Bremen 4: Angels in Hell

ぶれーめんふぉー じごくのなかのてんしたち

Aired: 1981

A feature-length television special produced by Tezuka Productions, broadcast on August 23, 1981 as the fourth installment in Nippon Television's '24-Hour TV: Love Saves the Earth' charity programming and running for approximately 90 minutes. Written, planned and directed by Osamu Tezuka himself, this original work reimagines the Grimm fairy tale 'The Town Musicians of Bremen' as a stark anti-war, anti-nuclear fable: four animal musicians - a donkey, a dog, a cat, and a rooster - rise up against a militaristic dictatorship's invasion of Earth, using the power of music to defend the human heart. One of Tezuka's most distinctive late-career television works, Bremen 4 fuses his trademark humanism with pointed social satire and stands as a high-water mark in the artistic ambition of 1980s charity-event television anime.