Twelve minutes in and nobody has said a word yet, and you already know exactly who Godo is: a baby decanted from a tube, taught to walk and fly by machines, loved by nothing except a robot. That opening is the whole flex. Tezuka builds the future as a nursery run by computers, then spends the rest of the film breaking it, dropping his golden-boy pilot from the elite ranks into penal labor and sticking him with Dr. Saruta, an old man who thinks the answer to a dying Earth is to go catch the Phoenix itself. And then there's Olga, the shapeshifting nurse-droid who raised him and refuses to stop loving him, which is the part that ruins people. The animation goes fully cosmic in the back half, all fire and light and life burning out of the bird. It's 1980 hand-drawn sci-fi that asks whether a machine's devotion counts, and then answers yes, at cost.

In a far future on a dying Earth, people are made in laboratories and brought up by computers and robots to fill set roles in society. A boy named Godo grows up under the care of his robot nursemaid Olga and trains to become a skilled pilot. Kind toward animals and machines alike, he is mocked by his superiors for his bond with Olga, but his marksmanship earns him a special assignment: capturing the immortal Phoenix, a creature blamed for wrecking many spaceships. Then he falls for Rena, the president's daughter, who is already engaged to the head of the Science Department. The film opens with a long wordless sequence and grows into a space adventure about the strength of selfless love.