Shameful Otaku Secret!

In all of anime, there are few longstanding franchises with as much dedicated fandom as Macross (In fact, I’d wager to say there are two, and the other one has robots too).

There are even fewer that make their fans work as hard as Kawamori’s do. Having finally finished Macross 7, the first sequel and longest installment, I finally feel like I have a handle on Macross as a whole and what each chapter has done. The issues are all over the place, but the overall experience is a fun one. So what’s Kawamori’s problem?

Pretty much unavoidable spoilers of varying degrees will follow for SDF, Plus, Zero, 7, Dynamite 7, and Frontier.

Production Values

To a degree, this is one of those technical concerns that I know is hard to get away from, but still irks me a little. SDF had plenty of excuses, the main one being its age. But M7’s animation is so horribly dated that it’s hard to believe it came out of the late 90s at all. Satelight certainly had occasional problems with Zero, but compared to the wildly inconsistent and often just-plain-horrible cardboard jumpiness of Frontier, it’s beautiful. OVAs and movies generally solve the problem — Do You Remember Love? might be the best-looking anime ever made — but it’s not just the animation itself.

It’s as if directors like Amino (and even Ishiguro) weren’t even trying during the TV series. Whether it’s the majesty of discovering the protoculture, the fist-pumping power of rock, or just a realistic feeling of being around fighter planes, the OVAs have plenty going for them in atmosphere and directing that just never seem to make it into the fun but workmanlike productions shown on TV.

Power to the Music

The story of a young girl going from Chinese restaurant waitress to pop idol to savior of the galaxy: Striking. The message that your enemy may not actually be your enemy but just doesn’t identify with you: Moving. But repeated retellings of that same story have lessened the impact. You know it’s going to happen. You know there’ll be a magnificent set piece in the end a la Do You Remember Love’s titular song performance. Those repeated stories (in M7 and Frontier) serve to make the stories more “Macross-like,” but Kawamori and his collaborators flourish more when they explore the core elements (love, planes, Protoculture) a little more deeply.

Pacing’s a bitch

Yeah, it takes a real masterful storyteller to weave a plot together that moves in all the right ways at all the right times. Apparently, one more masterful than Kawamori. I don’t expect something as long as Macross 7 to go without mindless filler episodes that don’t develop characters, push the plot, or even provide entertainment. But that thing had two arcs of about 4 episodes apiece that were really engrossing, and Dynamite 7’s stupid whales were still a million times better. Frontier’s story was so poorly paced and even more poorly weighted and emphasized that it actually got hard to follow a relatively simple plot at times.

The tendency of Macross stories is to draw their stories out — possibly for believability’s sake, if that makes any sense in the Macross world — and then suddenly resolve with what almost amounts to Deus Ex Machina at the last second. Kawamori and crew seem to write best, as with directing, in the shorter OVA format.

Lack of resolution

This isn’t something I normally complain about in anime. I’m not much of a shipper. But Macross’s love triangles have a tendency to dull at the edges and never resolve. You could argue the Guld-Isamu-Myung triangle did, but in truth that ship sailed long before the viewer got to witness any of it. With love being such a central theme, and recycling such a central technique, why can’t we re-experience, say, the ache of choosing love wisely over choosing the burning passion you thought you wanted? Well, you won’t get served such a satisfying dish at Mylene’s House of Waffle. I suppose there’s still hope for Alto in the coming Frontier OVA, but if Kawamori does have any troll blood in him, this is the part where it manifests — see the end of Dynamite 7 if you want in on his joke.

The Protoculture

The Protoculture is an intriguing element of Macross that adds a little mystery and, more importantly, a common thread between the galaxy’s races. If the Protoculture created the Zentraedi and also Earth’s civilization, then what do we have to fight about? Powerful if idealistic stuff on a planet where most members of our own species can’t get along. But almost every subsequent installment blindly adds another de-mystifying chapter to the myth of the Protoculture, chafing me like Midichlorians in my Jedi pants.

The Protodeviln? OK, I’ll buy it, because if you’re going to build the Zentraedi you must have a serious enemy. Too bad all the Zentrans in the UN Spacey are no match for Grabil. Also, too bad they’re really hokey to be believable as sentient life’s original arch-enemy.

At least Macross Zero did more to help the situation than hurt, for the most part. By bringing the storyline back to pre-SDF launch, Kawamori helped us identify with the characters, and the sense of wonder than encountering the Protoculture must have instilled in Shin. Zero remains an amazing part of the series for this alone. But Grace O’Connor’s declarations about the race who came before our forefather in Frontier’s final episode just felt like another game of pin the tail on the Protoculture. There’s no need for that kind of retcon, let’s move on.

Kawamori is a big fucking hippie

How you feel about this is mixed, and really it may not really be that much of a problem. I suppose that a guy who keeps writing galactic love stories should really believe in love, but the hippie shit can seriously be a bit much. To me it seems like a very 1980s conservationist stance rather than anything truly progressive, but keep in mind it’s Japan. Maybe Dynamite 7’s message of “save the whales” is a little more than a bumper sticker over there, since whaling still actually goes on in Japan. And “no nukes” definitely means more to Japan than to the people who dropped a couple on them.

And just maybe the OVAs’ focus on nature is just to emphasize the fact that they’re planet-based rather than on a Macross station, but let’s get real: somebody here loves all the plants and cute little animals.

Worth it?

I find that as anime fans we have to overlook the shortcomings in the medium more often than we’re presented with stuff that lacks those shortcomings. So Macross isn’t special in that way.

It’s often terrible to its fans (though sometimes it’s the most generous anime around) and, like Star Wars, it’s helmed by a creator who isn’t always the best executor of his own ideas. So is it worth it? Does it make me feel good to call myself a Macross fan? Of course, a thousand times yes. The benefits are great, and they deserve their own post.

The rest of the world

Do you have a favorite like this? You know in your heart you could write a giant word-bomb about its faults, but still come back and love it at the end of the day? Are we Macross fans the biggest apologists in anime fandom?

Possibly misleading post title

This not strictly a review of Macross Frontier. There are going to be a lot of those on the web, of varying quality and opinions. And I’m guessing a lot of people are going to say they liked it, with some complaining about a botched ending or how Alto didn’t stick it in your favorite girl, blah blah. And they’ll be right about many of their complaints: the end was a copout and the love triangle was lukewarm at best. But after all the shipping, all the whining, and all the missile spam, what did Macross Frontier really do for the franchise? While thankfully some reviewers can look at Frontier as its own sci-fi series, if you’ve seen previous versions it’s harder to divorce any series from the overall Macross “experience,” the way you could with (for instance) a Gundam series.

First, let’s have a look at what other series and films have brought to the table.

• The Super Dimension Fortress Macross. The birth of Macross.
• Do You Remember Love? Established Kawamori as one of those artists who obsessively paints the same picture over and over — in this case, the chill-inducing juxtaposition of an incredible battle with a majestic song performance.
• Macross 7. Took the vague mystical concepts of Lynn Minmay and turned them into vague hard science. Also made Macross a bit silly and fun.
• Macross Plus. Set a higher standard for music and characterization, and opened up the possibility of a more mature Macross.
• Macross Zero. Gave fans real perspective on the Macross world, and a new view on Protoculture. In a way, Zero made Macross “real.”

Macross Frontier

Zero animator Satelight is back, and this time they’re out to turn all your characters into cyclops. The computer work is better, in fact it’s amazing. But the end result doesn’t smell as good as I’d like it to.

The contribution… What is it? In my mind, when I try to reach a conclusion about what Frontier means to the franchise, I come up short. Since it’s Macross, here’s a musical analogy: Frontier is less like a new album by a master songwriter and more like one of those awful tribute albums — or worse, a re-recording of old tunes by the original artist with none of the fire intact.

There’s no new Macross here, only more of the old Macross. More songs (which is a good thing), more singers to sing them, more space battle, more guy-who-looks-like-Global, and more more more references to past Macross.

The peppering of little smirks and nods to Macross lovers is a cool form of fanservice, and just as panty-shots of Mylene Jenius are a rare and notable thing, so should be those references, or they become less… nifty. Sorry, saying “special” in reference to Mylene’s panties seems totally wrong.

I like a captain who looks like Global, I like the dread inherent in a pineapple dessert, I like filming a movie about the events of Zero, but put them together along with all the other (often forced) wink-wink-nudge-nudge fanservice in this series, and two things happen: instead of creating something original, you’ve created a collection of references; and it only reminds me that all those shows you’ve referenced were better than this one.

Deja Vajra

Not only is Frontier determined to look toward the past, it’s basically made of past Macross spare parts. Take, for instance, Sheryl’s climactic performance on the battle stage, an enemy who is not actually your enemy in the end, or a fold engine for Valkyries that’s newly invented. What the flying fuck? How many times must we invent this thing? Gamlin used one in M7, Isamu used one in Plus, and suddenly Bilrer’s a flipping genius for making another one. Re-inventing the VF fold engine only served to iron out a story issue that should have been solved through quality writing.

The point is…

Perhaps I’m missing the point. Fanservice seems to form the basis of plenty of series these days anyway. Maybe Macross fans deserve to have a TV series that tells a very “Macrossian” story with a modern look, bright colors, and more songs than ever before. And I think I can get behind that idea.

The problem is, Kawamori and Satelight didn’t deliver. If the goal is to sum up the “Macross experience” in an all-encompassing story, then it deserved more consistent production values, a tighter story, and better characters (Ranka…). If the goal is simply a jumbled Super Dimensional antique store full of basic nostalgia, then I guess they did well.

Let’s just say it didn’t leave the best taste in my mouth, that way I’m justified in using this picture.