RE:Animetion - The Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneaimse (1987) Part I

It was a bomb.

Let’s make that one clear from the start. 

A lot of Wings’ defenders point out that the film almost grossed enough to cover its actual production costs of 400 million Yen.  Almost breaking even is not an optimal outcome for any business.  Except it didn’t even do that. The theatrical cut in Japan depends on a ton of factors, however, there always is one. So Gainax’s actual box office take-home pay was a lot less than the 380 million Yen box office haul.  Not that that mattered in the least because the movie’s actual real world, “this be the money what got spent” amount was 800 million Yen. 

The reason I’m starting with the money is because saying, “the only way it failed was financially,” sounds like a fairly major cope.  

But it is the truth, the only way that The Wings of Honneaimse did fail was financially; in every other way, it succeeded at what it was trying to do. Magnificently so at that. 

It says so much about the Japanese that when Gainax’s Toshio Okada and Yasuhiro Takeda made their initial pitch meeting, they started it off with a scholarly paper on the future of anime.  And according to them, it didn’t have one.

The thrust of their paper, (Project Intentions: A New Wave in a Time of Lost Collaborative Illusions) was that Japanese animation, like American animation, had started out strictly as kids’ entertainment with guys like Osamu Tezuka and some others. Great stuff in its day, but that day was in nineteen-sixty-something. Manga had long since evolved into both an art and a business model that had expanded well past that limitation in scope. There was now a manga for every demographic.  If you were a teenage girl, there was a manga for you. If you were an 80-year-old, there was a manga for you.  Housewives, salarymen, truckers, all of them were catered to by the manga market.

Not so with anime. While there had been some more adult fare in the seventies, like Space Battleship Yamato and Captain Harlock, anime was now becoming stultified again because the content had moved from childhood to adolescence and refused to grow up any further. Put more simply, anime was becoming nothing more than hot chicks and giant robots.*  

Gainax was going to be the studio that changed all that.  They were proposing an animated film that was geared to an adult audience from the ground up. It was going to be hard science fiction, but first and foremost, it would be a complex drama. In support of this project, they made a pilot film to show what they had in mind.

It was mostly an exercise in world-building, but you can see a lot of what would become Wings in this short. The level of detail in this four-minute one-shot is insane. Gainax had originally planned a 30 to 40 minute OAV 

It says a lot about Japanese business practices during the Economic Bubble that they not only approved this project by a studio that had only made bootleg amateur films, but that they tripled the budget request to 800 billion Yen. This is like going out to buy a Glock and coming home with an F-35. You knew what to do with a Glock, but an F-35 (while doubtless useful) is bringing way more to the party than you needed.  

Gainax had to change the scope of the project.  No OAV had a prayer of making back 800 million Yen in 1987.  The Royal Space Force was going to have to be a theatrical release. The college team from Osaka was now officially playing in the major leagues. 

This film was approached with two major goals in mind, and these goals would shape every Gainax project attempted until it was shuttered. 

One, world building over spectacle.  Two, emphasize realism and philosophy.

You Shall Have No Exposition and You Will Be Happy

One of the biggest traps a novice genre writer can fall into is explaining everything about the wonderful world he has created.  Here’s the 7000-year history of this fantasy world that led to the battle I’m going to start with.  No, my dude, just start with the battle, because no one is going to care why it got started if it’s exciting enough.

But Gainax did an amazing job of not explaining anything.  You are just thrown into the middle of this world that is frequently described as alternate history, however, the single look at the planet you get at the end doesn’t look like planet Earth.  It’s not explained.   As I said, nothing is explained.

The story takes place on a planet with humans on it that appears to have a level of technology that lands somewhere in the late 1940s era, kinda sorta. There are two rival powers: the Kingdom of Honneaimse and The Republic. Jets fighters are clearly first or at most second generation, and they are only used by the Honneaimse navy. The Army Air Corps uses prop fighters that are more advanced than the ones used in WWII. I can think of a few reasons to do it that way, but again, nothing is explained. 

The clothing is a mix of Meso-American color patterns on Chinese jackets worn with kilts. The architectural style is just as mixed. The musical instruments are a hodgepodge of designs that could probably work but are not easily identifiable as coming from anywhere. There is no one thing you can look at and say, “This has an identifiable origin on Earth.”

So that is the setting, so what is the plot?

The question of the story is, can Shirotsugh Lhadatt, despite technological limitations, political infighting, and foreign aggression, become the first man in space?

Not much of a plot, I admit, but the A-story isn’t the real story of this movie; that’s just something that happens in the background that moves things along. The real story is following Shiro’s personal moral and philosophical journey. Since this is a Japanese story, there is no directed antagonism at Shiro, his character development is the point and purpose of the story.

The opening scene is an entirely white shot that pans down to see a tiny figure struggling through the snow. It’s Shiro, he tells us just enough about his background to get to know one of his big dreams, which was to be a naval aviator because only the Navy flew jets. 

 He was fascinated by flight, but then tells the audience that his grades weren’t good enough, so he ended up in the Royal Space Force. 

Just the first few scenes demonstrated the ambition of this film’s scope. The detail for this 1980s hand-drawn film was insane. Every minute detail was lovingly rendered and then just left in the background.  The art design was also impressive; the director, Hiroyuki Yamaga, was using lighting techniques that are nearly impossible to create without computer animation (which wasn’t up to the job in 1986).

After the credits, the film begins at a funeral, but we never find out for whom; they didn’t give that character a name, not because he wasn’t important, but because he had to be nameless.

Shiro is frequently described as disengaged and lethargic at first.  While this is true, English-speaking critics are missing the real point. Shiro and, for that matter, the rest of the Royal Space Force (it’s really an undermanned squadron) are coded as NEETs (Not in Employment, Education, or Training), and they are despised in Japanese society. For Shiro and his friends, the Space Force is nothing more than a welfare check.  They are a bad joke and they know it. They are just a pool of human guinea pigs, and one of them occasionally gets picked to do something that might get him killed. Shiro didn’t bother to wear his dress uniform to the funeral. 

After the funeral we see them hitting the town, getting drunk, trying to pick up girls and generally being machines for turning food into shit. Their characters get established, and we find out a little more about them. They do have comparatively high ranks. The lowest rank is a major, Shiro himself is a Lt.Col, but their ranks are a joke.  If anyone ever saluted an officer in the Royal Space Force, the light was bad. 

While stumbling around drunk in a gorgeously detailed red light district, Shiro runs into a girl handing out religious tracts, bewailing the sins of this world. This is Riquinni Nonderaiko.

One of the original names for this project was The Wings of Riquinni. She is that pivotal to Shiro’s story.  She is a tragic figure for whom things keep getting worse. She has no narcissistic traits at all.  Everyone has a few; it keeps them from becoming life’s perfect doormat, but that is  Riquinni in a nutshell. It wouldn’t be that hard for her to improve her lot a little, but she just won’t. She’s kind of like Bartleby the Scrivener, she would prefer not to.  

One of the few places Gainax had to exposit was her religion, which appears to be the dominant one in her world.  It’s even more dour than Calvinism. In the beginning, a disinterested god creates the world in fire but seems to care little for it. A man named Dao steals fire from heaven, but the god curses the fire that Dao stole.  Dao and his sons will gain no good from this knowledge.  All of Dao and his descendants are now cursed by Dao’s sin so long as they live on the Earth.

You can see that this is a combination of Prometheus and the Original Sin of Adam and Eve. Except there has been no Redeemer, nor is one foretold in prophecy.  Man is simply damned from the start.

Shiro wasn’t sure why he did it, but he went to Riquinni’s prayer meeting.  She was a little shocked since no one had done that before. They have lunch.

Shiro is interested in her romantically, but she doesn’t seem to view him that way. When he tells her what his job is (or at least supposed to be), she is overjoyed. A man who leaves Earth will be the first one to escape the Damnation of Dao.

Shiro, for his part, finds her enthusiasm infectious.  When he returns to his command, he is now conforming to the traits of the Japanese trope of Top Student. He is now a believer in their purpose, although he’s still the only one. To the horror of his comrades, he bravely volunteers to become the first man to go into space. 

Shiro takes his astronaut training quite seriously at first, and the rest of the Space Force catches his enthusiasm for the project.  They even get into a bar fight with the actual military when the Air Corps makes fun of the Space Force uniform. It’s a time-honored team-building exercise.  

One of the few places Gainax put in exposition is when explaining orbital mechanics.  If you have a kid who asks, show them that scene.

The Space Force starts working with the Honneaimse rocket scientists, who are mostly very old and half senile, except for Doctor Gnomm. He’s the head of the program and is a sort of combination of Robert Goddard, Sergei Korolev, and Professor Challenger. 

Dr. Gnomm is depicted as eccentric, brilliant, and deeply committed to the space program, often clashing with military officials who don’t share his scientific vision. His character reflects the most idealistic aspects of the program. He quickly establishes himself as the Space Force’s sempai. 

This covers the first act of Shiro’s story.  The next part will cover his road of trials as he loses his idealism. 

End of Part I