Two hours of ocean and it never once feels like a kids' cartoon babysitting you. This is the 1972 Tezuka series squeezed into a re-edit, which means Tomino's earliest instincts hit you in a concentrated dose: a blue-haired boy with a crescent on his forehead, an Orichalcum dagger, and a war with the Poseidon tribe that keeps insisting there is a right side to be on. Triton and Fin cutting through open water is still one of the purest images in 70s adventure animation, and the compilation format strips out the filler until only the momentum is left. What makes it cult is what the story eventually does to the word hero. You come for a boy and his dolphin. You leave doing math about who actually started it.

Umi no Triton is a 1979 recap film in two parts that re-edits the earlier television series into a feature-length adventure fantasy. Only the first part played in theaters, as part of the Uchuu Senkan Yamato Festival. The second part came out years later on home video, and later DVD editions brought both halves together in a single release.