The Mysterious Cities of Gold (Seasons 1–4)

"The Mysterious Cities of Gold" (太陽の子エステバン, 1982) — watch online the Japanese-French animated series that defined adventure animation for a generation. The year is 1532: twelve-year-old Esteban, called the Child of the Sun, lives in Barcelona and carries an unexplained gift for drawing sunlight out of cloudy skies. When his adoptive father dies, he sails for the New World to find his birth parents and decode the meaning of his medallion.

He finds two companions along the way: Zia, an Inca girl taken from her tribe years earlier who wears the same medallion, and Tao, the sole surviving descendant of the Hiva civilization said to have raised the Cities of Gold. The three follow a blazing star etched into their medallions across jungles, mountains and pre-Columbian ruins, with Spanish conquistadors closing in from behind.

Co-produced by NHK and the French studio DIC across 39 episodes, directed by Bernard Deyriès and Kenichi Maruyama among others. The series mixes real 16th-century South American history with Inca mythology and science fiction in a way that holds up across every episode. Stream "The Mysterious Cities of Gold" (1982) on iFILM.