The long-beloved anime adaptation of the Night on the Galactic Railroad feature film has shown up on a number of streaming services over the last few years and is continuing that expansion. The Tubi TV service had this added last year but it wasn’t too long for the service with all kinds of things going on. The feature film has been added in its English dub with closed-captions available which you can watch for free here.
Check out our Thirty Years Later retrospective that includes this property.
Plot Concept: Based on a short story by the popular children`s writer Kenji Miyazawa, Galactic Railroad offers viewers a slow-paced, dreamlike journey through space and time. When Giovanni, a lonely boy in a hill town, goes to get milk for his ailing mother, he finds himself crossing the Milky Way on a faster-than-light steam railroad. The stations he visits in various constellations, like the planets explored by St. Exupery`s Little Prince, offer curious adventures and an assortment of human “types.” Reality and fantasy blur aboard the train, and its travels across the light-years sometimes suggests the journey through life. The characters as depicted as cats, presumably to avoid the problems of animating humans.