Summary
Creative, charming, and energetic, Milky Subway: The Galactic Limited Express – The Movie is an unexpectedly captivating journey.
I’m forever complaining about shows and movies being too long, but it’s rare I ever moan about anything being too short. It’s basically impossible to watch Milky Subway: The Galactic Limited Express – The Movie and not want more of it, though, however clunky the title might be. A theatrical cut compiling all 12 episodes of Yohei Kameyama’s 2025 animated series, itself based on 2022’s Milky Highway, a four-minute ONA (original net animation) that Kameyama wrote, directed, and self-produced, it sounds like something too messy and random to function as a coherent whole. But Netflix obviously believed in it, and rightly so, since it’s an absolutely joyous way to spend 47 minutes.
Seriously, this is good stuff. It’s funny, stylish, creative, and eventually action-packed, without an ounce of fat anywhere in the runtime. When so much quality can be crammed onto such a small canvas, it makes me even more irked than usual that so many storytellers can’t accomplish anything similar in eight hour-long episodes.
The plot finds superhuman Chiharu (Momoka Terasawa) being interrogated by police officer Ryoko (Mikako Komatsu) about an unspecified event that has left Chiharu’s cyborg friend, Makina (Anna Nagase), damaged beyond repair. With the stakes firmly established, we wheel back in time a little, as Chiharu recounts how she and Makina were sentenced to a week of community service for traffic offenses, tasked with cleaning the carriages of the titular Milky Subway, or the Galactic Limited Express, a high-speed locomotive.
Joined by cyborgs Max (Yoshitaka Yamaya) and Kurt (Koko Uchiyama), biker gang leader Akane (Hisako Kanemoto), and mechanic Kanata (Makoto Koichi), Chiharu and Makina set about scrubbing the innards of the train, which sets off on a rather unintended trajectory. The 47-minute runtime veers from entertaining comedy to exciting buddy adventure as the tight premise continuously reveals new surprises, evocative visual tricks, and an infectious personality.
That personality is communicated through naturalistic overlapping dialogue that is the production’s key selling point. It creates an authenticity around the characters and their dynamics, which also helps to colour the lived-in setting, helping it to feel like a real place rendered in cheap but great-looking retro-futuristic 3DCG animation. There’s a tremendous sense of character to Milky Subway, both visually and in the humour. Ludicrous though it may be, the commitment to having these characters feel real goes a long way in bringing the entire story to life, even with such limited available time (this theatrical version does include a tiny bit of new footage, so it’s worth it for completionists, but the seamless cut is also impressive in and of itself, and the material is so good that it’s worth a rewatch either way).
Despite the limitations of a single-location setting, the energy is sustained through clever stylistic choices and art design. I felt immediately connected to this world, despite having no real familiarity with previous versions of it, and that’s a great point in its favour, testament to how well-realised everything is. The light-hearted framing will appeal to as broad an audience as possible, but make no mistake – this is top-quality action-adventure science-fiction that builds intensity through real skill and craft. Since it’s still relatively unknown among a mainstream audience, its release on Netflix can only be a good thing, and it operates just fine without any prior knowledge of the setting and story. Check it out.
