A faithful version of Hector Malot's novel "Sans Famille" adapted for animation 99 years after the book's publication. It tells the at times almost unbearably sad tale of Remi, an eight year old French farm boy. He learns that he was a foundling when his stepfather arrives home and promptly sells the boy to traveling musician Vitalis to join his band of performers (three dogs and a monkey). For Remi, tragedy seems to strike every time a tiny sparkle of hope arrives in the boy's life. But don't worry, he will eventually find happiness even if it will only be after 51 half hours of misery.
This series was quite heavilly promoted in Europe because of the gorgeous animation technique which appeared to give it a three-dimensional effect. Remi was drawn as a typical Anime boy with large eyes and the occasional jerky leg movement, while his mentor Vitalis was portrayed as an enormous, brick wall of a man, despite the gray beard. Both of them had fashionably long seventies hair.
Admittedly, when this series was first broadcast by the AVRO on Dutch TV between October1979 and August of 1980, my young mind was not quite prepared to watch a cartoon series like this. First of all, it was a serial, and having to invest to such a long continuous story was unusual in TV shows at the time. Secondly, the animation was quite different from American and European contemporaries (my parents explained to me the names on the credits were Japanese, which was puzzling seeing as it was a French story). But most importantly, the story was often extremely sad. More than half the traveling performers die before the series is half way through. Poor Remi has to content with poverty, prejudice, cruel work-masters, a flood in a coal mine, a family of thieves, a young girl who can't speak, a boy who can't walk and several character, both good and bad, are thrown in jail at some point or another.
In the mid-eighties there was a Dutch video release, for wich the series was reedited into a mere 90 minutes, and completely re-dubbed. This was because they had cut out so much material that they had add new dialogue to explain things. And when the entire series was shown again on EO television between September 1996 and July 1997, the soundtrack was completely redone once more, including a new, hipper theme tune and a title change from "Remi" to "Alleen op de Wereld". This time the dialogue had to be changed because the EO is a very religious broadcast network and the original AVRO dubbing featured a couple of mild swear words.
The entire series (1530 minutes) was finally released on DVD in the Netherlands with help from the archive at Beeld & Geluid in 2011. This is predominately the AVRO version, although episodes 13 and 24 feature the EO voice tracks. My guess is they couldn't locate the original tapes from those two installments. Shame they couldn't add both audiotracks to every episode, then it would've been 3060 minutes worfh of Remi.
Having now finally manged to see every episode, this 40+ year old series remains a very impressive adaptation. The first half of the book is very fleshed out, with many new details added, but the second half is a bit less faithful to the original text. For instance, here Remi finds a new monkey to replace the original Jolli-Couer and his best friend Mattia has a much stronger personality in the cartoon compared to the often quite docile character from the book. Still, all the important story elements remain the same and a lot of touching and emotional scenes are highlighted by the animators.
Another, completely different Manga version of Sans Famille was made during the nineties, in which Remi was given a gender swap (but still kept her old 'masculine' name. Poor child. It seems Remi will never get a break.
9 out of 10