This is the movie that makes you realize Greek mythology was always a gangster story, and 1986 Sunrise had the guts to animate it that way. Yasuhiko Yoshikazu came off Gundam, took his own manga, and directed it himself, so every frame carries that linework where faces actually age and armor actually weighs something. The engine isn't the war between Zeus and Poseidon, it's Hades quietly building a child into a knife using his mother's blindness as the lie, and Arion spending the whole film refusing to be the weapon someone else forged. Joe Hisaishi's score treats the gods like weather, huge and indifferent, right up until the point where they turn out to be small, petty, and disappointingly human. It's slept on because it never got a clean release and it doesn't flatter anybody, least of all the Olympians. Watch it for the moment Arion stops looking up at them.

A boy raised in the shadow of gods awakens to a world far more dangerous than he imagined. Arion spends his childhood in the hills of Thrace with his blind mother, Demeter, until a mysterious stranger carries him off, planning to turn him into an assassin for the war between Zeus and Poseidon. Gods such as the tenacious Ares, the clever Athena and the scheming Apollo stand against him. But Arion refuses to be used. Armed with great strength, a long-forgotten weapon made by Prometheus and loyal companions, he fights on. Along the way he draws closer to the truth about his birth, a secret that weighs on his mother. To learn his destiny, Arion must storm Mount Olympus and confront Zeus himself.