Night on the Galactic Railroad

The story was made into an anime film in 1985 by director Gisaburo Sugii under Minoru Betsuyaku's screenplay and released on July 13, 1985. The anime features Mayumi Tanaka as Giovanni and Chika Sakamoto as Campanella. The film was produced by Nippon Herald and animated by Group TAC.

The most prominent but controversial alteration made in the anime is that the main two characters (and their classmates) are depicted as cats. Some other characters such as the children from the ship are humans.

Many members of the anime staff ultimately went on to high-profile careers as directors or as studio founders, such as Kōichi Mashimo, then a storyboard artist, who more than ten years later would go on to form the famed studio Bee Train.

The film was licensed by Central Park Media in the late 1990s, and was released on VHS with English subtitles. The subtitled version played irregularly on the Canadian station Space in 1997 and 1998. When it was later released on DVD in 2001, CPM produced an English dub that starred Veronica Taylor as Giovanni and Crispin Freeman as Campanella. The film was re-licensed by Discotek Media and released on DVD in 2015 and Blu-ray in 2016.

The captions throughout the film are in Esperanto, paying homage to Kenji Miyazawa who was strongly interested in the language. In the language, the film is called Nokto de la Galaksia Fervojo. Texts appearing in various scenes are also written in Esperanto, such as writings on the blackboard in the classroom. An apparent extra at press in the printing house—where Giovanni works—tells the shipwreck of a passenger ship, carrying the Esperanto lyric of "Nearer, My God, to Thee". The film soundtrack was composed by YMO member Haruomi Hosono.

Justin Sevakis of Anime News Network commented that the film was "a beautiful journey, albeit an ominous one. Slowly, the mood of the trek shifts from excited and childlike to desperate and profound.”