Wikipedia Article which goes into more detail than usual about the film, the author’s intent, and the difficulty in getting it made.
Never saw this until today (The link is to the English dub, but personally I watched it subbed to avoid some over-acted characters in the English version). Reviews when it came out panned it for being a meandering, unfocused and boring slog, but I didn’t find that to be the case at all.
It’s definitely a slower paced character driven story, with a few minutes of intense action in its 2 hour runtime, but overall I found the movie to be absolutely engaging throughout. It was apparently designed to be a sort’ve ‘Anti-Anime’ film that tried to be more grounded, and push back against the Otaku culture developing around anime at the time:
Okada and Yamaga argued in their proposal for Royal Space Force that what prevented the anime industry from advancing beyond its current level was that it had fallen into a feedback loop with its audience, producing for them a “cul-de-sac” of cute and cool-looking anime content that had the effect of only further reinforcing the more negative and introverted tendencies of many fans,[38][l] without making a real attempt to connect with them in a more fundamental and personal way:
“In modern society, which is so information-oriented, it becomes more and more difficult even for sensational works to really connect with people, and even so, those works get forgotten quickly. Moreover, this flood of superficial information has dissolved those values and dreams people could stand upon, especially among the young, who are left frustrated and anxious. It could be said that this is the root cause of the Peter Pan syndrome, that says, ‘I don’t want to be an adult’ … If you look at the psychology of anime fans today, they do interact with society, and they’re trying to get along well in that society, but unfortunately, they don’t have the ability. So as compensatory behavior, they relinquish themselves to mecha and cute young girls. However, because these are things that don’t really exist—meaning, there’s no interaction in reality happening between those things and the anime fans—they soon get frustrated, and then seek out the next [anime] that will stimulate them … If you look into this situation, what these people really want, deep down, is to get along well with reality. And what we propose is to deliver the kind of project that will make people look again at the society around them and reassess it for themselves; where they will think, ‘I shouldn’t give up yet on reality.’”
The artstyle is quite unique, the animation at times incredibly fluid, and the soundtrack is quite good (especially the ending track!).
The story briefly touches on a few themes that I wasn’t expecting as well, such as the idea of a space program being incredibly wasteful when there are so many unemployed and hungry who need assistance.
Overall I thought it was a superb film, but there is one pretty massive gripe I have with it, which contains some spoilers.
Movie Spoiler Gripe
About 3/4 of the way through the film, one of the characters attempts a violent rape. It was absolutely bewildering to see, as its completely out of character for the person committing it, almost as though it was added randomly by the director.
Even worse, the victim blames herself for defending herself, and brushes off the attempt virtually immediately, continuing to be warm and friendly to the character for the rest of the movie.
Besides feeling a little guilty about it, a quick pep-talk sees the character who committed the assault pretty much assuaged, and it’s never brought up for the rest of the movie, and doesn’t impact the story line whatsoever.
It’s a terrible tarnish on an otherwise superb film, and I cannot for the life of me imagine why it was added into the film.
Just watched this movie last night, it was definitely worth watching.
It suffers a bit from comparison to “The Right Stuff” movie which is also about the early troubled days of a space program – Tom Wolfe mighta been a reactionary git, but he had an eye for detail, and the Honnêamise slice-of-life events seem kinda bland by comparison.
The chase scene in the middle seems a little out of place. It happens, then there’s no mention of it again. Almost like it’s thrown in to wake people up. However, the action towards the end is well-done and effective.
The Riquinni character is unfortunately underdeveloped. To that end she recalls Nausicaa in Miyazaki’s film: a saintly figure that is just a little too perfect, such that they become almost a caricature. This madonna/whore nature is emphasized by the way we first see her, handing out religious pamphlets in a pleasure district. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say there’s a MeToo event, and OP reviewer says they can’t imagine why it was added. The wikipedia page has a good overview of how it might be explained thematically, but I agree with OP that it’s inexcusable. The same idea could have been expressed in a less gratuitous way. It’s a reminder that movies in that time were mired in a culture where such actions were considered unremarkable, and this is not the only movie that suffers from such depictions. So, to be clear, this is a flawed movie.
It does several things right tho, including the worldbuilding, which has a nice feel to it that is somewhere between late !raygungothic@piefed.social and early !cassettefuturism@lemmy.world . I was a little surprised to see there wasn’t a manga behind this as in Nausicaa or Akira since it was so well developed, but wikipedia says they explicitly focused on worldbuilding. The “oxen pulling carts with cutting-edge flying tech” scene would later be re-used by Miyazaki in The Wind Rises and is a striking visual epitome of the mood they’re going for.
Anyway, I think anyone interested in what kinds of thing anime can achieve, should take a look at this despite the flaws mentioned above.
Ah, I’ve yet to see that film. My only point of comparison is Apollo 13, which isn’t terribly similar, so RSP still felt pretty fresh.
Yeah that probably could’ve been integrated better, though I think there was some foreshadowing in a conversation with the leader of the neighboring country and his aid. Though the chase isn’t addressed afterward, I think it does help build up to the final conflict, which may have been a bit jarring without that chase scene to gradually escalate the other country into opting for more extreme actions to prevent the rocket launch.
Fully agree there. Considering how much emphasis is placed on this film emulating Nausicaa’s sales figures, and how it was pitched to exec’s as a ‘Nausicaa-like project’, it wouldn’t surprise me if they actually did model some of her personality on it.
I hadn’t read that section until now. I never would’ve been able to grasp that that was what they were trying to convey with that scene without that additional context, which only further speaks to how wildly poor the decision to depict it in that way was. 100% agree that it really speaks to the general mindset of that era.