It was the source material for the 1978 Japanese anime television series Future Boy Conan, directed by Hayao Miyazaki.

The Incredible Tide tells the story of Conan, a boy who lives alone on a small island on Earth ravaged by World War III.

Conan, Lanna and Teacher are survivors of a land called the West, or the Western World, that now no longer exists, as a result of the cataclysmic destruction caused by the war.

The Western survivors made their way to an island and created High Harbor, a place of refuge, where they live peacefully, but it is a hard life, without many technological comforts.

His real name is Briac Roa, and he is in hiding because the leaders of the New Order want to find him and use his knowledge to recreate the technology that the old world used to have.

He has come to High Harbor to take anything he can get his hands on that might help the New Order, and he is frustrated whenever he demands something that isn't in the trade agreements and Shann denies him.

A New Order ship discovers the island where Conan has been surviving for five years since the helicopter crash and captures him, taking him back to the city of Industria as a worker.

Meanwhile, Lanna and her parents at High Harbor have to deal with Dyce, who wants her people to supply lumber faster than they can with the tools they have and is desperate for knowledge of the whereabouts of Briac Roa.

Enraged, he seizes the tattooing device and marks several self-important officials before he is subdued, and they assign him to work for a crazy old man named Patch, who turns out to be Teacher.

At High Harbor, Lanna and her parents are continuing to deal with Dyce and his demands—now he wants some wrecked aircraft that are on the island and some sassafras roots.

Lanna finds out that they also have to deal with Orlo, who has been leading a rebellious tribe of children and teenagers that has broken away from the rest of High Harbor.

His humanitarian nature forces him to go to the council and tell them who he really is so he can warn them, but he wants Conan to take the boat he's been building and wait for him at a designated rendezvous point.

To their surprise, they discover that Dr. Manski has also washed up on this island, because her survey ship was ordered to search for Briac Roa and went down in the same storm.

Instead, she climbs to the highest point on the island and tells Tikki to find Conan and bring him safely to High Harbor.

Conan then uses the situation to get them all to seek higher ground, carrying the semi-conscious Orlo himself as the tsunami waters start to rush in.

The themes of living sustainably in harmony with nature rather than coercing it with technology, and of villains trying to recover the technology that nearly destroyed the world in the past, both recurred strongly in the first full-length film Miyazaki later wrote and directed, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), and in the 1982-1994 manga of the same name by Miyazaki on which he partly based his film.