Originally I didn’t intend to watch this movie, but many people pointed out that Macross – Do you Remember Love (which followed the original Macross series) deserved to be watched. Now that I watched it, I agree that it’s more than just a recap-movie, and actually a bit of an alternative retelling whose story is very similar to the original.
My big issue with recap movies is when the creators do nothing but copy and paste frames or storylines directly without any form of editing. Thankfully, this is not the case for Do You Remember Love: the creators made conscious decisions of what storylines to focus on, they actually improved the storyline to get rid of some of the plotholes of the original series, and the entire animation is redone. And how! This is 1984 we’re talking about, and the animation looks its time far ahead. This movie, along with Nausicaa is responsible for introducing anime to the big budget era, showing the amazing things that you can do with it. During its time, I’m sure that it revolutionized the animation industry. Even today, it’s still a beautiful movie, and a great recommendation for those who want to get into the look of the eighties and have only watched shows from the past decade. But how does the rest of the movie hold up?
In the end, however, I like Do You Remember Love less than the original TV-series, simply due to the inevitable: the characters and storyline have far less depth, and the storyline just isn’t paced well enough for a movie. Of course a lot of time is spent on the invasion of the Zentradi and their giant cactus that forms a threat to earth, but the main focus, especially in the second half, turns out to be the romance, and the love triangle between the three lead characters. Hikaru and Misa are fine, but I really didn’t like what happened to Minmay: her development is cheesy and angsty, wasting lots of precious time, and her romance comes from nowhere, and feels rather forced and unbelievable.
And, while the new storyline does fill in a few plotholes from the original TV-series, it also creates a lot of new ones. Why did Misa know the Zentradi language? Where did the ancient cities come from? How much of the movie actually happened in canon with the tv-series, and where did Minmay’s brother suddenly bugger off to? Seriously, for such a seemingly important character in the first half he completely vanishes without any explanation whatsoever during the second half. But yeah, those are minor issues. My biggest issue with the restructured plot is that it completely lacks depth as a standalone movie: you NEED to have seen the TV-series in order to fully understand its context, and the very few extra bits of depth it offers just don’t make any impact.
Nevertheless, whenever Minmay starts singing, you really forget about all these flaws. I’ve seen Macross being described as a music video, and after watching this movie I can understand: the singing scenes are without a doubt the best parts of the movie, where both the music and the animation excel beyond belief. It’s really there where this movie shows its true colours, and it’s somewhat a shame that Minmay doesn’t sing often enough.
To continue the experiment: how about this: a short blurb on each of the categories?
| Storytelling: | 7/10 – Did a nice job of stuffing 26 episodes in only two hours, but didn’t manage to catch the essence of the TV-series. |
| Characters: | 7/10 – Shallow compared to TV-Series |
| Production-Values: | 9/10 – Gorgeous, the best of its time. |
| Setting: | 8/10 – Managed to stay in canon with the TV-series with also adding a bit here and there. |
It was my understanding that that as far as canon, this movie was literally a movie within the fiction of the Macross universe. ie. Characters in the later TV series Macross 7 mention that they’ve seen it.
If anything, I like the layout of your new rating system – the previous one was a bit too underwhelming and small so that I never really bothered to look at it.
I agree with Denizen. I only look at your overall rating because I never know why you give one show a 7 out of 10 and another an 8, etc… This system clearly shows in a few words how a series or a movie measures up in those categories as well as give an explanation of each score.
Ahem and just where did you get this idea on the new rating system? 😛
I am still waiting for your “Monster” review….forever and ever and ever
I’ve heard a lot about how good this movie is. Would you recommend it to someone who hasn’t seen the series it’s based on?
This is a rare movie. I’ve watched it in original Japanese, in English and in Swedish… And out of all, I think I prefer the Swedish dub the most. The actors just had more feeling, oddly enough. Anyway, I love the movie, but mostly for sentimental values, as I watched it the first time like 22 years ago or something. ^^;;
As for your rating system… I agree that the layout of this one is more pleasing on the eyes. ♥
Factory: yeah, why not. The story is a bit hard to understand if you haven’t watched Macross, but that’s not the reason you want to watch this movie anyway. 😉
Yeah, I love the new rating system. It gives quite a bit of insight in short to the series.
As a side note, this movie’s main song “Do You Remember Love?” was I believe the #1 song of the year, or at least hit #1 on the charts, the first anime song to ever do that.
I watched this movie without having any previous Macross experience and still enjoyed it, but you’re right in that there’s not too much depth or novelty involved. I thought it simply worked as a beautiful action movie with some interesting ideas, even if they weren’t fully realized.
Watching the actual series later on gave me a better sense of perspective, of course, but I don’t regret seeing DYRL first.
Hey there,
Good review and insights, I’m a huge fan of this movie that I used to watch on cable TV back in the late 90’s. Years after I obtained a DVD of it. I share your sentiments about some character development being rushed, and yeah it does feel part romance / mecha anime, and part music video with more anime.
Cheers!