Macross Plus Movie Edition 4K 1995

The second film at Derby Quad's 'Anime-a-go-go' event was "Macross Plus" which, as with the previous film "Patlabor", was part of an intellectual property I knew nothing about prior to starting the film. I enjoyed this one the most of the three we saw though.

Myung Fang Lone (Rica Fukami) returns to the planet of Eden, where she grew up, as a producer for holographic A. I. superstar Sharon Apple. Her return further heightens the rivalry between her childhood friends Isamu Dyson (Takumi Tamazaki) and Guld Goa Bowman (Unshou Ishizuka) both of whom now fly experimental aircraft and are being assessed for the Super Nova Project. The rivalry between the two turns more and more aggressive, and both blame the other for Lone's previous departure.

I think I like "Macross Plus" because it was a mix of the typical robots, spaceships, laser guns tropes, with quite a deep character's story about deep-seated rivalry, trauma and regret. It was certainly more complicated emotionally than I was expecting to expose my son too - though he coped admirably with it.

The actual film we saw was a cut down version of the four-part anime series, and had the original Japanese audio performances, rather than anything with either Bryan Cranston or David Hayter providing any audio dubbing. I liked how this looked, I'm interested to read on Wikipedia that it was one of the pioneers of combining traditional and computer animations together.

Of the films I watched on this day, this is the one where I'd be most interested to further investigate the series and dig deeper into the storylines.