Over 30 years later, Macross Plus still flies sky high

As a standout entry in a foundational modern sci-fi anime franchise, 1994’s Macross Plus was not only an exciting return to the series for franchise creator and famed mechanical designer Shōji Kawamori, but also the directorial debut of one Shinichirō Watanabe, known for such anime classics as Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo. There’s a lot of anime history tied up in this series, but for audiences new to Macross, Plus is a great route into Macross as a whole, a slice of what makes the franchise so captivating while carrying its own unique ideas that have remained prescient and timely to this day.

And now, some 30 years after the first episode of the OVA was released, there’s a new Blu-ray home release of the anime, including a hefty (and pricey) “Ultimate Edition,” set to release at the end of this month from Crunchyroll in the U.S. and Anime Limited in the U.K. and Europe — the first home video release of Macross Plus in the West since the early 2000s.

The Macross franchise has been through numerous rights disputes over the past few decades, which has rendered several titles in the series — including the original anime —unavailable to watch in North America. In recent years, a deal with Disney has made most of them, barring the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross and its film remake, The Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love? (I had to say the full title at least once), available on streaming, though not in North America.

By comparison, Macross Plus has been far less elusive; the edited movie version has had numerous theatrical screenings in the U.S. and U.K. over the past few years, making it the most accessible entry in the franchise to date. It’s also arguably the most newcomer-friendly (it’s the one I saw first, at least), an isolated story that begins with hot-blooded test pilot action, grounding its high-flying sci-fi with a love triangle and a rivalry that began in the protagonist’s youth. While Macross Plus has connections with the earlier series, it’s not impenetrable to newcomers. The real emotional arc of the story remains legible, and has a fairly casual relationship with the lore. There are touches that feel familiar, in many ways, to Watanabe’s later work, with some key collaborations beginning with this production here — most prominently composer Yoko Kanno (who composed the score and arranged the AI pop star Sharon Apple tracks) and the late, great screenwriter Keiko Nobumoto (Wolf’s Rain, Tokyo Godfathers), both of whom would go on to later work with Watanabe on Cowboy Bebop.

The story is separated from Super Dimension Fortress Macross by decades, set 30 years after the end of the war depicted in the original anime. It’s set in a time where humanity is flourishing rather than being on the run as in Macross — now running multiple planetary colonies in partnership with their old enemy, the alien species known as the Zentradi. This particular story is on one such colony, the planet Eden.

The film follows a trio of characters: the test pilots Isamu Dyson and Guld Bowman, and the music producer Myung Fang Lone. They all have history with each other, eventually sent their separate ways by an incident that drove a wedge between the three of them, and that emotional baggage drives a lot of the chaos of Plus. Guld is a stoic and sometimes even cruel and duplicitous, Isamu is simply a cocksure dope with a broken heart — it should be noted, one played by Bryan Cranston in the dub, who is wonderfully lackadaisical and self-assured in his delivery (it’s not his first time as an anime test pilot either, following on from his role in Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise). Myung’s dynamic with the two rival pilots is both tender and tense, having been romantically linked with both. Her character is cautious about revisiting the past, but she’s drawn back into their orbit regardless. That turmoil also affects her secret, real job — as the creative basis for the AI pop star Sharon Apple.

The Movie Edition and the OVA more or less tell the same story. Both are worth watching, maybe not back to back, as the Movie Edition is a great streamlining of the 160-minute OVA… though at the expense of some killer “to be continued” stings. The Movie Edition is quicker about introducing the AI pop star subplot, jumping straight into the absurd pageantry of Sharon’s red carpet appearance, before cutting to Guld and a test flight of his mind-controlled jet, the film’s two major reflections on automation placed alongside each other. The OVA begins rather explosively, with a training exercise in an asteroid field that takes a little more time in establishing who Isamu is (great skills, very sure of himself, no respect for authority), before introducing his tense relationship with Guld and Myung. Though this difference might suggest different priorities, both versions begin with the same message: “Dedicated to all pioneers…”

The intertwining of transforming jets and love triangles (or squares) with pop music has always defined the Macross franchise, and the same is true of Macross Plus, though it approaches those hallmarks from a fresh angle through its main antagonist: an AI pop star that goes rogue. Kawamori himself has spoken on the connection between the film’s depiction of AI with the use of AI in the present, in an interview with Vulture from earlier this year (he noted that he’d be OK with it being used for in-betweening, but questions its ability to create feeling).

The artbook included with the Ultimate Edition features a lengthy discussion between Kawamori, Watanabe, and Nobumoto, who unpack the thematic and visual ideas of Plus as well as share some stories from production. The three note that Watanabe was brought on board for his work on Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory — which itself is worth watching for viewers who enjoy Macross Plus, what with the two bearing a resemblance to each other through their shared, Top Gun-flavored test pilot premises.

One of the standout points of Macross Plus is its white-knuckle action — the Movie Edition in particular makes the heart race the moment it takes to the skies, and the new discs are a lovely transfer of these visuals. In one of the interviews included in the artbook, Kawamori, Watanabe, and Ichirō Itano — the pioneer of the famous and widely homaged “Itano Circus” (of which there might be between five and seven in Plus, I lost count) who helped guide the action sequences in Macross Plus as the anime’s special visual effects director — all spoke about how the choreography in Plus was a purposeful shift away from how dogfights had commonly been depicted in anime up until that time, as well as how they highlighted the immense strain of G-force on the pilots’ bodies balanced with the desperate, repeated banking of the fighter planes during a battle.

In a “special video message” included with the release, first filmed for a North American screening, Kawamori briefly touches on the different aspects of preparation for the film, as well as some other hindsights, while seated in front of a life-size replica of one of Macross’ iconic variable fighters. One of the major points Kawamori touches on is the inspiration for the dogfights, which he attributes to his time examining fighter development in the U.S. Some of the experiences he mentions include an air show at the Edwards Air Force Base, a trip to NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center to see a prototype of an F-18, and his time air training with Air Combat USA alongside Itano. If the aforementioned Vulture interview is any indication, he undersells it here. As writer Eric Vilas-Boas recounts in that interview, the story of Itano blacking out during a flight on a fighter jet for research is famous — a story that Itano elaborates on in another interview included the artbook, saying that he experienced “five or six Gs” while in flight and that his body “ached like Son Goku after using the Kaio-ken x10.” Such strain can be felt throughout Plus’ tense aerial duels.

As well as making for some rather wild pre-production stories, these creative decisions to set Macross Plus apart from its forebears apply to the anime at pretty much every level, with Watanabe highlighting his “outsider’s perspective” as being key to his role in the production. The same could be said of Nobumoto’s contributions; in the artbook interview, she calls Macross Plus “the first anime project [she] was fully involved with.” This different perspective on Macross doesn’t just apply to the action in Macross Plus, but to the emotional contours of its story. The previous Macross movie, Do You Remember Love?, though not set in the same continuity as Plus, touches on how the Zentradi had lost touch with their feelings because they stopped creating art. By contrast, Guld, the main Zentradi character who appears in Macross Plus, feels too passionately, accusing his old friend Dyson of being out of control when his own impulses are what nearly get Dyson killed.

Further still, in a franchise where you could apply the term “poptimism” very literally (as Nobumoto says in the interview included in the release, it’s a franchise where a song saves the world), Plus is a chilly twist on the series’ attachment to music. Viewed in 2024, the sight of Sharon Apple almost immediately creating disaster feels right for an age where creative industries are dealing with an onslaught of AI junk. That said, the first appearance of Apple as a blocky, HAL 9000-esque computer server walking the red carpet in a lavish gown with a crowd braying in admiration immediately robs the AI idol of any sort of mystique or wonder — instead carrying a sense of the absurd.

Obviously, the anime isn’t intended as a commentary on AI art as we understand it now, with the AI story for much of Macross Plus feeling like more of a backdrop to the real meat of the narrative: the love triangle between Isamu, Guld, and Myung. But it’s easy to map contemporary fears about AI onto the story that Macross Plus is telling. For instance, this AI doesn’t work autonomously; it relies on Myung to complete it. Even in Macross Plus’ version of the year 2040, there’s no such thing as AI art without human input. Regardless, Sharon Apple is a worldwide hit on the planet Eden, and the fact that machines have dominated the fictional charts feels like an expression of a certain paranoia about the digital age eroding the humanity of art, with people more enamored with the phenomenon rather than authenticity of feeling. Even the test pilots can’t escape it, and not just because Sharon begins pursuing Isamu. His fellow pilots are also under threat of being replaced in favor of an AI piloted Jet, with one reflecting, “Do they think people are unnecessary?” in an amusing overlap with the plot of Top Gun: Maverick.

When Lynn Minnmay, a love interest and pop idol singer in Macross: Do You Remember Love?, sings her song at the end of the film, it feels freeing, euphoric. By contrast, the music of Macross Plus performed by Sharon Apple is shown to have a pacifying effect. People aren’t galvanized into action or into making amends with one another but instead stare in a trance, oblivious to what she’s really doing. It’s also possible to find a tension between the human hand and that of the digital baked into Macross Plus’ production, with Sharon Apple being represented with computer graphics in many of the scenes featuring her, as well as other various graphics. Not to mention that this same thematic thread that would continue in the 2019 anime Carole & Tuesday, on which Watanabe worked as a supervising director alongside director Motonobu Hori, where its eponymous pair of musicians become an outlier by writing their own music rather than letting a machine do it.

There are so many contemporary films and series, so much of the modern day, that you can see reflected in Macross Plus. It doesn’t just hold up today thanks to its impeccable visual and sonic craft, but for its romanticism and its forward-thinking visions of the future, which just so happens to be shaped by transforming robot fighter jets.

The Macross Plus Ultimate Edition will be available to purchase through Crunchyroll in the U.S. and Anime Limited in the U.K. and Europe on Oct. 31.