Review of Wings of Honneamise: Royal Space Force (1987)
Anno Hideaki (animation director), Yamaga Hiroyuki (director).
On the planet Uru, the humans and domestic cats look the same as they do on Earth. Every other detail is different in some way, as if this world had been put together under the natural laws of reality. In the rough technological equivalent of our 1950s, a boy dreams of being a pilot. He doesn’t qualify. His name is Shirotsugh, and he joins the Royal Space Force of his country of Honneamise because it would almost be like flying, if it worked.
The little-known and cash-strapped project is run by a nobleman who has himself failed to become a historian. A fundamentalist 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.
Originally called only Royal Space Force, it is almost 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. As a whole and in many of its details, it is mind-blowing in its imaginative realism and sheer ambition. Yamaga has stated that he intended for the film 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. The philosophical and dramatic aspects fit right in and even the music’s 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 along the way. The occasionally goofy character design has also grown on me. There is still a large number of minor glitches in cel tracking, foreign-language voice acting, foley, the application of the score, and the largely irrelevant imagery set to the opening credits, but that’s what I expect from unqualified zealots doing what seems almost impossible.
The plot includes the horrible crime of attempted rape, which is germane to the theme and treated with appropriate gravity. This motif has nonetheless made the film infamous among US prudes, partly because the English-language dub—I am told—handled it poorly by implying the victim takes responsibility. The Japanese script has no such implication. Instead, Riquinni consistently thwarts and then ignores every one of Shirotsugh’s sexual ouvertures as if they never happened. He is baffled by this behaviour, and there is no specific explanation for it. In the clouded flashback that illustrates Riquinni’s description of 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. There is also no evidence of an internalized sexism strong enough to support the interpretation that she blames herself.
Yamaga has the two meet one last time at the tram stop, but there they say almost nothing. That, I think, is the writer’s way of communicating that the lack of resolution in this matter is deliberate. He left Riquinni open to interpretation. My own interpretation is that Shirotsugh’s own relapse into his former, “uninspired” and more animalistic personality, coupled with the shock of Riquinni’s violent yet too-brief response, plants the seed that finally makes him identify with all of humankind for the poetic montage that follows the launch. It’s not the assassination attempt that changes him: It’s the mystery of Riquinni’s denial, which is the dark side of her hope, which is what inspired Shirotsugh in the first place. The pair of them embody the careless and contradictory struggles of humanity, where a million assaults end up on the trash heap of history every day. This, to me, is more significant than the ambiguous triumph of the phallic launch. That happpens over an open military conflict, the stereotypical backdrop of an epic fantasy, which this is not.
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).