Macross Frontier

It has been two weeks since I finished all episodes of Macross Frontier (MF), yet it was not until today when I actively sought the time to write about it. To be honest, I would rather not have chosen it to be the first anime commented on in my blog, but it is the only one I’ve finished so far this year (out of the 9 I planned to watch). Furthermore, if there’s anything I am dying to write about right now, it is the stuff that would make me feel more positive. Anyone who’s been reading my posts since the previous two months will notice that I have recently been critical of too many things, and I desperately need a change of tone, because I hate being the poster-boy for premature crankiness. Unfortunately, my crankiness goes on today, because I’m having a very uneventful year, and I don’t have anything else to update my blog with besides my thoughts on MF, which will no doubt be full of rants.

I’m quite aware that Macross has a huge fan base, and that they’ve been gushing about MF as being a great tribute of the series’ 25-year run. I haven’t seen the earlier Macross, though, so all the tributes are lost to me. And if any of the huge fan base should start calling me names for not liking MF, please note that I take no pleasure in disparaging it. I was hoping that I’d like MF enough that it would get me interested to seek out the older Macross. Sadly, that did not work out too well, because after viewing it, I not only disliked it, I also started doubting I’d like the older titles too.

The one thing that I did like was the production. The show was unmistakably high-budgeted, and looked great most of the time. There were occasions when the characters looked inconsistent, but they‘re not too noticeable or distracting. The Variable Fighters (i.e. fighter planes that transformed to robots; essentially the hallmark of Macross series) looked great and it’s a joy to see them in action. They almost made me want to buy their miniature toys — my overall sentiments with MF were my only causes of hesitation.

Starting of with its list of duds (which is long) is the characters. It’s one of the show’s biggest failings to have myriads characters but develop only a very select few, and those few weren’t likable beyond their fan service appeals (because they were designed to be good-looking). I’ll say this with some caution: MF is a love-triangle story of a guy and two girls. Respectively, Alto Saotome is a pilot-in-training, Ranka Lee is a waitress aspiring to be a songstress, and Sheryl Nome is the most popular songstress of the galaxy (yep, like many sci-fis, the Macross stories spans multiple planets). Their lives intertwined in a soap-operatic way, which annoyed me to no end, because Alto was unbearable to the point that I often wondered what it was the two girls saw of him. Put simply, I just don’t understand what the deal is with all these Asian shows making the ungrateful, ungentlemanly self-absorbed pretty boys the protagonist, like they’re requiring us to sympathize with people who couldn’t even bother to respond to other’s kindness. Alto, somehow, managed suck more than the jerks I see in other shows (anime or not) by being extremely boring whenever he’s not yelling at either of the girls (and he did that a lot). It’s like he only knew of 1 way to respond to flirtations, and that’s with an outbursts of “Shut up, I….” which would then be interrupted by plot contrivances like explosions or the appearances of side characters. I also didn’t even get why he antagonized his family so much. Compounding to my aversion of obnoxious anime pretty boys is the side character Michel, who thinks he’s God’s gift to women, and always spouts things that make me want to punch him in the face.

If the protagonists were bad, the antagonists weren’t any better. Their motivations were flimsy at best; they never rise above tripes like “ruling of galaxy” for the “evolution of mankind”, which has gotten old since Evangelion. They could’ve been portrayed as people deserving sympathy despite being at odds with the good side, but MF is content to merely cast shadows on them while they glare, pump their glasses, and laugh like a maniac, because there’s nothing that says “evil” more than following those archetypes.

And then there’s the plot, which I think is the most haphazard I’ve seen in any shows. A while ago, I said I was “cautiously” claiming MF to be a love story. That’s because classifying MF as romance is to cover how it raised other themes but couldn’t decide what story it wanted to be. Sometimes it would be about war and geopolitics, but their severity always get downplayed by ridiculous scene transitions. My favorite example occured in the 19th episode: we see a sniper aiming his rifle at the president. Before scenes of JFK assassinations could even resonate, the show shifted focus to Ranka running to confess her love to Alto, only to catch him hugging Sheryl. I didn’t even know how the writers want me to take this scene; sure, Ranka had her personal dilemmas, but were they supposed to matter? There’s a presidential assassination going on here, folks! Things like that happen in the story all the time it was reading tabloids that footnoted reports of war, but headlined celebrity scandals.

I was told that the Macross titles could essentially be summarized this way: there’s a colony, and in the colony there were pilots who flew variable fighters as defender from invading forces, and songstresses who performed to keep everyone’s hopes alive. And the latter is where I found MF to be the most insufferable, because it’s taken too far. The songstresses here had singing voices that could do amazing Deus Ex Machina things, such as stopping aliens dead on their tracks, transporting an entire colony to another galaxy, healing the diseased, saving the world, etc. It’s corny beyond imagining! I also hate to slight the composer Yoko Kanno, but the songs used here were quite ill-fitting. In the fight scenes, I was supposed to feel the horrors of war, and yet how could I, when someone was singing bubblegum pop songs in the background? Plus, there were scenes when it made sense that the songs would only be in vocals, but the background instruments would come anyway, because MF never wanted its viewers to forget that the songs were all recorded in a studio and heavily computerized. As a result, the songs here felt like overproduced fluff that dragged on for too long.

Which, really, sums up my overall feeling of the show. Beyond the production values, I couldn’t see it as anything else but a glorified 25-episoded MTV with the most superficial guises of having a story.