Review of Wings of Honneamise: Royal Space Force (1987)
Anno Hideaki (animation director), Yamaga Hiroyuki (director).
Humans and domestic cats look the same on Uru as they do on Earth. Every other detail is different, as if life arose spontaneously on this world and developed under identical natural laws, but just happened to reach a similar conclusion in these two species.
In the rough technological equivalent of our 1950s, a boy dreams of being a pilot. He doesn’t qualify. His name is Shirotsugh. He joins the Royal Space Force, of his country of Honneamise, because it would almost be like flying if it worked.
On a wild night out after burying a colleague, Shirotsugh meets a religious fundamentalist. She’s grateful that anyone is willing to listen. Her idealistic flattery inspires Shirotsugh to volunteer for the first manned flight into space when that’s still only a distant possibility. Through the long switchback of technological development, political corruption, popular resistance, commercial exploitation, dark religion, personal problems and international intrigue that follows, Shirotsugh realizes that this is what people have always been doing.
Sui generis theatrical feature animation. This gritty and philosophical tale of an alternative humankind’s first manned flight into space was an expensive box-office failure. The young studio behind it recouped its losses through home video, but if you ever get the chance, you should see it in a cinema.
Originally called only Royal Space Force, it is the Citizen Kane (1941) of animation. It was directed by Yamaga at age 25, from his own short story. Anno was one of many animation directors, working on the technical stuff, such as the canard fighter planes. As a whole and in many of its details, the film is mind-blowing in its imaginative realism and sheer ambition. Yamaga has stated that he intended for it to make its audience of animation geeks love reality by filtering it through an alien culture. To that end, he used high-grade animation for a long and very serious SF film that is in fact scientific but neither futuristic nor a spectacle and has none of the narcissism of the pulps. The philosophical and dramatic aspects fit perfectly and even the music’s very good. The pacing problems that seemed so evident the first couple of times I saw it are no longer noticeable. Instead, I now appreciate Yamaga’s and Shirotsugh’s relapses into everyday lethargy and temps mort along the way. The occasionally goofy character design has also grown on me. There is still a number of minor glitches in cel tracking, foreign-language voice acting, foley, the application of the score, and the largely irrelevant Sadamoto Yoshiyuki concept art set to the opening credits, but that’s what I expect from unqualified zealots doing what seems almost impossible.
The film’s main theme is, as Shirotsugh puts it in his microwave-band monologue, “stumbling down the path of history”. Each character relates to this theme in a different way, from the slick and hedonistic Matti to the fundamentalist Riquinni, a moral absolutist who sways Shirotsugh very close to her own position. The character who speaks most clearly to the theme is Shirotsugh’s boss, General Khaidenn. Having been pulled into a war as a young man, he counsels Shirotsugh on the paradox of personal ethics under difficult circumstances.
The most crucial point in the treatment of the main theme comes earlier. The plot includes the horrible crime of attempted rape, treated with appropriate gravity. I have never heard the English-language dub, but I have heard a rumour that it implies the victim takes responsibility for the crime. Perhaps that is why some US prudes reject the film as sexist. In the Japanese script, on the morning after Shirotsugh sexually assaults her, Riquinni apologizes for hitting him, not for anything else. Throughout the film, she consistently thwarts and then ignores every one of Shirotsugh’s ouvertures—including the assault—as if they never happened. She does not invite them or take any responsibility for them. That fact does not require any explanation, but the true relationship between the abortive rape and the theme of the film does perhaps need an explanation. To start with, in the clouded flashback that illustrates Riquinni’s description of the adopted Manna’s parents, the mother cries “please stop” (yamete kudasai), which implies that sexual assault may have occurred there too. Riquinni is careful not to fight in front of the traumatized child, but that does not explain why she does not reprimand or distance herself from Shirotsugh later on. I find it insufficient to assume that she tolerates him because she needs his help on account of her poverty and social isolation. Perhaps she forgives him, but that would require her to be superhumanly merciful like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1982), of which there is no sign. Instead, in the very last scene, she clings to her unforgiving religious zealotry. While Shirotsugh and Manna change as characters, Riquinni does not.
The fictional setting complicates the picture. Despite her knowledge of Manna’s parents, Riquinni dares to stand alone in the pleasure district, handing out her leaflets to drunk johns, evidently unafraid of sexual harassment. She welcomes Shirotsugh into her home, an isolated place with no protection other than Manna, again as if the threat of rape was unknown in her culture. In the scene where Shirotsugh puts his hand on her knee, Riquinni frames recreational romance and sex as a “compromise” that is destroying the world. This implies something like the negative outlook on sex in Genesis 2f and the later Catholic idea of an original sin. In the country’s religion, there is an original sin that brought a curse to humanity, but unlike the curse of Eve, the curse of the savage Dao in Riquinni’s holy book is clearly not sexual in nature. Shirotsugh has an important encounter with a hard-nosed female reporter. There are multiple women among the professional soldiers in the southern skirmish, but not in the Space Force. Briefly put, there is clear evidence of sexism in Honneamise’s culture, but it’s on a lower level than typical Christian societies in the real world’s 1950s. Whatever the culture may be, Riquinni’s personal behaviour is clearly not normal. If the concealed cash in her shoe has anything to do with sex, that is never stated, but to hide it, she cannot be completely naïve. There is no way that she failed to comprehend her assailant’s intentions, nor that she plausibly acts as ignorant as that. Yamaga repeatedly emphasizes that Shirotsugh is baffled by the way she ignores his assault. He expects her to hate him and he cannot understand why she acts like she doesn’t. Maybe Riquinni has psychologically internalized the sexist attitudes that surround her. In that case, perhaps she hates herself, but there is really no evidence that she blames herself for anything. Such an interpretation would be tenuous.
There is also no evidence of an authorial sexism or “male gaze”. Nothing frames the victim as inviting the intradiegetic assault by enticing the extradiegetic viewer, although that interpretation would be defensible if you looked at Yamaga’s later work instead. On the subject of authorial intent, there is no evidence pointing the other way, either. Riquinni’s response is not presented as a heroic or saintly ideal, whether from a presentist feminist perspective or otherwise. Her knocking Shirotsugh unconscious is not much different from Shirotsugh later stabbing his would-be assassin. They’re both acts of desperate self-defence. Both are authorially justified, but neither one is valourized. Similarly, Riquinni’s denial the morning after the assault is not a triumph. It is portrayed as weird, perhaps even cowardly.
Yamaga has the two meet one last time at the tram stop, but there they speak only banalities. As the tram pulls away, Shirotsugh stares at the woman, his eyes wide. He is left wondering. That, I think, is the writer’s way of communicating that the lack of consequences and resolution in the attempted rape is a deliberate mystery. It is not a casually cruel oversight. Yamaga left Riquinni open to interpretation. My own interpretation is as follows. When he is made a poster boy for the corrupt capitalist monarchy, Shirotsugh relapses into the uninspired and more animalistic personality he has at the first funeral. He goes AWOL and then commits the crime. In the assault, Shirotsugh pauses momentarily. We never learn why. Perhaps he is mindless, but it could be empathy, or the shock of realizing what he has returned to. That pause is immediately followed by the shock of Riquinni’s violent response, which in turn is followed by the shock of her apology the next morning. I think it is this brutal three-stage paradox, once confirmed at the tram stop, that will eventually make Shirotsugh identify with all of humankind for the poetic montage that follows the launch. It wouldn’t have worked without Riquinni’s three reactions: Terror, violence, and denial. It’s not the later assassination attempt that changes Shirotsugh: It’s his own crime being both perpetrated and denied. Despite what she said about compromise earlier, and despite the fact that she never acquiesces to his advances, Riquinni’s denial of the assault is a compromise after all. It is the dark enabler of the same hope that inspired Shirotsugh in the first place. I think her ultimate reaction was intended as a character flaw. In the end, his assault, though it was horrible and tragic, has been swept under the rug with a million other such crimes. It’s headed for the trash heap of history, like the old shells on the midden underneath the rocket, pried open and violated in Uru’s stone age. Through his crime and her inappropriate minimization of his crime, Shirotsugh and Riquinni together embody the careless and contradictory struggles of humanity, forever stumbling down the path.
That central theme, carried on the dramatic level of the plot, is more significant than the ambiguous triumph of the phallic launch. That launch happpens over an open military conflict, the stereotypical backdrop of a conventional epic fantasy. This is not such a fantasy, but the two levels work well together. Honneamise represents so much of Gainax in my mind: esoteric in concept and sufficiently ambitious in execution to give the industry a kick in the pants. The industry felt little this time around. In 1992, a project to make a sequel called Uru in Blue (Blue Uru) died on the vine due to profound economic problems at the studio following the closing of General Products. These problems eventually drove the studio to bankruptcy. I can dream of what the sequel project would have been, aside from unnecessary.
References here: Nerd argues about distinction between fantasy and science fiction, “Daicon IV Opening Animation” (1983), Gunbuster: Aim for the Top! (1988), Legend of the Galactic Heroes (1988), Planetes (2003), Blue Blazes (2014), Hidden Figures (2016), Violet Evergarden (2018).