Macross Plus: The Movie

By Andrew Osmond.

Released twenty-eight years ago, Macross Plus: The Movie still dazzles now, a film that somehow manages to combine plane dogfights and space duels (think Star Wars meets Top Gun); a melancholy drama about former friends tormented by their ruined past; and an AI pop-goddess who seems far less fantastical in the age of Hatsune Miku.

Like the best franchise spinoffs, the film is very watchable for newcomers, but some background points are useful. Released in 1995, Macross Plus is a next-generation sequel to a much earlier TV anime series made in 1982-3. That series is often known as just Macross, though its full hefty title is Super Dimension Fortress Macross. (It was reworked in America into the first “arc” of a longer composite series called Robotech, but that’s another story.) Serialised over 36 episodes, Macross was a markedly different kind of story from Macross Plus, without any of the same characters, but with a few important connections.

The first Macross anime showed an epic space war between Earth and a militaristic alien race called the Zentradi. On the human side, one of the series’ main characters was a young female singer, Lynn Minmay. She’s not in Macross Plus, but that film’s heroine Myung is a former singer who it’s easy to see as a more adult Minmay. Meanwhile, the Zentradi in the TV series were giants, many times bigger than Earthlings. During the story, though, some Zentradi were exposed to human culture (specifically Minmay’s songs), and elected to be miniaturised to human size and live with humans.

Macross Plus is set thirty years later, and one of the three main characters is a human-sized Zentradi, called Guld. Although Guld grew up after the space war, the script indicates that he’s inherited his race’s millennia-old fighting instincts, which he strives to suppress – this has an important bearing on the story. Also, the film’s later scenes take place at an anniversary commemorating the three-decades old war, with the original Macross spaceship as a backdrop. It’s a massive metal edifice that looks like something between a Transformer and a castle.

The film’s story, though, is far more intimate than the TV Macross, and much more adult in tone. The TV Macross had been made when anime was still widely perceived as a children’s medium in Japan, despite a burgeoning fandom of older viewers. As it happened, Macross’ original broadcast ended in 1983, which was the year that the Pierrot studio released Dallos, a space adventure miniseries; it was the first anime made for the young direct-to-video market, catering for older demographics.

By Macross Plus in 1995, video anime and adult fandom were both well-established. Indeed Macross Plus was a video anime at first, released as a lavish four-part miniseries in 1994-5. However, the film is no simple compilation. Rather, it’s a thorough and elaborate reworking, with scenes extensively remixed, and many new scenes added. At least one big story point is deliberately changed to scandalize viewers, involving a character failing to respond to an emergency because he’s in in the middle of a one-night stand. (In the series version, the character tries to respond, but he’s just too far away.)

This reflects Macross Plus’ more adult content, with sex and sexual jealousy at the show’s heart. The three main characters are the former woman singer Myung, the Zentradi Guld and the human male Isamu. They were close-bonded as youngsters; one flashback shows Isamu and Guld striving to launch a home-made plane with pedal power, in what looks like a pastiche of a moment from Ghibli’s Kiki’s Delivery Service. Now, both men are test pilots at an airbase, but they’re also bitter rivals, and when they meet Myung again, their full hatred becomes clear. It’s linked to some terrible incident that happened seven years ago, but what exactly happened is left mysterious until late in the film.

Myung used to be committed to being a singer, but now she insists that’s behind her. Instead she’s the “producer” of a new sensation – Sharon Apple, a pop singer who’s also a holographic A.I., bewitching fans with stunning “live” concert performances. But Myung has a secret. Sharon Apple was created from her brainwaves, which makes her Myung’s phantom alter ego in a way that Perfect Blue fans will recognise. Sharon Apple is the almost literal embodiment of Myung’s lost dreams, which fill the flesh and blood woman with bitter self-loathing. There’s a great moment when Myung stands alone at a darkened window, saying dejectedly that she hates both Sharon’s songs and her own, before she slides down to the floor… and there’s Sharon Apple standing right behind her in the window. You could call it a Satoshi Kon-ish moment, except that Macross Plus predates Perfect Blue.

The film’s somber themes, of regretted life choices and toxically curdled friendships, have echoes of the last episodes of the original TV Macross, which also had characters dealing with passing time and changing circumstances. But the film speaks more directly to viewers who saw the first Macross as kids or teenagers, but who since experienced the challenges of adulthood for themselves. As such, it’s a much bolder reinvention of a franchise than, for example, the recent Top Gun sequel. Macross Plus has been frequently compared to Top Gun, especially with the figure of the cocky grinning daredevil Isamu, who imitates plane noise like a ten year-old kid in order to charm a woman into bed. By coincidence, Isamu’s introduction in the film, taking a perilous test flight and cheerfully breaking every rule, feels very akin to the start of Top Gun: Maverick.

The mix of maturity, melancholy and cool in Macross Plus anticipates Cowboy Bebop three years later. That’s hardly surprising, as Macross Plus was the anime that brought Bebop’s key team together. Macross Plus was co-directed by Shinichiro Watanabe, Bebop’s director, although Watanabe said that on Macross Plus, he deferred to the Chief Director, Shoji Kawamori (see below). Still, Macross Plus must have been a vital training ground for Watanabe, as well as uniting him with writer Keiko Nobumoto and composer Yoko Kanno. Both women would go on to Cowboy Bebop and many more marvelous titles; Nobumoto’s career ended tragically early with her death in 2021, aged 57.

Shoji Kawamori is sometimes called the Macross franchise’s creator, though it’s more accurate to describe him as one of the core creative team. He didn’t direct the original TV series – that was Noboru Ishiguro – but he developed the beloved Valkyrie transforming planes, as well as contributing major elements, such as “the war being solved by song” – an idea which gets a subversive twist in Macross Plus.

Kawamori did direct the 1984 cinema film Macross: Do You Remember Love?, which was a lavish retelling of the TV Macross. With it, Kawamori set a precedent for Macross Plus, which was similarly released in alternate versions. The main difference is Do You Remember Love? was made with all-new animation, far bigger-budgeted than the TV series, whereas the Macross Plus series and film share much of their footage, and were both made to high standards from the start. When I interviewed Kawamori in 2019, he said, “I cannot bear (always) continuing with the same format. I really enjoy working between them.” By then, he’d reworked two later Macross video series, Macross Frontier and Macross Delta, into films as well.

In the same interview, I asked Kawamori about a phenomenon which Macross Plus predicts with unnerving accuracy, the virtual singer Hatsune Miku (and her fellow Vocaloids). He laughed at the question. “I’d often talk about Sharon Apple, and all the fans going crazy over her, and the staff claimed that it was crazy, that it won’t happen. But then Hatsune Miku appeared and I could say I told you so. Hatsune Miku is a virtual idol but there is a person ‘inside.’” (Miku’s voice is sampled from voice-actor Saki Fujita, and her movements are motion-captured.) “Those similarities were very interesting for me.”

Sharon Apple is a sinister figure in Macross Plus. When I asked Kawamori if he thought Miku was a good or bad thing, he replied, “At the beginning, I felt quite awkward (about her), but they are making progress, improving her. The President of the company [presumably Hiroyuki Ito of Crypton Future Media] actually used to be an employee of the Satelight studio.” Satelight collaborated with Studio Nue on Macross Zero, Macross Frontier and Macross Delta.

I also asked Kawamori about a story point in Macross Plus which will be very divisive among viewers. (SPOILERS follow in the paragraph.) It involves sexual violence, and it invites comparison to a story twist in Alan Moore’s Watchmen, as well as a notorious scene in the anime film Wings of Honneamise – though the moment in Macross Plus shows far less, and is played like an operatic tragedy, with an unforgettable orchestral crescendo by Yoko Kanno as the reveal hits home.

In retrospect, I asked, did Kawamori think the scene went too far? His answer related to the maturing anime audience discussed earlier. “Macross Plus was made ten years after the first Macross. At the same time I was making Macross Plus, I was also making Macross 7 [another TV anime], mainly targeted at teenagers. But in contrast, Macross Plus was made as a video for people who had seen the first Macross, who were now ten years older; therefore I didn’t have to worry about the content.”

Indeed, Macross Plus opened when the anime industry was in a very different place from the 1980s. According to a report in Britain’s Observer, one of the film’s screenings was in a triple bill at the Tokyo Fantastic Film Festival in November 1995. The other two films were two more SF anime – the anthology Memories and Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell. Macross Plus overlapped them both. Sharon Apple fitted right in with the blurring of human and digital in Oshii’s film, while Memories contained the story “Magnetic Rose,” about a virtual singing star who inherits feelings of love from a human host and makes them something deadly. Even the music of “Magnetic Rose” was by Yoko Kanno.

Andrew Osmond is the author of 100 Animated Feature Films. The Macross Plus collector’s edition will be released in the UK from Anime Limited.