The Odyssey Anime Set the Epic in 31st Century Decades Before Christopher Nolan

Long before Christopher Nolan’s big-screen take on The Odyssey hits theaters, a little anime did the same thing with lasers instead of longboats. Ulysses 31, a French-Japanese-Luxembourgian co-production between DIC Audiovisuel and Tokyo Movie Shinsha, aired 26 episodes from October 1981 through April 1982.

It took Homer’s ancient text somewhere no adaptation had gone before: outer space, a full thousand years in the future, reshaping an 8th-century-BCE epic into a Saturday-morning sci-fi series. Without further ado, here’s why we think the anime adaptation deserves recognition before The Odyssey releases on July 17, 2026.

The 80s Anime That Deserve a Look Before The Odyssey Releases

Tom Holland from The Odyssey | Credits: Syncopy

With Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey set to hit theaters on July 17, 2026, it’s worth pausing on the fact that Hollywood is far from the first to reimagine Homer’s epic for a modern audience. Ulysses 31 got there more than four decades earlier, and it did it in a format nobody expects an ancient poem to end up in: a co-produced European-Japanese cartoon and anime aimed squarely at kids.

Revisiting it now isn’t just nostalgia; it’s a chance to see how two very different productions, separated by generations and budgets, chose to handle the same source material. Nolan is going for scale and live-action spectacle; this cartoon leaned entirely into imagination, animation, and a strange futuristic remix of Greek myth.

Looking at both side by side says a lot about how elastic Homer’s story really is, and how each era bends it to fit its own storytelling instincts and technology. It’s also a reminder that adaptations don’t need a blockbuster budget to leave a lasting cultural mark, since this show still has a devoted fanbase decades after it stopped airing new episodes anywhere. So before you rush to the theatres tomorrow, we urge you to take a look at the 26-episode 1981 animated series. Here’s what it was about.

What Is Ulysses 31 Anime About?

The premise of Ulysses 31 sticks surprisingly close to the source material while dressing it up in chrome and neon. Ulysses commands a massive starship called the Odyssey, and when he kills a monstrous Cyclops to save a group of enslaved children – including his own son, Telemachus – the Gods of Olympus don’t take it well. Zeus punishes him by freezing his entire crew and wiping the route home from the ship’s memory banks, leaving Ulysses to wander the cosmos with only Telemachus, a telepathic alien named Yumi, her brother Numinor, and a tiny chirping robot named Nono for company. The goal: find the Kingdom of Hades, the only place that can undo the gods’ curse.

What makes the show fascinating on rewatch is how loosely it treats its own source material. Only about half the episodes actually draw directly on The Odyssey, and even those bend the story until it’s barely recognizable. Ulysses runs into Sisyphus, who is reliving his eternal boulder-pushing punishment, gets kidnapped by Aeolus for a birthday party, and has to solve the Riddle of the Sphinx; a myth that technically belongs to Oedipus, not Odysseus. Scylla and Charybdis become entire planets instead of a sea monster and a whirlpool.

Character designs came from Shingo Araki and Michi Himeno, the animators behind one of the best shonen anime of all time, Saint Seiya, blending anime style with a sleek look inspired by Greek sculpture. The show found its biggest audiences abroad, airing on Kideo TV in the U.S., BBC One in the UK, and RTÉ in Ireland, before DVD releases in the UK and Australia extended its life well past its original run.

Are you excited for Nolan’s The Odyssey, and have you watched Ulysses 31 before? We’d love to hear all your thoughts and opinions in the comments below.