Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise
Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise is a 1987 Japanese animated science fiction film written and directed by Hiroyuki Yamaga, co-produced by Hiroaki Inoue and Hiroyuki Sueyoshi, and planned by Toshio Okada and Shigeru Watanabe, with music by Ryuichi Sakamoto. The story takes place in an alternate world where a disengaged young man, Shirotsugh, inspired by an idealistic woman, Riquinni, volunteers to become the first astronaut. The film was the debut by the studio Gainax, and the first anime produced by Bandai.
Royal Space Force was produced over four years and involved many creators, including some from outside the anime industry, to construct a detailed alternate world. Its collective approach to filmmaking, rejection of anime motifs, visual complexity, and inexperienced staff were all factors in its chaotic production. Its investors changed the name The Wings of Honnêamise and created lavish but deceptive marketing, with a premiere at Mann's Chinese Theatre.
Royal Space Force was released in Japan on March 14, 1987, by the Toho subsidiary Toho-Towa. It received some support from domestic anime fans and industry figures including Hayao Miyazaki, and Mamoru Oshii. The science fiction writer Ted Chiang described Royal Space Force as the most impressive example of worldbuilding in fiction. It failed to make back its costs at the box office, but eventually became profitable through home video sales. The anime director Hideaki Anno said the response had a major impact on him personally and professionally.
Royal Space Force did not receive an English-language release until 1994, when Bandai licensed it to Manga Entertainment. A dubbed 35 mm version toured theaters in North America and the United Kingdom, and received coverage in major newspapers but mixed reviews. It was released several times in English on home video. Various surveys of anime have regarded the film more positively; Yamaga said in retrospect that the elements which made Royal Space Force unsuccessful made possible the later successes of Studio Gainax.
Plot
In the Kingdom of Honnêamise, on an alternate version of Earth, Shirotsugh Lhadatt is an unmotivated young man who once aspired to be a fighter pilot. He instead joined the Royal Space Force, his nation's fledgling space program, which has been demoralised by numerous failures. After a fellow astronaut dies in training, Lhadatt befriends a young religious woman named Riquinni Nonderaiko, who spends her days street preaching and lives with a sullen child named Manna. Seeing the groundbreaking nature of his work, Riquinni inspires Lhadatt to volunteer for the Space Force's last attempt to send the world's first astronaut into orbit.Lhadatt's training as an astronaut parallels his coming of age, as he and the rest of the space project members overcome technological difficulties, doubt, overwhelming public attention, and the machinations of their corrupt government. Lhadatt frequently visits Riquinni, who sees the world has succumbed to selfishness and sin, and becomes destitute when her house is foreclosed by a power company, forcing Riquinni and Manna to live in a small shack provided by a local church. Lhadatt studies a holy book Riquinni gifts to him, which asserts that humanity is eternally cursed for having stolen the "fire" of knowledge.
General Khaidenn, commander of the Royal Space Force, rallies public support for the project by lying that they are building a "space warship". The chief engineer is killed during an engine test accident, and controversy sparks regarding the project's expense and how it exacerbates the Kingdom's poverty epidemic. Disenchanted and depressed, Lhadatt suddenly goes AWOL and stays with Riquinni for a while. One night, Lhadatt sexually assaults Riquinni while catching her undressing, but he stops himself just before Riquinni knocks him unconscious. Lhadatt begs forgiveness the next day, but Riquinni denies the incident before running off. Returning to the city, Lhadatt barely survives an assassination attempt by the Republic, a neighboring nation that is at war with the Kingdom. Before departing for the launch site, Lhadatt finally befriends Manna and says farewell to Riquinni.
The launch site is in a demilitarized zone, where the government hopes that the rocket will provoke the Republic into attacking. Though Khaidenn pushes the launch time forward, the Republic launches an invasion. Lhadatt — already in the space capsule and determined to finish what he started — refuses to abort the launch, and convinces the vulnerable ground crew to complete it. The spectacular launch stuns both sides into inaction.
As his capsule orbits the earth, Lhadatt broadcasts a prayer for humanity's forgiveness. Lhadatt's capsule is suddenly bathed in sunlight, and a montage of his own life and his world's history and achievements are shown. On the planet's surface, Riquinni witnesses the first snow fall and gazes into the sky.
Cast
Production
The film had a budget of, at the time equivalent to, making it the most expensive anime film up until then. It surpassed the budget records of Hayao Miyazaki's Castle of Cagliostro and Castle in the Sky.Development
Royal Space Force developed out of an anime proposal presented to Shigeru Watanabe of Bandai in September 1984 by Hiroyuki Yamaga and Toshio Okada from Daicon Film, an amateur film studio active in the early 1980s associated with students at the Osaka University of Arts and science fiction fandom in the Kansai region. Okada had first met Watanabe in August 1983 at a convention for tokusatsu fans in Tokyo at which Daicon Film screened their live-action short The Return of Ultraman and ran a sales booth for Daicon's related fan merchandise company, General Products. In a 1998 interview, Yamaga asserted that the success of the company was an impetus that led to the creation of Gainax and the Royal Space Force proposal, as Okada had co-founded General Products with Yasuhiro Takeda but Takeda was now managing it well on his own, leaving Okada to feel he had nothing to do. "I approached Okada, who was feeling a bit down. I was thinking every day about how Sadamoto and Maeda are great geniuses. Of course, Anno is a genius, as is Akai. To have one genius in your group is incredible enough, but here we have four of them. I told that he would be a fool not to take action. I said that we should do something. We had sacrificed quite a lot for the sake of our independent films as students—we had dropped out of school, we'd lost jobs. So there had always been a desire within us all to see those sacrifices pay off at some point."Watanabe had been involved with product planning for Bandai's "Real Hobby Series" figurines. The position had also led Watanabe into Bandai's then-new home video label Emotion, where he helped to develop Mamoru Oshii's Dallos. Released at the end of 1983, Dallos would become the first anime original video animation, an industry event later described as the beginning of a new "third medium" for anime beyond film or television, offering the prospect of "a medium in which could 'grow up,' allowing the more mature thematic experiments of creators". Okada and Yamaga's pitch to Watanabe had followed the recognition Daicon Film received earlier that year in Animage magazine through a special secondary Anime Grand Prix award given to their 8 mm short Daicon IV Opening Animation. Their September 1984 proposal gave the outline for an anime to be entitled Royal Space Force, to be produced under the heading of a new, professional studio to be named Gainax. The proposal listed five initial core staff for the anime. Four had been previously associated with Daicon Film: Yamaga was to be the anime's concept creator and director and Okada its producer,
Yoshiyuki Sadamoto its chief character designer, and Hideaki Anno its chief mechanical designer. The fifth, Kenichi Sonoda, listed as responsible for the anime's settei had previously assisted with product development at General Products.
Writing
The Royal Space Force proposal, subheaded "Project Intentions: A New Wave in a Time of Lost Collaborative Illusions," began with a self-analysis of "recent animation culture from the perspective of young people". At the time of the proposal, Yamaga was 22 years old and had directed the opening anime films for Japan's 1981 and 1983 national science fiction conventions, Daicon III and IV, which through their sale to fans on home video through General Products were themselves regarded as informal precursors of the OVA concept. At age 20 and while still in college, Yamaga had been chosen by the series director of the original Macross TV series, Noboru Ishiguro, to direct episode 9 of the show, "Miss Macross," as Ishiguro wished "to aim for a work that doesn't fit the conventional sense of anime." Yamaga commented in a contemporary Animage article that it had taken him two months to create the storyboards for "Miss Macross" and wryly remarked he had thus already used himself up doing so; the magazine noted however that the episode was well received, and judged the creative experiment a success.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, 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 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 proposal described Royal Space Force as "a project to make anime fans reaffirm reality". Gainax asserted that the problem was not unique to anime fans, who were only "the most representative example" of the increasing tendency of younger people not to experience reality directly, but as mediated through "the informational world". "We live in a society mired in a perpetual state of information overload. And the feeling of being overwhelmed by the underwhelming isn't something limited to just young people, but everyone"... "However, this doesn't mean that people want to live alone and without contact, but instead they want to establish a balance with the 'outside' that is psychologically comfortable for them." Yamaga and Okada believed that this sensibility among some fans explained why anime often combined plots that "symbolize modern politics or society" with characters whose age and appearance was "completely incongruent with reality". The Royal Space Force plan proposed to use the creative techniques of anime for a radically different aim, to make "the exact opposite of the 'cool,' castle-in-the-sky anime that is so prevalent these days... It's on our earth now, in this world of ours now, that we feel it's time for a project that will declare there's still something valuable and meaningful in this world."File:"Image Sketch" from Royal Space Force proposal, September 1984.jpg|thumb|right|One of the "image sketch" paintings by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto and Mahiro Maeda that accompanied the original proposal for Royal Space Force
"It is essential to pay close attention to the smallest design details of this world. It's because it is a completely different world that it must feel like reality. If you ask why such an approach—when the goal is to get anime fans to reaffirm their reality—it's because if you were to set this anime in our actual world to begin with, that's a place which right now they see as grubby and unappealing. By setting it in a completely different world, it becomes like a foreign film that attracts the attention of the audience. The objects of attraction are not mecha and cute girls, but ordinary customs and fashions. If normal things now look impressive and interesting because they've been seen through a different world, then we'll have achieved what we set out to do in the plan; we'll be able to express, 'Reality is much more interesting than you thought.
The September 1984 proposal for Royal Space Force was unusual for an anime pitch in that it described the setting and story, but never named the main characters. Okada and Yamaga requested that Maeda and Sadamoto prepare a set of over 30 "image sketches" in watercolor to support the written proposal, depicting the world to be designed for the anime. That same month, Watanabe brought the pitch to Bandai company president Makoto Yamashina, who himself represented a younger corporate generation; Yamashina's response to reading Gainax's proposal was, "I'm not sure what this is all about, but that's exactly why I like it." Yamashina would later state in an interview with the comics and animation criticism magazine Comic Box shortly before the film's release that this viewpoint represented a "grand experiment" by Bandai in producing original content over which they could have complete ownership, and a deliberate strategy that decided to give young artists freedom in creating that content: "I'm in the toy business, and I've always been of the mind that if I understand , it won't sell. The reason is the generation gap, which is profound. Honneamise just might hit the jackpot. If so, it will overturn all the assumptions we've had up till now. I didn't want them to make the kind of film that we could understand. Put another way, if it was a hit and I could understand why, it wouldn't be such a big deal. I did want it to be a hit, but from the start, I wasn't aiming for a Star Wars. In trying to make it a success, it had to be purely young people's ideas and concepts; we couldn't force them to compromise. We had to let them run free with it. In the big picture, they couldn't produce this on their own, and that's where we stepped in, and managed to bring it all this way. And in that respect, I believe it was a success."