Macross: Do You Remember Love?

2009. Humanity is at war with a giant race. The Zentran are men and the Meltran women, and the two groups do not even see one another; they know no life outside fighting. The humans have a fallen ship that has been turned into a city. Hikaru is a pilot. Minmay sings on the ship. In one battle the two of them land on an enemy vessel and the Zentran examine them. What they do not understand is song. They have no notion of culture and music paralyses them. What decides the course of the war is not a weapon. Shoji Kawamori directs with Noboru Ishiguro. Mari Iijima, Arihiro Hase and Mika Doi are among the voices. It is a Japanese production, made in 1984. The film retells the television series Macross; the events are not the same and parts of the series were changed. The quality of the animation is far above the television work of its time; the movement and the transformation sequences were drawn by hand. Mari Iijima both voiced the character and sang the songs. The matter it treats is culture turned into a weapon; the film builds that not as irony but as a serious premise. The narrative puts a triangle at its centre and the war is its ground. The film worked in Japan and influenced the robot animation that followed. For anyone who does not know the series the narrative is fast; the characters are introduced briefly. Its limit is structure; the narrative is compressed, there are too many characters, and the ending is rushed. Who it is for: viewers who like eighties Japanese animation and the robot genre. Who it is not for: it is fast, crowded, and the ending hurried.