Original title: Ōritsu Uchūgun: Oneamisu no Tsubasa. Aka: Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise
This gorgeous bit of alternate history science fiction isn’t as well known outside anime fan circles as it deserves to be, due in part to its refusal to conform to anime stereotypes and partly one suspects because it opened just before Katsuhiro Otomo’s far more successful and popular Akira (1988). It’s not without its problems but as an offbeat tale of war and scientific endeavour it’s fascinating and never less than beautifully rendered.
Directed by Hiroyuki Yamaga it charts the story of Shirotsugh Lhadatt, a middle-class young man living in the Kingdom of Honneamise, a world where mid-20th century technology is rife but where the space program never happened and where people still life in abject poverty despite the huge technological strides happening around them. Lhadatt dreamed of flying jet fighters for the navy but his academic failings let him down. Instead he signs up for the much maligned and deeply demoralised Royal Space Force who hope struggle to get unmanned satellites in orbit. Lhadatt meets a religious young woman, Riquinni who suggests that humanity could find peace through space travel. Inspired by her simple naivety Lhadatt volunteers to become the first human in space, a perilous project that initially brings him fame but also brings him to the attention of both radicals opposed to the space program and government assassins that want him dead, the program being little more than an excuse to start a war with the neighbouring Republic. As war breaks out, Lhadatt finally blasts off into an uncertain future.
The Wings of Honneamise lacks the often frantic pace of much science fiction anime which will come as a blessed relief to those who find the manic velocity of much Japanese animation off-putting. It’s more akin to the work of Hayao Miyazaki but even that’s a far from accurate comparison. It’s very much its own thing, a one-off that deserves to be better known that it currently is, despite its flaws.
One of those flaws is a by-product of the refusal to play the standard anime game – the lack of urgency in the storytelling makes the film feel slow and overlong, though one can’t fault Yamaga’s extraordinary attention to detail. The animation is as fluid and thorough as that in Akira (still the gold standard for many when it comes to discussing anime), the alternate world it images as richly textured as anything by Miyazaki and the sheer density of visual information is quite breathtaking.
Chief among its other problems is an unnecessary and still much debated scene in which Lhadatt, consumed by lust, tries to rape Riquinni who fights him off, a dreadful misfire made all the worse by the English dub which had Riquinni put the blame for Lhadatt’s assault on her herself. It also omitted his subsequent musing to his best friend Matti about his actions: “Suppose that life was a story… Have you ever wondered if… if maybe you aren’t a good guy? That you’re one of the bad guys instead?” The sequence is an deeply uncomfortable one and has no real impact in the plot at all. It comes out of the blue and is just as quickly forgotten about. The film would have been better for its removal.
Elsewhere, Yamaga (just 24 years old when the film went into production) and his team get an awful lot right. The slow pace allows him to embellish this world that strange alternate world (though we’re never entirely sure if it’s meant to be set on a Earth-like planet or in a parallel universe – valid claims have been made for both) and to flesh out the characters to a degree still unusual for anime. Visually the film is stunning, from the densely populated cityscapes to the glorious shot of the spacecraft finally taking off as war erupts around it. Lhadatt’s first flight aboard a “borrowed” air force plane may be implausible (he flies it perfectly and with added acrobatic manoeuvres despite having no prior training or experience) but it’s exhilarating and Lhadatt’s wonderment at the freedom of flitting between the clouds is infectious.
There’s some social commentary too – the people of Honneamise don’t care about the space program because they’re desperately poor, starving and homeless. The authorities are so focused on the threat of war that they can’t see the effects the peace is having on their people. The space force, demoralised and unloved, is run by a general so determined to see it (and his own job) survive that he’ll enter into shady deals to ensure the future of the manned space mission, a project opposed by a group of radicals. The government meanwhile are using the project to their own ends and are covertly planning to assassinate Lhadatt, leading to a stunning set-piece in which he and Matti are pursued around the dingier parts of the city by an alarmingly calm old woman determined to kill them, a tour de force sequence that culminates in Lhadatt being hunted by a ravenous street cleaning machine.
The Wings of Honneamise is said to have been the most expensive anime feature made to that date and it’s not hard to see where the money went. The debut feature from anime titans Gainax (they’d made a couple of short films for the annual Japanese National F Convention under the name Daicon), it was and remains a hugely ambitious project but it was beset by marketing problems that saw the desperate investors who were nervous about he apparent lack of merchandising opportunities that would have made them a lot more money than box office receipts would have allowed. A change of title from Royal Space Force to the now more common The Wings of Honneamise and misleading advertising (the trailer seems to be for an entirely different film) didn’t make the film easy to sell and although it was far from a box office flop it did push the newly formed Gainax to the brink of bankruptcy.
If at times The Wings of Honneamise feels overstuffed, with too many ideas fighting for space, then perhaps we can pin that on Gainax’s exuberant determination to make the biggest possible splash with their feature debut. It was an ambitious project that still looks astonishing, and one certainly can’t argue that it’s just another piece of brain dead, action-packed, explosion-fuelled space opera. There are bigger concerns underpinning The Wings of Honneamise – some don’t work but most do and it remains a compelling and thoroughly engrossing film that may not quite scale the dizzy heights of Akira or the Miyazaki canon but which comes very close.
For many years, Gainax have been been talking up a sequel, Aoki Uru/Uriu in Blue. Initial attempts to make the film were scuppered by lack of financing and although the company repeatedly announced it, nothing came of the project and in 2018 it was picked up by the unrelated Gaina company who are aiming to have the film in release by 2022.
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