In 1933, a couple, Lisa Tetzner and her Jewish husband Kurt Held, left Germany for Switzerland, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who knows their history. In 1941, while World War Two was still raging, they published a children's book called Die Schwarzen Brüder, or The Black Brothers, under Tetzner's name only, for safety reasons. Eventually, in 1995, this book was adapted as the World Masterpiece Theater series Romeo's Blue Skies, and while this all might feel like unnecessary background information, watching the series (which I highly recommend) shows that it's not. Although significant changes were made, not the least of which is the name of the main character from Giorgio to Romeo, unlike Nobody's Boy Remi, Romeo's Blue Skies understands what its original authors wanted to say when they chose the darkness of wartime to tell the story of a 19th century chimney sweep.

Moved forward from the 1820s to the 1870s, the story follows Romeo, a young boy from the Swiss mountains. His life is poor but happy – he has a loving family and a job ringing the church bells. But everything changes when a man named Luini shows up in the village. Luini, known also as the grim reaper, is basically a slaver: he buys boys to resell in Milan as chimney sweeps. Romeo's family initially doesn't want to sell him, but Luini is determined to buy the nimble boy, and eventually resorts to destroying the family's fields. Left with what he feels is no choice, Romeo sells himself and signs a contract to go to Milan for six months.

If it sounds terrible, it is. Luini is somehow even more evil in the anime series than in the original novel, and it feels like the drama knob is always cranked all the way up. That largely works because the situations Romeo and the other boys bought and sold by Luini find themselves in are undeniably terrible. This is most evident in the case of Alfredo, the first other boy Romeo meets on his journey. Like Romeo, Alfredo has sold himself for his family (in his case, his younger sister Bianca), and he and Romeo quickly form a bond. Alfredo is morally upright and invested in justice and a better world, values he teaches Romeo, and by episode six, it's clear that these boys truly care about each other in what becomes the strongest and most resonant relationship across the series.

This is simultaneously the brightest light and the darkest depth in the story. While Romeo suffers at the hands of his new master, Mr. Rossi (and, more specifically, at those of Rossi's horrible wife Edda and son Anselmo), it is his relationship with Alfredo that truly informs his life. He can endure the Rossi family because he met Alfredo, and this friendship has a profound effect on the rest of his life. In a 2010 interview, series director Kouzo Kusuba says that their relationship is romantic, and honestly, you don't need to take his word for it, because it's obvious from the moment they meet. Alfredo, in particular, plainly adores Romeo, and in all of the scenes they share, he can be seen not only looking out for him but also touching him as much as possible. When the boys are initially separated in episode seven, it's heartbreaking because they clearly never thought that, having found each other, they'd ever have to be apart. This is foreshadowing for much later in the series, and at the risk of overstating, what happens is one of the most soul-shattering things I've seen since Sunday Without God. It's not fair.

But that's the point, really. While Romeo's life is hard, it's not nearly as bad as that of his fellow children in the series. The other chimney sweeps risk disease and death (the Wikipedia page about chimney sweeps will give you a good overview of how much this show didn't tell us), and the kids who make up the street gang known as the Wolf Pack aren't much better off, just doing their best to survive. For every Angeletta – the sickly young girl who lives with the Rossis – there's a child who doesn't make it. Angeletta's story, in fact, stands as a direct parallel to Alfredo's, for where she's able to be saved from her illness and uplifted to her rightful social status, he is the opposite. It's horribly random, and while swathes of Angeletta's story are anime-only (she's the Rossis' actual daughter in the book), it all contributes to the point of Tetzner and Held's novel: terrible things happen, and if we survive them, we owe it to those who did not to make the world a better place.

Although the series can be a bit on the nose with its symbolism on this front – the paper/doves imagery in episode 10 is a good example – it's hard to blame them for spelling it out in the finale. The message of the story must come across to viewers, because otherwise it risks just being a depressing case of torture porn. But there's a point to what Romeo and the others go through, and when an adult Romeo teaches a child to write the name Giorgio on a slate at the end, it's an acknowledgement of who Tetzner and Held originally wrote for. They may have chosen 19th-century chimney sweeps as their characters, but the subject was remarkably flexible in wartime. Romeo's triumph and survival are a message that terrible things can be overcome.

There's a reason why Romeo's Blue Skies is such a well-loved entry into the storied World Masterpiece Theater catalogue. Despite having plenty of anime-only content, it understands the message of the original novel and retells it in a way best suited for its time. It isn't a perfect production and occasionally stumbles in the visual arena, but it does its best to use correct Italian (both written and spoken) and has a genuinely haunting opening theme. If you want to read the original, you can do so for free here, but this isn't a case where you need to. Romeo's Blue Skies more than stands on its own.