Macross Plus-Movie
I ended up watching this on a whim. I've been going through a lot of old anime, maybe out of a longing or nostalgia for the 90's, and this is probably the first one that has held up to my memory of it. It really oozes Watanabe in a lot of aspects with dashes of Kawamori in areas such as the concert and love triangle/characters. For Kawamori, this was pretty restrained as in comparison to the cast of
SDF Macross with Hikaru and Kaifunn, this cast is downright lovable. I think though that the part of my watch which surprised me the most was how mature Watanabe's direction already was at that point in his career.
Earlier this year I mentioned how
Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory was similar to Top Gun. It seems that movie must have been really popular in Japan as this also takes traits from Top Gun. However where
Stardust Memory is closer in narrative structure,
Macross Plus nails the characters and attitude. With my review, I suppose I should start with the characters as that appears to be the most disliked part of the show. I'll be upfront, I generally liked the characters as they were somewhat interesting even if they are flawed. I don't need to like a character or any of the characters but I do feel they need to have some level of depth and be able to grab my interest, something I think the show successfully establishes.
Starting with Isamu, he's in the same vein as Maverick, Tom Cruise's character in Top Gun. Both are troubled pilots with a spotty at best service record that while reckless, they're expert pilots of the highest caliber. One of the early scenes in the movie has Isamu driving his motorcycle in a near suicidal fashion around the base and into town, a direct reference I'm sure to
Maverick's motorcycle in Top Gun. In the first half of the movie Isamu is more carefree and whimsical but as it progresses he gets more competitive over both the project and Myung. It feels as if Guld and Myung are dragging him back into emotions long since forgotten. In some ways he's supposed to be representative of the work as a totality in that he's that dreamer that blazes ahead even if he leaves a bunch of cracked eggs in his wake. If I may extrapolate a little, he might represent the feelings of some of the animators themselves working on the project in regards to that complete dedication to their craft. It's kind of childish but at the same time that purity is enthralling to watch.
I didn't find Isamu to be that dislikable in the movie. He only does two things that are particularly questionable, one morally and the other intellectually. The later has to do with going to Earth to presumably wreck the Ghost which would likely end in him being court-martialed and executed. Although thinking about it, I'm starting to doubt he went to Earth primarily for Ghost but rather Myung. He never mentions Myung until he's already on Earth but Guld brings up Myung as if he believes Isamu is chasing Myung. In addition, Isamu doesn't decide to hijack the YF-19 until after he speaks with Kate and she mentions how Myung has gone to Earth. Kate in this scene seems to represent his old personality of being a 'free agent' and here he rejects her along with that line of thinking, deciding to grow up a little and go after Myung. The morally questionable event is when Guld's YF is spiraling during one of the field tests and Isamu holds off on rescuing Guld until he receives a direct order. However this scene comes after Guld is smug about sleeping with Myung and Isamu is rightfully pissed off about that considering past events. As the famous Chris Rock quote goes, I'm not saying he should have let him die
but I understand. Of course there were also tinges of jealousy and anger involved due to the performance of the YF-21 outperforming his plane as well. He does still end up saving Guld, who promptly wrecks Isamu's plane.
Weirdly enough, Myung in many ways feels like the main character of the show, even more so than Isamu. The movie is about her emotional state and how she's torn between the adventurous risk-taking emblematic of Isamu and the safety found in Guld along with her present work. She's given up on singing with her dreams and is content with her present state until she sees Isamu again and he re-awakens those repressed passions of hers. Isamu is pushing at her to resume singing and to simply believe as she's lost her faith. The only time he gets angry at her in the movie is after she gives a speech saying she doesn't have any dreams nor wants to feel anything. He doesn't get mad at her for sleeping with Guld or anything else but rather that she gave up. Myung is representative of growing up in that do you seek out your childhood dreams or go for the steady paycheck? By just playing second fiddle to Sharon Apple, she's surrendered a part of who she is and her fire has dwindled out. Myung at this juncture is a broken shell of the girl Isamu left behind. So the movie ends up being about Myung getting her spunk back.
That's why I like Sharon so much as a villain as she's the physical representation of all the buried feelings of Myung. Sharon is just doing what Myung wants, albeit in exaggerated fashion. Myung wants to be closer to Isamu and Guld so Sharon sets the fire as a way of reconnecting the trio. Despite what Myung might say, Sharon is the pure embodiment of Myung's emotions and is the mirror that makes Myung confront her mental issues. The whole climax is, in a distorted way, about what Myung really wants. She needs Isamu to come and save her, to choose between flying and her. Also at the risk of reading too much into the work, what ends up happening to Guld might have been what a part of Myung wanted after the rape attempt seven years and similarly Isamu being hurt or killed might have been a form of punishment for leaving Myung behind. She wanted them to hurt because she had been hurt. Nonetheless, Sharon is that release valve for Myung who has repressed all of her own personal desires and so she has to overcome that part of herself.
Guld is the most dislikable character in the movie for a number of reasons but he's also the most complicated. After I watched the movie, I went and checked for differences between the movie and OVA. It seems like the movie tones down a lot of the psychotic things he did in the OVA such as replacing Isamu's ammunition which causes him to be in the hospital and might have killed him. For example the scene when Guld's YF is on top of Isamu after Isamu saves him, in the OVAs Guld intentionally causes Isamu's plane to crash and mocks him afterward. While in the movie, the incident comes across more as an accident in which his temper flared and the mech following his brainwaves unconsciously ruins Isamu's plane. Changes like that dial things back, which is crucial considering the later revelation involving Guld.
That later revelation being the flashback to the attempted rape scene. Guld had repressed the memories and twisted them to the point of Isamu being the bad guy. It is a little ridiculous that he had forgotten what had happened however the in-universe explanation in which his mind was addled with emotion suppressing drugs seems plausible enough that I can bypass it. Any time he starts remembering, he takes a handful of pills and calms down so it's easy enough to brush off the memory loss as a side effect of the drugs. This twist obviously makes him despicable and a hypocrite because despite all that he said about protecting Myung, he was the one that hurt her the most. However it does make his character as well as his relationship with Myung more interesting as a result. He's so full of self-hatred that the only way he can sleep at night is to push that loathing on to someone else. It also gives more weight to his decision to take those emotion suppressing drugs as when he lost control and went full Zentradi, he hurt the few people he truly cared about. As for Myung, it really warps their relationship and decisions she makes in it, as she remembers everything correctly and still decides to sleep with him. She's both afraid of him but at the same time she looks to him for safety. It's a weird dichotomy that feels surprisingly human. It's a depressing realization of the real world in which people go crawling back to the ones who hurt them.
I thought the narrative structure of the movie was surprisingly tight. There's two separate plotlines, the one on the base involving the YF projects and the other involving Sharon, but thematically they're both similar and tie in together extremely well at the end. The YF projects represent different stages of human involvement from the YF-19, which is completely human controlled, to the YF-21, which is partially handled by a computer, ending with the X-9 Ghost, which is entirely controlled by AI. The YF-19 represents a degree of liberation and creativity due to human control while the X-9 Ghost is one of oppression and logic. The movie demonstrates that difference when Isamu avoids Guld's major missile barrage by just gliding like when he was a kid. Then on the Sharon side, Myung is initially involved as the brain of Sharon until the bio-neural chip is installed. Sharon afterwards is trapped to following the desires of Myung. The way both of these tie together thematically is just like how the YF-19 ends up triumphant, Myung chooses that part of her that wants freedom and self-expression. The movie is a rejection of rationality, in that you shouldn't give up on your dreams even if they're impossible.
One of the complaints online I saw after watching was how Isamu and Guld were shooting the shit on Earth and how quickly Isamu forgave Guld after the missile barrage but I loved the entire Earth YF-19/YF-21 dogfight. That whole scene was about depicting how petulant and petty both of them were while establishing their history, all while a crazy dogfight is happening on screen. They're both listing out their grievances with one another in both a serious and childish manner. It's a very shounen-ish scene but it works maybe because this is the first time the two are actually communicating instead of just punching and insulting each other. Also Isamu seems like the type to not really hold grudges, unlike Guld, so I imagine he had come to terms with those past events long ago. It's a good relationship building moment between the two and a nicely handled spot of comedy in a rather serious segment.
On the visual front, this looked absolutely gorgeous. Masayuki, of Gainax/Khara fame, did the character designs and they turned out pretty well. My biggest complaint with the designs is that they have that quirk from the 90's where the chins were
long and pointed which at times could look really bad if off-model, especially for the females. Obviously character design styles have largely changed so a large part of it is that I'm accustomed to the more rounded shape found in modern anime. Goddamn though, animators really knew how to draw femme fatales and scorchingly hot chicks back then, something got lost along the way. As for the dogfights, I wasn't too impressed initially but the later ones are just insane from a production standpoint with the highlight being the
YF-21 vs Ghost dogfight. It's moments like this when I miss that level of 2D mecha animation. It's not just the dogfights or
mechanical drawings but other aspects such as the
background art which were outstanding. I didn't go into this earlier but Watanabe uses a lot of Western visual approaches which give the production a very unique feeling visually. There's some shots in here that I see translated later over into Cowboy Bebop. On the audio side, I wasn't particularly impressed with Kanno besides
Voices and the concert music. Voices though is a phenomenally great song and it's used in the right moments so it all works out. This was one of Kanno's first anime OSTs and it's kind of fun hearing bits and pieces that would make it into her later works.
In conclusion, I don't think it's a bad script. There are definitely flaws though such as the crazed scientist guy not having enough development to justify his insane line of thinking. It's handled in an
Oshii sort of fashion but the rest of the movie is at odds to that style so he doesn't gel that well with the rest of it. There's also the complaints about Guld's amnesia being far fetched but I can accept the in-show reasoning. Not to mention the way Guld dies is so absolutely brutal that I'm willing to forgive a lot of his character flaws as he paid a pretty heavy price in the end. Dude's eyes exploded in their sockets, there's not many worse ways to go. He literally got crushed to death.
While writing this review, I went and watched most of the fourth OVA episode and the movie version has a lot more emotional weight to similar scenes due to tweaks that flesh out the characters. For example in the OVAs when Sharon hynoptizes Isamu at the end,
he's simply just in a daze. While in the movie,
he sees the open sky in front of him and can feel the wind on him. It's much more substantial than I would have guessed. If you're planning on rewatching or haven't seen the OVAs in so long that you've forgotten a lot of the details, I would strongly recommend watching the movie version instead as it paints the characters in a better light and the sakuga in the finale give the events a more dramatic flare. That YF-21/Ghost duel...
