Black Jack operates on a principle that cuts against everything modern medicine pretends to be: a doctor who'll save your life regardless of whether you deserve it, then charge you what you can bear. Each episode is a complete moral negotiation dressed up as a case file. The animation holds steady across 61 episodes, which shouldn't be remarkable but is, it lets you actually see the precision in his hands during surgery, the weight of what he's deciding. Pinoko trailing behind him, genuinely in love with a man incapable of returning it the way she needs, grounds the whole thing in something real that no diagnosis can fix.

Black Jack is a genius doctor who practices without a registration and carries a murky past shrouded in mystery. Working alongside his young assistant Pinoko, who is openly smitten with him, he takes on obscure medical cases that can be bizarre, dangerous or entirely unknown. He can save nearly any patient, provided they can afford his fee, and his name is known worldwide, especially among doctors and scientists. A committed rationalist, he trusts little he has not witnessed himself, yet again and again affection and the natural world overpower the scientific outlook that guides his life. The drama runs for 61 episodes.