Les Miserables (Toei)

About

Les Miserables was adapted by the famous Japanese film and animation studio Toei in 1979 as a 75 minute TV special for Fuji TV. Retitled Jean Valjean Monogatari (The Story of Jean Valjean) it was written by Masaki Tsuji a well known scenarist at the time who had worked as a writer on many popular shows since the 1960's including Gegege No Kitaro and Urusei Yatsura. Animation and character design was by Masami Suda who would later design the characters for both the TV series and movie versions of Hokuto No Ken (Fist of the North Star) and the Salaryman Kitaro TV show. The remainder of the crew where made up of the usual Toei staffers.It was adapted into English by ZIV International. By the early 80s, ZIV International had amassed a large collection of Japanese animation, much of it from the prolific Toei studio, which it intended to sell as children's TV fodder. The shows where diverse in nature from boy's own tales such as Captain Harlock, The Adventures of King Arthur and Captain Future to titles more suited to the female market like Fables of the Green Forest, Flower Angel and Lily Cat.The English language version was cut by six minutes bringing it's running time down to barely more than an hour. Even though the original was fairly tame and family friendly, the cuts were necessary to not cause upset in the West. Removed scenes include Javert's suicide and elsewhere dialog was re-written including reference to Fontine simply a beggar rather than a prostitute. This was released in 1984 on VHS and Betamax by Family Home Entertainment in a big box. There are only three know copies of this tape in existence at this time. One is owned by famed Anime YouTuber Kenny Lauderdale, the other by a private purchaser on eBay, and finally the copy from my collection that I uploaded for posterity.

Human-made No record of this work says a model made it. What this means.

Archive

Internet Archive, in Anime

Licence or status

The Internet Archive states none for this item.

Credit

Toei Animation; ZIV International

Language

English

Who can watch

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