come, again and again in like manner Marco finds himself shuttled about the country in in an increasingly difficult, desperate and seemingly endless peregrination in search of his mother. Along the way he meets all sorts of people, good and bad, rich and poor, and so on, and his journey becomes, both in reality and symbolically, a journey from innocence into adulthood.

An adaptation of only one tiny portion of Cuore, the story for the month of May, "From the Appenine to the Andes". Read more about the adaptation. The anime resembles the original story only in outline; most of the story elements and characters in the anime are original, created by skilled screenplay-writer Fukazawa Kazuo (screenwriter of Hols, Prince of the Sun).

One major flaw (in retrospect) in this series is the fact that language doesn't prove much of a barrier to the Italian Marco on his journeys in Argentina; he chats away without any problem with everyone he meets. I suppose this series would be hard to imagine if language barriers made dialogue impossible.

On the TV compilation movie:

A tv-compilation movie was released in theaters on 19 July 1980 in Japan. I believe it, in addition to the Heidi movie released a year earlier, was supervised by the original creators, Takahata Isao and Miyazaki Hayao; as much probably can't be said for most such tv-compilations, IMO reflecting the deep level of involvement typical of these two.

Dubs on Video

An Italian dub was released at one time on VHS

There was some sort of video release in Spain and Portugal at one time

(The following essay was attached to the original version of my WMT page.)

3000 Leagues in Search of Mother:
From the Appenines to the Andes

Based on (Cuore)Heart: an Italian schoolboy's journal, a book for boys by Edmondo de Amicis

On the novel

Written following the Italian war for independence by a sub-leutenant who had fought in the seige of Rome in 1870, Cuore is the fictional diary of a boy's third year in a Turin municipal school. It was written to foster juvenile appreciation of the newfound Italian national unity, which the author had fought for in the recent war. The book is often highly emotional, even sentimental, but gives a vivid picture of urban Italian life at that time. A master, introducing a new pupil, tells the class, "Remember well what I am going to say. That this fact might come to pass--that a Calabrian boy might find himself at home in Turin, and that a boy of Turin might be in his own home in Calabria, our country has struggled for fifty years, and thirty thousand Italians have died." The author established a reputation as a writer in various genres after his experience as a soldier, and after having been translated into English in 1895 as Heart and then four years later as Enrico's Schooldays, the novel became internationally popular, and has been translated into over twenty-five languages.

On the anime

Our story starts off in Genova, Italy [Image 1]. It concludes across the Atlantic in Cordoba, Argentina [2], where our protagonist, the young Marco Rossi [3], has travelled all by himself in search of his mother, who has been away for many months by this time and whom he has been pining to see for as long, being still very young. (So much for the title) At home in Genova, the Rossis are a family of four: The mother, Anna, the father, Pietro, the brother, Tonio, and Marco himself. And Amedeo, their pet, a rather fancifully drawn monkey (who may have been the inspiration for the Token Pet to be found in almost every WMT series from here on out). Marco's father [4] oversees a free clinic which treats the masses unable to afford the cost of medical treatment at a hospital. Due to the debt into which this line of work eventually thrusts the family, and coupled with the national work shortage which plagued Italy at the end of the nineteenth century, Marco's parents find themselves compelled to take the drastic but temporary measure, which neither of them likes but upon which they are both agreed, of sending Anna [5] to Argentina in hopes that would be able there to find work as a nurse to the poor, and return home at a time when the family's debt has been repaid.

But the very journey that is central to this story does not start until, over the unfolding of a dozen episodes, we have been escorted through what seems like every nook and cranny of the fin-de-siecle city of Genova [6], through the eyes of young Marco: the dark alleyways which only get five minutes of sunlight a day [7]; the vast marble plazas where the priveleged minority lounge in the sunlight above the crowded, towering tenements of the inner city [8]. Every image is intense and vivid, shot like a documentary, and the sounds in turn are so unobtrusively authentic as to reach over and evoke the smells and the sensations, the rain, the sunlight, the crush of the bodies in a crowd. I come from Houston, Texas, the sordid melting pot of Rich and Poor planted like an off-center bellybutton in gullet of the land of the armadillo, and the picture painted seems distant and yet also somehow disconcertingly familiar to me. (okay, King of the Hill is by far more disconcertingly familiar to me than 3000 Ri) The Genova of Marco's day is a city on the verge of modernity, struggling to move ahead but mired in the past, like its buildings, whose gruesomely disproportionate shapes evoke a suffering beast forever frozen in the act of rending its body up towards the sky in a wracked convulsion, or more congenially, like trees in a thicket competing for the sunlight in a life or death struggle, thus accounting for the sad, melancholy mood which pervades Genova beneath the mask of lively bustle, and the unnaturally tall and slender proportions of its artifices, the tenements.

Marco feels that he must leave Genova for the alien city of Buenos Aires (Images of Buenos Aires: [9] [10] [11]) -- a grueling journey all the way across the Atlantic -- because the sudden cessation of correspondence from his mother, Anna, inflames his fears that his mother may have fallen gravely ill. By the time of his journey, Marco has been matured and mentally prepared for the journey ahead of him by the often shockingly heated family disputes that he, in his yearning to set off in search for his mother, instigates with his father. His father only naturally refuses even the thought of putting his son alone onto a ship to head for a far off, alien land like South America. But Marco is just a little boy. His desires aren't bounded by logical boundaries (A stigmatized longing for the impossible seems to have a long tradition as as one of the beauties of youth...) Marco takes his anxieties to an extreme that is frightening and even downright pathological, and yet not even for a moment do his violent emotions ever comes across as gratuitous. It is in fact this part of the series which delves most deeply and effectively into the realm of the turbulent emotions of that difficult time called adolescence. At certain points in these episodes Marco rebels with an intensity of emotion and mental anguish that would make Jim "Rebel" Dean/Stark quake in his boots.

This viewer only recently had the opportunity to experience watching these episodes for the first time, and without hesitation I would say in earnest that no anime tv series has ever been more emotionally riveting to me than merely the first fifth of this tv series. (and that's not to discount the rest of the series) One could say that 3000 Leagues is the emotional prototype for Grave of the Fireflies, Takahata's film from a decade later. In her article on Isao Takahata in Kinema Jumpo No. 1166, Emiko Okada makes it a point to draw a parallel between the indifferent and cruel adults in Grave of the Fireflies and those in 3000 Ri. While I think such a parallel is partly true, I don't feel that the characterisations of the adults in 3000 Ri were taken to the extreme to which they were taken in Grave of the Fireflies. I think Grave suffers more than anything from this problem. People who lived through this period say that people were charitable and supportive of each other during this time and that the hardship-induced greed and self-interest characteristic of most characters in this film is all wrong. 3000 Ri is more than well balanced by its share of compassionate adult characters, and doesn't suffer any such handicap, I feel. The creators of the anime would be to thank for this, if it's true, because in almost all respects the anime version of this novel is an original story; (one of the more important differences being that the anime version is understandably devoid of the patriotic undercurrent which Cuore the novel fairly floats in.) whereas Grave, as Okada points out, betrays its origins in autobiography by its sometimes wooden depiction of characters. It's easy to understand that liberties would need to be kept to a minimum in a 90 minute adaptation, whereas liberties would needs be taken in abundance in order to flesh out a 52-episode adaptation.

Ihara Yuuta (his Japanese home page) astutely points out the decline in grit in the WMT as the years go by, in his description of Little Princes Sara (1985) on his home page. When the WMT was still up and running, it was in the hope of perhaps one day re-experiencing the unique emotional power with which this TV series about a young girl's hardships was (apparently) imbibed the tv series borders on stepping out of the novel's "children's literature" pigeonhole on this count, in fact, once again apparently that he continued watching year by year the successive new tv series of the WMT (I wasn't too shocked after watching the first four episodes, but that's all I've seen) Without getting into details detracting from this point... now that the WMT is over (as of April 1997) one can see that all series which followed after Sara seem tame and patronising in comparison to it and several other WMT series (although Sara deserves the bulk of criticism in my opinion for its forced, black and while villains and heroine, and for Minchin, who comes off looking like a lunatic if anything with her unexplained, perverse persecution of excessively angelic Sara.) In any case 3000 Ri stands out in this respect, alongside Sara and possibly A Dog of Flanders, as being among the few powerful and beleivably executed, hard-hitting dramas -- "tragedies", roughly speaking -- in the WMT. Interesting is that these series, the tragedies of the WMT, have either among the largest followings among the WMT, or got its highest ratings in its twenty-three year history (ratings decline steadly from the go anyways). And as a contrast, the series in the latter half of the WMT's existence, more light-hearted and formulaic than the seminal, sober early tv series, appear to be deliberate attempts to make "childrens' anime". The ultimate failiure of this attempt, and in its deadly embrace, the WMT, smacks of irony somewhere, somehow. Perhaps there is more wisdom than meets the eye to Shudo Takeshi's (Minky Momo scenario writer and original creator) 1993 remark, "I have the impression that we went about creating [the MM tv series] with a feeling not of pandering to the kids, but rather, thinking that if adults could follow, then surely the kids would be able to follow as well."

A film inspired Takahata to go ahead with 3000 Ri, and probably exerted a good deal of influence on the stylistic aspects of the tv series. This was Vittorio De Sica's film The Bicycle Thief (1948), the seminal movie of the Italian post-war "neo-realist" film movement. De Sica's other films inclue Miracle in Milan, Umberto D, and Shoeshine. The film is considered one of the hallmarks of western cinema. Most striking of the similarities between 3000 Ri and The Bicycle Thief and other neo-realist films, are the extended, unadorned camera-shots and sequences where a character is filmed going through menial daily rituals. The pacing in 3000 Ri is also similar to that in The Bicycle Thief. It follows Marco in documentary style through the streets as he is ushered from one corner of town to the other, and then from one town to another, in search of his mother. It paints the cities in unflattering colors, meanwhile showing the color of daily life and hinting at the discontent and despair that existed beneath it all. Many Italians fled Italy in search of work around the turn of the century. Apparently Marco's father was modelled directly after the father in The Bicycle Thief. The father in The Bicycle Thief is hounded incessantly by the ever canniving dogs of fate -- on the surface by the bicycle thief, but under it in the form of the employment shortage in Italy during the postwar bust years; and in 3000 Ri this hard fate falls upon Marco, who in many ways plays the part of the father in The Bicycle Thief. And sometimes 3000 Ri shows the "color of life" prevalent in those hard times quite ominously. As the squalid immigrant ship [12] upon which Marco has been forced to board approaches Buenos Aires, the city where he beleives his mother to be, a hull-level camera-shot shows an object bobbing slowly along the waves towards the ship. As it bumps into the hull, it tilts over to one side, before sinking beneath the waves, to reveal the corpse of a horse. This is a good example of the hard-hitting, frank realism that pervades the series. (The slum pictured here is another: [13]. Note the ironic juxtaposition of the grimy slum with the pristine white city.) This scene melds into the flow of the narrative spontaneously, as do all events and developments in 3000 Ri, and simultaneously adds a subtle layer of grim foreboding to an already ominous episode. His experiences on the new continent reveal to Marco -- and to the viewer -- a people living sad, stoically determined lives, upon the vast, flat Argentenan pampas. [14] [15] It is a place proverbially no "greener" [16] than Marco's remote and overpopulated, troubled homeland. 3000 Ri is my favorite of all the World Masterpiece Theater series because it is in my opinion one of the most important, most transcendent achievements of Japanese animation. If the fifties and the sixties saw the flowering of Japanese cinema at the hand of directors like Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi and Ozu Yasujiro, it is my belief that this old generation of brilliant filmmaking found a sort of "closure" at the hands of this director, Isao Takahata, with the T.V. series 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother.

The series is called Marco in the German-broadcast version. It has frequent re-runs in Japan and in Europe (as do many of the World Masterpiece Theater series), and because of this frequent tv broadcasting, it's in all likelihood as popular and well known (that is to say, as "popular and well known" to television audiences as an anime series can get) in a select few western nations -- France and Germany, for example -- as it is in Japan. However, this reputation takes the form of notoreity in Argentina, where the series was cancelled before even a third of the series had been aired, on account that it was apparently deemed too serious and depressing to certain viewers. How ironic that the country where most of the action of the tv series takes place should shut the door in its face.

The anime version is leagues different from the novel, being, as it is, effectively a "story within a story" -- in this case a story within the diary-novel Cuore. On the other hand, the other World Masterpiece Theater series based on a diary-novel -- Daddy Long-Legs -- follows, rather, the whole of the original, fleshing out the entires, producing in the end a growing-up sitcom with a more tangible narrative. The original for Daddy, however, has even less of a central narrative than does Cuore. And whereas the novel is but a diary-novel about the life of an Italian elementary school student, the anime is, one might say, more like an international adventure story. The story "From the Appenines to the Andes" is the title of one of the novel's chapters. This chapter is a story read to the class in Cuore, one of many such stories in the novel. The teacher made it a habit to read the children of his class a story once a month, and these are included in the text of the novel. So, this anime tv series was based upon only one chapter of Cuore: not the entire story. The entire story was, however, animated by Nippon Animation five years later, in 1981, and was the last of the "Calpis Playhouse" works. (I'm not entirely sure what exactly this entails, but most likely it points to some company named "Calpis" as having been the main sponsor of the WMT series and other Nippon Animation series for the first few years of N.A.'s existence.)

This was one of Isao Takahata's earliest credits as tv-series general director, and remains one of his most well known works. (his most (ever-)popular and famous tv series are probably 3000 Ri, Anne of Green Gables, and the virtual anthem of Japan's Kansai region, Jarinko Chie) The "Ri" of the Japanese title, Haha wo tazunete sanzen ri, is an antiquated nautical measure of distance; one ri is equivalent to 2.44 miles; "ri" thus becomes "league."

Video Releases

See the top of this entry for concrete info on the various releases. Here are some comments on the LDs, which I own. And which may no longer be in print, sadly. There are seven volumes of the LD's, each containing two LD's (eight episodes) except for the last volume which contains one LD. The video mastering is very clear, which is essential so as to present the full beauty of the stunning backgrounds (the powerful and visible brush-strokes of which are a stark comparison with the strictly "realistic" backgrounds prevalent in today's high-budget Studio Ghibli films -- not to mention the same, to a lesser degree, in Nippon Animation's recent World Masterpiece Theater tv series), and was "remastered from a new print." The audio got some sort of high-tech fumbling-with which made it sound absolutely fantastic on my headphones but which for some strange reason separated the voices and the BGM/background noises, respectively, into my left and right channels when played over the speakers (!). I beleive they call this "multi-audio" in the Japanese. Apparently this is considered a plus. Different folks, different strokes.

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