Anime Impact. Chris Stuckmann

the girl we saw earlier, Rasa, is out from her village riding her floater bike (a kind of hovering scooter) to bring her brother Nam his breakfast because he’d forgotten it that morning. Nam sees the Shade sword land on their planet, but when he goes to investigate he sees a beautiful, ghostly woman called Arlia who introduces herself and promptly vanishes. A sphere that looks like the one he’d been chasing shows up and hatches an inorganic creature, who begins trying to fight Nam. Rasa is chased by a gang of inorganic bikers, meets up with Nam along the way, and is saved at the last minute by the arrival of Bao and his ship. Arlia appears again and explains that the universe is a life form, and that there is a battle between organics and inorganics for its fate. The Shade sword contains a great amount of life energy and consciousness, and it’s a tool created by the universe for destroying the inorganics. After this revelation, she disappears again and another inorganic begins chasing them, calling out names of fruits and vegetables with each attack. They decide to flee to an old underground city that was destroyed in a nuclear strike, where Bao looks for the ultimate weapon against the inorganics.

      As one might be able to tell from this description, the story of Birth doesn’t really hold together, and has little internal logic. Why would the universe impart consciousness into something like a sword? What is supposed to be done with it? And once it’s been acquired, why would our protagonists need to go on another quest for a different weapon, which is so dangerous they shouldn’t try to use it anyway?

      Additionally, the overall conflict between organic and inorganic strikes an odd tone. At the point when the film says the inorganics need to be destroyed, they haven’t been shown to be anything more than an annoyance and certainly not anything that a universal consciousness would concern itself with. Perhaps even more disturbing, in one early oddly-placed scene, we are shown the melancholy of a young inorganic after Rasa spurns his childish advances. The inorganics aren’t shown as enemies of organic life as much as annoyances, and in fact have rich inner lives. This isn’t to say the film necessarily needed to resolve the conflict between the two types of life as much as it needed to explain its setup, other than as a bare hanger upon which to hang a stylishly extravagant suit of animation.

      In the end, while some individual scenes are well-constructed and display a fantastic use of fluid movement throughout, the film as a whole doesn’t really hold together. There are sometimes baffling transitions from one scene to the next because it can’t seem to settle on a single storyline to pursue. The loose plot only serves as justification for the fantastic scenes of running, flying, and exploding. However, I would argue that there is not necessarily anything wrong with that. Disdain for the conventions of narrative and storytelling in Birth (whether intentional or not) result in a finished work that communicates a sense of freedom through its expressive animation.

      Brian Ruh is an independent scholar with a PhD in Communication and Culture from Indiana University. He is the author of Stray Dog of Anime: The Films of Mamoru Oshii.

       1984 • Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love?

      Chôjikû Yôsai Macross: Ai Oboeteimasuka

      — John Rodriguez —

      Do you remember your first crush? I do, and her name was Lin Minmei.

      Wait, no: it was Lisa Hayes.

      Wait … oh, darn it, I can’t decide! Love is hard!

      Well, sure it is. Everything requiring maturity is hard for a ten-year-old boy. But waking up at 4:30 a.m. on a school day to catch the latest syndicated episode of Robotech … that was a piece of cake. I remember those mornings: the sky still dark, the blankets warm, the reception terrible. Not so terrible, though, to block out her. Lin. I mean, Lisa. I mean…

      Okay, I don’t know what I mean, because I didn’t know what I wanted. Perky or poised? Flashy or formal? Dainty or determined? That was the ying and the yang of Robotech’s Lin Minmei and Lisa Hayes, the impossible choice foisted upon dashing mecha pilot Rick Hunter and far less dashing ten-year-old me.

      It was confusing as hell. But it wasn’t half as confusing as Robotech’s convoluted lineage.

      One of the pioneers of anime on American television, Robotech represented the Frankenstein-esque stitching together of three different mecha anime series. The first of these series was titled Super Dimension Fortress Macross. Macross formed the foundation of Robotech’s tale of intergalactic war between earth and the invading Zentradi. It also established the now-famous love triangle between ace pilot Rick, pop diva Lin, and stern officer Lisa. Future seasons would completely change the cast—Robotech was a mish-mash of different shows, remember—but it’s Lin and Lisa who’ve kept Robotech alive in my heart all these years.

      But what about Macross, the show that birthed these memorable characters? I’m happy to report that it’s alive and well. Macross has thrived across an array of different media, including video games, print, TV, and film. And it’s the very first Macross film—Do You Remember Love?—that we’ll be discussing here.

      Do You Remember Love? is a reimagining of the events depicted in the original Macross series, yet it features all the familiar characters. There’s pop diva Lynn Minmay, stern officer Misa Hayase, and of course ace pilot Hikaru Ichijyo … hmm, something’s off here. Oh, that’s right: Robotech changed all these characters’ names to better suit its American audience! Phooey, westernization!

      Anyway, the core story currents of Macross remain intact in Do You Remember Love? Humanity’s remnants are still on the run from alien invaders, and their base of operations is still the SDF-1, a flying fortress that’s part battleship, part spacefaring city. The aliens themselves are slightly altered. There’s still the Zentradi, an all-male race of giant bionoids. And like in Robotech, there’s a counterpart race of all-female giants. Here, those women are given a name (“Meltlandi”) and a backstory of strife with their estranged Zentradi kin.

      Signature elements of Macross carry over, too. And, oh, how cool they are! Thrilling space combat! Transformable mecha! Swarms of weaving missiles that leave totally unrealistic yet utterly awesome smoke trails in their wake! This is the kind of stuff that makes ten-year-olds stand up and take notice!

      Of course, mecha and missiles aren’t all that ten-year-olds are apt to notice. For myself, that’s about the time girls started appearing on the radar. And as it happens, Macross featured two of the more memorable female characters in anime history: Lynn Minmay and Misa Hayase. Both were clever. Both were courageous. And both became heartthrobs for a generation of American youths.

      In some ways, the Lynn/Misa choice was like a litmus test. Did you fancy girly girls? Congratulations: You were a Minmay man! Or did you value composure and forthrightness? Well then, you were Team Hayase.

      But it’s safe to say that ten-year-old me wasn’t digging for nuance. Ten-year-old me was too busy learning to crush. Well, maybe not just to crush—maybe learning to refine my understanding of what constitutes attractiveness, too. Lynn was lovely, of course. She was the belle of the ball and the obvious choice to dote upon. But if Lynn was beauty, then Misa was grace. She was firm. She was decisive. She carried herself with dignified bearing, and she harbored a strength that I longed to rise up and meet. Even at ten, Lynn felt like a caricature of what a woman was supposed to be. Misa, by contrast, felt like an honest-to-God person, someone I could admire and look up to.

      I will never forget the epic space battles that vaulted Macross into the public consciousness. Do You Remember Love? features a couple of those, and damn if they aren’t as pulse-pounding now as they were back in those early-morning Robotech days. They’re certainly more than enough to make me forgive the film’s cheeseball conclusion, where Lynn Minmay saves humanity by performing a 20,000-year-old pop tune on a shielded spaceward-facing stage while lasers and missiles whiz about her.

      But it’s love, not mecha or missiles, that will forever define this film for me. I think that’s one of the greatest magics of art: its ability to shape a person’s definition of love for a lifetime. We need those shapers in our lives. Especially when our parents—those best positioned to