The legendary anime that adapted ‘The Odyssey’ 45 years before Christopher Nolan

I’m not Christopher Nolan’s biggest fan, I admit it, but I’ve got no choice but to be grateful, as a film lover, for having at least one person in mainstream cinema who does exactly whatever he feels like. A very long drama about the creator of the atomic bomb? Of course. A science-fiction film that goes -literally- backwards and forwards the whole time? Why not. An adaptation of the best-known story of all time? Here’s 250 million dollars, do your thing, Chris.

Fight for good and for peace

After the release of The Odyssey, it’s hard not to imagine a young Nolan watching Ulysses 31 on television and thinking that, why not, he too could tell the story his own way someday. If you’ve read this sentence wondering “Wait, what the hell is Ulysses 31?” don’t worry, because you’re going to freak out, especially if you’re one of those people who cries over the director’s historical fidelity. The thing is, the series, inspired by The Odyssey, takes place in the 31st century, has time travel back to Odysseus’s own era and ignores Homer’s text as much as it can. And in the 80s nobody cared.

Crunchyroll Download

In fact, this anime was a collaboration between France and Japan, and it tried to make the Homeric texts more accessible to the kids at the time, glued to the TV. Since they were watching cartoons anyway, they might at least learn something… though I don’t think any of them ran to the library after seeing the premise: Ulysses, captain of the spaceship Odyssey, kills a robotic Cyclops to save his son Telemachus and other children, but Zeus, enraged, sentences him to travel aimlessly through the universe until he finds Hades, with the rest of his crew turned to stone. If you were wondering, yes, everyone accepts pretty naturally that the Greek gods are just hanging around in space like it’s no big deal, almost 40 centuries later.

The production of the series was polished and crafted with extreme care, even though many of its plot lines (which were forgotten from one episode to the next, obviously) didn’t make much sense. For example, in episode 23 they travel to Ancient Greece to meet the Ulysses and Telemachus from that era, who are exactly the same as their counterparts from the past, without anyone finding it particularly strange. Finally, after many adventures that revisit The Odyssey and other Greek texts, they manage to reach Hades in the last episode and manage to return to Earth. Despite the success, they didn’t pursue a sequel, thankfully, leaving the myth untouched.

Obviously, the story of Ulysses 31, even though it passes through Greek myths and gods, doesn’t follow The Odyssey to the letter. For example, the episode with Calypso is completely different (here Zeus orders her to stop Ulysses in his tracks, but she falls in love and lets him go), and in the middle of it all they go off to save Theseus from the Minotaur’s labyrinth. Yes, fine, but a whole generation of kids learned history and became interested in the myths of antiquity thanks to this anime that, sadly, is hard for future generations to discover because its pacing has clearly become dated. Still, who knows? Maybe after Nolan’s success it’ll finally return to streaming with a proper remaster. Anyone up for sailing the skies again?