Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise (1987 720p) An underfunded joke of a space program struggles against the odds to propel mankind into space in their world’s first spaceflight
Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise (1987 720p) An underfunded joke of a space program struggles against the odds to propel mankind into space in their world’s first spaceflight
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.