Milky Subway: One-Person Anime on Netflix — Full Breakdown &

[00:00] Uh-oh! I'm back on my bullshit! Normally, this doesn't happen. Normally, when I have a favorite anime of a particular year, like one of my favorite animes of 2025, I normally don't have a reason to ever come back and talk about it

[00:13] and have it somewhat feel relevant. But today I do, because one of my favorite anime from 2025 was a little thing called Milky Subway. And if you're wondering why I get to talk about it now in 2026,

[00:26] it's because now it's on Netflix. And why is this important? because last year all Milky Subway was was a legitimately entertaining series of short films that totaled to a little bit over 40 minutes or so, made by a guy and uploaded to YouTube.

[00:40] But now all of those shorts got combined into one theatrical 47-minute production, and it's up on Netflix. And on the surface, the film is just like this little quirky and somewhat dumb sci-fi comedy,

[00:53] you know, about a bunch of delinquents who get thrown on a subway car that's careening through the stars like Galaxy Express. And it is just that. But also one of the things that I find very interesting is how this was made, mostly by like one guy and I think Blender. Because normally when you have anime, they are a big production, they are a lot of people, there's committees, there's teams, there's groups of animators, there's a writer, there's a director, there's producers, it's this whole team effort usually to make an anime come to life.

[01:24] and this guy did most of it by himself. Sure, you can check the cast list or the staff list and realize, nah, he had a little bit of help in some places, but the vast majority is just one guy. And that, to me, is very significant

[01:36] because we've had several anime that have existed before in the past that are made by one person, but usually what that is is like you have an auteur or someone that puts themselves in like a producer role.

[01:48] They will more than likely also write the thing, which makes it more so theirs than anything else, But usually then they, like, hire a team or get animators to help animate. You don't normally have someone that, like, directs, animates, models, writes everything.

[02:04] The main thing that this guy didn't do is voice acting. And then he went all out on that. Because not only was Milky Subway given a Japanese dub, you know, for the Japanese audience, it was an actual, like, animated production from that perspective,

[02:18] but then also they went ahead and paid for dubs in multiple languages. That's something that, like, multi-million dollar anime productions don't always do, or they leave it to the localizers to do that, and they just stick with the Japanese.

[02:33] So the fact that, like, this is available in multiple languages, or was available and still is available on YouTube in multiple languages, is hilarious to me. So if you haven't seen it, Milky Subway is this sci-fi comedy about a bunch of delinquents

[02:45] who prior to the release of Milky Subway, if you watch the other short film, Milky Highway, you'll get to see two of our characters go on this wonderful little joyride in a car and they end up blowing up some police troopers

[02:58] and a bunch of other things, which lands them not in jail because apparently the jails are too full, but then along with two other groups of delinquents get thrown into community service. The community service that they're supposed to do is to clean a very old subway train

[03:13] so that it can still be used. you know, to save money or something like that. But the train malfunctions and ends up becoming a runaway train with them on board, and they have to try and take control of the train and get back home.

[03:25] Meanwhile, you have the police officer who's in charge of all of them freaking the hell out because she's just done with this shit. And the entire thing is a combination of what they're dealing with on the train, but then doing a bunch of flashbacks to, like, interrogations prior to

[03:40] going onto the Milky Subway to find out who these characters are, what were they in for, and just, you know, generally have a great time with all of them. It is an extremely well-paced production and narrative, that's what I'll say. Everything

[03:53] was written and presented in such a way that the episode breaks because every episode on YouTube is only a handful of minutes long Every break is very intentional and it leads up to them all very well for transitions into the opening and outro credits

[04:07] brilliantly most times, and it has the comedy. But because of that short nature of all the episodes, it is very chaotic, and it's part of its energy, and I felt like it really works very well. I'm still on the Netflix thing, and we'll get to that.

[04:20] But it is a show that very much makes use of its short length, because in total, it's only 45 minutes long. Even though this is a theatrical cut because it was released in Japanese theaters, the Netflix version is still only like half the length of a normal movie.

[04:33] And despite that, nothing feels like rushed. It feels half-paced, but not rushed. And despite the fact that we have like seven main characters, eight if you include other things,

[04:45] they all get reasonable amounts of time to shine. They all feel like real people. and that is kind of amazing when you consider the runtime. Now, when it comes to the actual production, this was all done by one guy.

[04:58] And this whole thing apparently started as a graduation project. Because in 2022, he made the previously aforementioned Milky Highway and he made that for his final project at either university or college or whatever program he was in the middle of running.

[05:11] I found it, but it was in Japanese and I'm probably going to mistranslate it. It's fine. And he did pretty much the whole thing of that short film himself. He wrote it, he directed it, he modeled it, he animated it, he edited it, it was mostly done in Blender, and he was entirely self-taught.

[05:25] Once he's done with it, he throws the short up on YouTube, and it hit over 6 million views. Cut to three years later, and now he has created an entire 12-episode miniseries sequel, which is now also uploaded to YouTube, and has 11 languages onto it.

[05:39] As I mentioned, languages! He didn't need to do that! So then, because, you know, the project is really freaking good, it was recut for a theatrical release, and it was put into Japanese theaters, and it made roughly 3 million US dollars in about a month.

[05:54] In Japan, it also debuted at number 4 for all of their films for the weekend that it came out, despite the fact that it only actually went out to 73 theaters, and not an extremely wide release. And so not only am I utterly amazed that this level of quality exists, when I tell you that Milky Subway was one of my favorite anime of 2025,

[06:13] it's like number two out of everything that came out. And that's mostly not due to any of the back-end stuff at all. Like, the back-end stuff is impressive, but just based on the characters, the narrative, the actual show we got, it was my number two for last year.

[06:27] But actually looking at all the back-end stuff, all of the meta stuff, like, that is where it's really impressive. I don't... I feel like I'm just beating it over the head that, yeah, one guy. And that's kind of important.

[06:40] The one guy. And again, you can look into the staff list and there are other names there. But the vast majority of all of the very difficult work for actually creating this project was done by him.

[06:52] It was done by him using, like, consumer-grade software. He didn't have, like, a studio with all of their fancy tech and the things that they purchased in order to make things easier for their lives or more commercialized.

[07:05] He didn't do any of that. He created this 3D animated film. Like, when a lot of people like me talk about 3D animated anime, like, from Japan, we normally, like, point to, like, Studio Orange and things. And, like, this guy made an entire 3D animated series that I would put on the level with stuff that Orange has made.

[07:23] I would say that I've enjoyed it more than some of the things that Orange has made. Orange is more technically impressive from a lot of different angles, but then they're also, again, a full team. There is a level of, yes, that's a step up, obviously.

[07:36] But just for what this project was able to accomplish without all of that, it's seriously impressive. I could go on to more about, like, the plot and the characters, but honestly, not only have I done that before, but really, you shouldn't listen to me talk about it, you should just go watch it.

[07:50] It's only, like, 45 minutes. Spend the time It like the best 45 minutes that I have watched and rewatched multiple times in the past year since this first came out You can do that But since I telling you to do that I guess I should now mention Netflix

[08:03] So, if you are going to watch this right now, you do have two options. You can go and still watch the YouTube version in its multiple cut episode lengths, and it's all available in multiple languages, and it's just there on YouTube for free.

[08:15] That's an option. That's how most of us, including myself, watched it and recommended to watch it for a very long time. But now the quote-unquote theatrical cut is out on Netflix, and that changes a handful of things. Firstly, I should point out that, and this is very confusing,

[08:30] it is one of now three versions of Milky Subway that seem to exist, because we have the original YouTube release, we have this Netflix release, which was the theatrical cut that came out in Japanese theaters, but now there also seems to be an extended theatrical version called the Extra Surface version,

[08:47] which has started streaming in Japan as of June 12th, and apparently that has additional scenes. Now, not being in Japan and not able to go and see that cut of the film, I don't know if those additional scenes are additional on top of the already additional scenes

[09:02] that exist within the original theatrical cut that's on Netflix. I don't know. If it is, that would be amazing, because that's kind of my sticking point with the Netflix cut. The downside of the Netflix release is that, as I mentioned before,

[09:15] the pacing of this series, it was like 12 episodes. All of the 12 episodes had a cold open, they had a title cut, and then they had the credits at the end. And it flowed seamlessly every episode into those moments. Every time there was a title cut, it felt

[09:30] like it was supposed to be there and nothing felt out of place. Same with at the end of every episode, how it's cut to the end credits. The problem then is taking that and combining into one long film means that any of the transitions into and out of the title card and the credits

[09:48] need to be replaced or removed or altered. Some of them were done well. Some of the rearranging of scenes and extra little moments so that we could have those transitions, I think,

[10:00] worked very well, especially at the start of the film. Near the midpoint of the film, Those ended up just being cut to black, and I mean, sure, but you could tell, or at least I could tell, probably because I watched the original Milky Subway so many times.

[10:15] I don't necessarily want to call it lazy, because I don't actually think there's much that they could have done there to really seamlessly transition those. It is just a, it is a structural problem of all of this having been written for a particular format where those cuts needed to be there in order to release into the 12-episode series format,

[10:32] and then just trying to combine it into a theatrical film, you're not going to do it very well. It's more or less the same problem we see in the bigger theatrical anime releases. So, like, when I went and I watched the Demon Slayer movie,

[10:45] I could very clearly see, hey, where is this going to be cut up into episodes? JK, same thing. Sometimes we were a little bit better at that than others. Like, the Demon Slayer was really bad. Not even knowing where the cuts were supposed to be.

[10:57] I know where those were going to be just by watching the film. This was done reverse. It wasn't like, hey, we took the episodes and then combined it into some film. Those were worse because it was a film that was already set up to be cut into episodes later.

[11:10] And that was a little bit annoying. And so with Milky Subway, you can kind of forgive a little bit of that because you're like, okay, well, it was a series of episodes. Now it's not. And it's okay. The cuts are fine. I do feel like some of the humor based in the hard cuts to credits are lost.

[11:25] And that's a little bit of a shame because then they just become scene cuts. And the feeling of them, the comedic impact of them is lessened because it's not the same kind of cut and it doesn't lead to an end.

[11:37] It's not like a sudden interruption to be continued sort of thing because we're immediately moving on. And so you lose a little bit of that. What you gain is a couple of extra scenes. And mostly these extra scenes are revolving around Ryoko who is the parole officer that is supposed to handle all of these delinquents she gets a new partner that was not there in the YouTube release She gets a boss a more stereotypical police guy behind the desk and her interactions

[12:05] with them are good additions. I am happy that they're there. I would also say that they don't really add anything to the film as a whole. They're really nice extra world building, and since I like Ryoko's character in general,

[12:17] they're great additions to that but also they are tacked on and they sort of steal it which is why I'm very curious as to the extra service cut that apparently is in Japanese theaters because if those extra scenes are even more extra scenes then well it can go one of two ways either that is just more

[12:35] padding on top of the existing padding that also doesn't really need to be there or it is extra scenes that legitimately help everything flow a little bit better and maybe that would be great I'm not in Japan, and the people that I know in Japan probably wouldn't look even the ones that like Milky Subway.

[12:49] So if you are looking for something that is short, tight, only about 45 minutes long, with no real extra filler and padding, I know I just kind of call the extra scenes padding, but really they're more so just hoping to transition between one episode to another,

[13:02] so I am heavily forgiving on that from that perspective. But Milky Subway still is probably one of the tightest 45-minute narrative and character-based shows that we have had in a long while.

[13:14] and I will continue to recommend it to Helen Beck, so you should watch it. And now since you can watch it a lot more easily, I recommend you do that. So you can go and watch that on your streaming service of choice, as long as that choice is Netflix. The amount of anime that we would put on the shelf of actually good anime only on Netflix

[13:29] is very short, but this is one of them. I am very much looking forward to seeing what comes out of this creator in the future, because if you look through the history of anime, there are many things that... There are several times where this sort of thing has happened before.

[13:43] One of the most notable is, if you've ever watched an anime called Voices of a Distant Star, it was mostly made by one particular guy. His name was Motoko Shinkai, and he went on to be, you know, Makoto Shinkai.

[13:57] And so when you hear stories about how Shinkai went and, like, animated all of, or most of, Voices of a Distant Star on, like, an old iMac or something, something which existed within his schooling setup and something that he had

[14:09] access to as a student or he had access to... I don't remember if he bought it. I don't remember the full story of that. Either way, it was still a guy making an anime with consumer grade stuff. And this is sort of the same thing just, you know,

[14:21] in 2025 and 2026 respectively. And where this guy goes and what else he makes, I am very excited to see and find out even if it's not something that is my genre or bag

[14:33] at all, because this is entirely my genre in my bag. You had, it's a space, it's a specifically space sci-fi with a lot of old nostalgia and retro-punk theming just

[14:46] built into it between tapes, floppy disks. It's theme song is a Japanese pop band from the 70s. Like, I don't even know if pop is the right description for the candies, but regardless, great stuff. It only sucks

[14:58] that their music isn't on a lot of the music streaming services for some reason or another. and that reason is probably down to licensing, and that's a shame. So all that to say, if you have Netflix, go watch the theatrical version. If you don't have Netflix, go watch Milky Subway on YouTube.

[15:10] It's still good. And that is my rant and call to action for the week. Hit the like button if you enjoyed the video. Subscribe if you haven't. Normally I do those in reverse, but, you know, working without a script is lovely. Thank you very much to our patrons who make these videos possible.

[15:24] Patrons like Geekwig, Rankin Bonnevarth, Omar Sherman, Ross Emerson, and heck, the month of May are Aiden and Sudiyamako. We can't continue this without your support, so however much you are able to help, I am extremely grateful.

[15:37] And until next time, go watch Milky Subway. Instead of saying watch more anime, I'm just telling you to do that. Please go do that. You should do that. You'll thank me later. You better thank me later. If you don't like it, well, I mean, we don't need to be friends or anything.

[15:50] Barca. And stay frosty.