Aoi Kioku: Manmou Kaitaku to Shounentachi

Aired: 1993

A long-form documentary anime adapting the first volume of the manga 'Series War', co-produced by Magic Bus, Nagano Eiken and others. In the closing months of the Pacific War, the Manchurian-Mongolian Pioneer Youth Volunteer Corps - boys in their teens - are dispatched to freezing borderlands far from home, where they are forced to combine subsistence farming with military drill. When the Soviet Union enters the war, the front collapses into chaos, hunger and despair. Director Dekao Tetsuji refuses easy melodrama, letting documentary detail speak for itself, and the result has long been used as a contemplative teaching tool about the human cost of imperial expansion.