Tistou Midori no Oyayubi

Tistou Midori no Oyayubi (Tistou of the Green Thumbs) is a 1990 movie, based on a beloved French children's novel by Maurice Druon. It tells the story of a boy, Titsou. He's the son of a rich factory owner, but he has no aptitude for book learning. 

Instead, his father sends him to work with the family gardener, known as Mr. Mustache. There, Tistou discovers that he has an extraordinary ability, "green thumbs": whatever he touches sprouts flowers, even if there is no soil or seeds.

(He can also communicate with his pony, Gymanstique.) 

As he travels around his home town of Mirepoil, he applies his thumbs to whatever he encounters - the town prison, the slums, the town hospital, and his father's armaments factory. 

He thereby changes his world for the better, even to the point of stopping a war. It's all too good to last, but the ending is metaphorical and optimistic rather than tragic.

The movie captures the book's tone of magic realism, balancing gracefully between a slice-of-life family story and a fairy tale. Long stretches have no dialog and rely strictly on visuals. The movie looks beautiful, with a pastel palette and watercolor-like backgrounds.

No attempt is made to explain Tistou's capabilities or his effect on his world; miracles are to be experienced, not analyzed. It's a lovely film, airy and insubstantial as cotton candy, and quite moving. The translator, Perevodildo, gave it his highest compliment, calling it "kino." (Yeah, I had to look it up in the Urban Dictionary too.)

A few translation notes:

• The pony's name, Gymnastique, is from the original French book. The English translation uses Gymnast, because the actual translation, Gymnastics, would be a fairly strange name for a horse. Here, the French has been left untranslated.
• Several characters with "foreign accents" mangle Tistou's name. The Japanese script uses "Chichi," but the book uses "Tisti," and that's used here.
• The factory manager's name, Trounadisse, seems like a riff on "trou d'indice" or "missing the point," because the character's orderly and rigid outlook makes him miss the point of Tistou's gift. The English book translation uses Tornbull.

The voice actors were mostly drawn from the world of films, rather than anime:

• Yamase Mami (Tistou) has only a few anime credits - Princess Peach in Super Mario Brothers: Peach-hime Kyuushutsu Daisakusen and Kayoko in the What's Michael? TV series.
• Ootaki Hideji (Mr. Mustache) mostly appeared in live-action films and TV shows.
• Yamamtoto Kei (father) played Jutaro in Band of Ninja, Mr. Gogetz in Dog of Flanders, Lt. Inoue in Harp of Burma, and Kurosawa in the first Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo movie, an Orphan release.
• Wakamura Mayumi (mother) appeared in many TV shows but has no other anime credits.
• Ishizaka Kouji (narrator) narrated Manxmouse, an Orphan release, as well as Call of the Wild: Howl, Buck, and the Zenki series.

The director, Tanno Yuuji, was a planner and producer. His only other anime directing credit was Bunna yo Ki kara Oritekoi, which has not been translated.

Tistou Midori no Oyayubi has never been released on digital media, so when a Japanese laserdisc version came up for sale, WOWmd snapped it up. He ripped it on his Domesday Duplicator and then encoded it. The encode is quite large, in order to preserve all the lovely details of the artwork. Perevodildo translated and timed. I edited and typeset (not much to do there). ImAWasteOfHair, Nemesis, and Paul Geromini all QCed. WOWmd chose to encode the first and second side of the laserdiscs separately, because they have slightly different frame sizes. This has happened before; Orphan's first version of Hashire! Melos was encoded in two pieces for the same reason. Perhaps, like that show, a single complete raw will be available sometime in the future.

This blog entry has been rather short, not because Tistou Midori no Oyayubi is undeserving, but because it basically speaks for itself: a charming, self-contained fairy tale about a child's goodness overcoming the evils of the real world. It's just what we need in these dark times, and I recommend it highly. You can get the show from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net.