You are looking at a 1979 artifact of pure adventure, before anime learned to be self-conscious, before it started explaining itself. A boy and a girl on an ocean world, hunting through ruins of a civilization that destroyed itself, moving toward a confrontation that feels earned because the film never stops moving long enough to doubt it. The magnetic weapons that broke the world are still out there, still wanted, still dangerous. Conan doesn't think about what he represents or what the story means. He just acts. That directness, that absence of irony, that commitment to the forward motion of the narrative, that's what makes this work. It's not trying to be timeless. It just is.

Twenty years after a war fought with magnetic weapons set off massive earthquakes and left the Earth mostly ocean, a lively boy named Conan and his grandfather live alone on an isolated island, believing they may be the last people alive. One day they find a girl, Lana, unconscious on the shore. She has been running from agents of Industria, a technologically advanced fortress island. Industria wants her because she is the telepathic granddaughter of the scientist Dr. Briac Lao, and its leaders hope she can lead them to him and to a powerful energy source. When Industrian soldiers take her back, Conan sets out to rescue her in a sci-fi adventure film.