Talk:Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise

Year of Release?
when was this movie made? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.74.220.218 (talk • contribs)

Animerica Sadamoto interview
Sources for character designs if anyone has time: http://eva.onegeek.org/pipermail/oldeva/1999-January/024322.html --Gwern (contribs) 19:19 8 November 2009 (GMT)

Manga Impact
Manga Impact: The World of Japanese Animation, 6 December 2010, ISBN 978-0714857411; pg 143:

Even as a child, Shirotsugu Lhadatt knew what he wanted to do with his life: he wanted to become a pilot. All grown up, he enrolls in the Royal Space force, an organization that is regarded as something of a joke and a waste of money following its lengthy failed efforts to put a man in space. Shirotsugu, lazy and disillusioned with life, wants to be that man. The first feature film produced by Gainax, The Wings of Honneamise could be considered an animation manifesto. The design and style of the backgrounds, the varied tone, and the historical and political implications of the plot were hugely influential on later anime. The realism of the visual description is accompanied at times by surreal touches and a general atmosphere of decadence. The past, as imagined by director Yamaga Hiroyuki, has the features of a near future, a reality where cities have exploded into a jumble of streets and people, and religion coexists with the obsessive presence of the media. Shirotsugu is a perfect representative of this schizophrenic reality: he is not only a young man inspired by a sincere spiritual quest, but also a weak man who drinks and chases women. In short, he is a son of the twentieth century, with all its paradoxes. Like its protagonist, Wings of Honneamise is an unbalanced yet original film, engaging and sincere. It is the result of an experiment led by Yamaga, and developed by a pool of leading artists, most notably Anno Hideaki as animator, Sadamoto Yoshiyuki as character designer, Sakamoto Ryuichi as soundtrack writer and Itano Ichiro and Maeda Mahiro as animators. C.C. [Carlo Chatrian]

pg 206;

In 1987, noted pianist Sakamoto Ryuichi, following a series of prestigious partnerships with artists and performers such as David Sylvian, David Byrne, Nam June Paik and Iggy Pop, wrote the original music for two films: Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor and The Wings of Honneamise by Yamaga Hiroyuki. For the first of these, he won an Academy Award, paving the way for mainstream recognition of his film music, while the second failed to live up to box-office expectations. The lack of popular response to the complex Wings of Honneamise perhaps goes some way towards explaining why it continues to remain the celebrated Japanese composer's sole contact with animation thus far; his refined and elusive scores are a poor match for the commercial soul of the animated film. Nonetheless, Sakamoto's syncretism and eclectic style have made him an enormously successful composer for film and the score he wrote for Honneamise (along with Nomi Yuji and Ueno Koji) is an excellent example of his work. Mixing very different sounds and melodies (accentuating Oriental tradition with electronic material), Sakamoto creates a sonic world that echoes the visual universe imagined by Yamaga: Oriental in character, but clearly influenced by the Soviet Union an the USA. If the film is conceived as a sort of farewell to the Cold War, the music underlines its melancholy tone and the existential despondency inherent in its leading character, the astronaut Shirotsugu. Developing a limited number of melodic ideas and featuring several superbly-paced episodes, the music occasionally recalls Blade Runner (1982, dir. Ridley Scott), from which Sakamoto quoted passages. The soundtrack is a fascinating one-off experiment, a creative model in music, which ends up enriching and deepening every shot. C.C. [Carlo Chatrian]

--Gwern (contribs) 19:49 23 December 2011 (GMT)