The epic art house film ROYAL SPACE FORCE: THE WINGS OF HONNEAMISE - Anime Review

Many years ago, a group of fans began making garage kits, selling fan merchandise, and organizing conventions. They made friends with some animators and asked them to animate opening sequences to their conventions. One of those sequences was the legendary Daikon 4 animation, a sweeping, loving tribute to all of science fiction and fantasy. That animation impressed so many people that those fans approached Bandai Visual about making a movie. Not only did they get a budget, but based on the strength of the teaser they made, they got a budget of what would today be $11 million, the highest ever budget for an anime film until that time. Pretty darn impressive. Those fans then named themselves Studio Gainax. They went on to make such influential anime series as Neon Genesis Evangelion and Nadia and the Secret of Blue Water. But their first major work was this film, released in 1987, Royal Space Force, The Wings of Kamehameha, which I will be reviewing right now. It's an alternate history film, in a sense, as it focuses on the space program of a fictional nation on an alternate Earth. Its culture is wildly different than anything on Earth, and the staff of the film reimagined almost every aspect of daily life, from coinage to clothing. However, they avoid the mistake of over-designing everyday objects. It just feels like this is a culture as different from any modern culture as Medieval Japan's was from, say, Medieval Europe. One of the high points of this particular work is the budget. They spent, again, $11 million on this film, and it shows. Characters move with a weight in detail that is rare in animation, period, much less anime. It's a bit of a shock to see crowd scenes where everyone's moving, and subtle approaches to movement. The direction is very clear, and this is actually an interesting thing. The camera angle is usually positioned in a very conventional way, similar to this, on the same plane as the characters. Ordinarily, this would feel dull over the course of a movie, but there's so much detail here, and it creates such a subtly different world than our own, that the movie benefits from this simplicity. The viewer needs a recognizable camera angle to feel grounded, and to let the eye roam the frame for all those details. That's also important because Hane Yomise does not tell a traditional shounen or otherwise story. The main characters are all adults, and the protagonist is a young man trying to find something to believe in. So much of your time is spent studying the characters' faces to understand their reactions to things. This film requires its characters to express complex adult emotions, which is one of the things that's frankly kind of shocking about it. It's not one piece, this is more like Apollo 13. As such, the film lives and dies partly on the audience's identification with the main characters. And here we enter some difficult territory. A lot of viewers just plain don't like the main characters, based on what I've read. The protagonist is kind of a shiftless pilot for much of the time, something of a jock, who spends a lot of time with a religious girl who's often kind of a doormat. Worse, and I tell you this because it's a trigger for some, there is an attempted rape scene partway through the film that comes out of nowhere. It involves the main characters, or at least one of the main characters, and it can feel troubling if you don't fully understand the film's messages about its characters. It is shocking. But this is a film about adults, and adults are complicated, often contradictory creatures. Indeed, the dialogue demonstrates this beautifully. Each character has very distinct speech patterns, a testament to the writing. Every character feels unique. And this gets to one of the difficult things about Honey and Misa. On the one hand, it's a visually stunning film about a space race of massive rockets and intense equipment tests, things like that. On the other, it's a character study of two people who aren't typical epic heroes. The film goes out of its way to avoid tropes in its characters, and this can make this film difficult to appreciate. Ultimately, it's kind of like an arthouse film. Honey and Misa feels like it is trying something very unusual and very thoughtful with what it's doing, while also trying to be visually spectacular because it's animation, right? In animation, you can kind of do anything. So this is something of a film that divides viewers. Some people love it, some people hate it. Much like Omura Oshii's work, come into this understanding that this is a very different film. But I think if you understand that and come in, you'll find a gem. It might not be a gem that's exactly for you, but it's a gem nonetheless.