Fafner Heaven and Earth
Is Takashi Aoki the best thing to happen to Xebec or what? It feels like his photography work was the star of this film. Right of Left was a good realization of the original SD Fafner style and had cinematography tricks of its own, but this leap into HD takes Fafner to a whole new level of visual polish. Just look at this shot of an info screen:
Not only do we see here Aoki's flair for UI design that he would later display in Yamato 2199, with an attractive design aesthetic that emphasizes sleekness and clarity, but the whole way this is shot, the slanted perspective of the screen and the impression of depth given by carefully adjusting the focus, is a cut above the ordinary. The photography work on sky shots is really excellent as well:
The focus on displaying the beauty of the sky is appropriate since that is actually a core theme of the story of Heaven and Earth, with the catalyst for its events being the arrival of a new Festum representative who marvels at the sky's beauty and seeks others to share it with. The conflict that unfolds continues the series' approach to examining different ways of conflict resolution and the quest for coexistence between human and a truly alien species. This approach, with Commander Makabe at its core, is something I appreciate and it makes this an example of science fiction in the classic mold that uses a speculative world to explore meaningful philosophical themes.
If I were to make a criticism, it would be that this is very dense. It expects you to remember everything that happened in the Fafner series up to now, building on what came before in a detailed manner without taking much time to explicitly remind you of any of it. Combined with the multitude of cast members, both old and new, and the heady writing that is attached to the Festum and Mir, it means that you have to continually concentrate to be able to follow what's going on. That isn't exactly a bad thing, but it is asking a lot of your audience, and I think the film could have been made tighter in some areas without compromising its core.
That said, I really do care about this cast overall at this point, and the final denouement made good use of that to create a satisfying payoff of something that was promised at the end of the original Fafner series. The whole handling of this series is bizarre - I'm not aware of any other example of an original anime franchise with such a heavy reliance upon continuity that has received multiple entires over a decade long time span - but I'm glad that Fafner was given the chance to recover from its rocky start and develop into something that Xebec, at least, can be proud of.
