Macross Δ (Delta) Movie Gekijō no Walkūre (Passionate Walkure)

[Seto Kaiba]

10 hours ago, Valkyrie Driver said:

Just once, I'd like to see a macross production animation director go to the JASDF and ask for a technical consultant. 

8 hours ago, kajnrig said:

...didn't M+ visit the actual Edwards AFB to get reference photos and fly in fighters?

Yeah, and they've paid visits to the JASDF as well as several other fact-finding trips in the past.

[Valkyrie Driver]

I guess they didn't do it for delta. Because the dogfights were boring...

[Sir Galahad®]

I think most of us wants that balance. The TV series did make Walkure really popular. Which I fear they maybe selling the music more than anything as I have noticed a Walkure concert a few weeks after the opening of the movie in 2018.

I'd like to see more battroid battles. Some may say this is because they are in the atmosphere which is why they use the fighter mode often but if we look at M+, it was done nicely.

 

[Zx31]

Macross has never been about the mech combat for me, so while it's always a fun part of the show, not being the focus never bothered me because I feel like it isn't meant to be. I totally get that other people come to it for the mechs, though.

[arbit]

5 hours ago, Zx31 said:

Macross has never been about the mech combat for me, so while it's always a fun part of the show, not being the focus never bothered me because I feel like it isn't meant to be. I totally get that other people come to it for the mechs, though.

That's true. I mean, SDF Macross wasn't a giant robot show. I think we can all agree to that. It was a drama balancing character development and the sci-fi war setting.  

But I have to say that Delta, and Macross 7, do have that giant robot feeling to them, where the valk battles are by the numbers, as you guys have mentioned.

The difference with Delta as a giant robot show, is that the valks are heavily detailed, unlike 7. But the action scenes themselves are still by the numbers.

Kawamori had mentioned that Delta was to be a cross between Plus and 7.  I thought this meant combining drama and kitch.  But it seems he just meant that the valks would be well-designed, not necessarily in a dramatic or sci-fi heavy sense.  

So I dont think it would work for the movie to be so different from the series in that sense. It is what it is.

But I do think that the girl group concept can be executed at a more consistent standard, just as the double divas where executed extraordinarily well in Frontier.

If all of Delta was as consistent as the first two episodes, Delta would have brought the anime world to a stand still (even though dancing valks and magical girls are not exactly my thing.)

Edited October 15, 2017 by arbit

[Chronocidal]

On ‎10‎/‎15‎/‎2017 at 1:15 AM, arbit said:

If all of Delta was as consistent as the first two episodes, Delta would have brought the anime world to a stand still (even though dancing valks and magical girls are not exactly my thing.)

I think that's actually kind of my biggest letdown with the series, honestly.  They made such a big deal in the first couple of episodes about Hayate's skill in battroid mode.... aaaaaaaannnndd then they forgot about the other two modes, and we got enough scissors to put Fiskars out of business. 

There were so many potential ways the entire series could have gone that would have been so much more interesting than where it actually went.

[Graham]

And then from episodes 14 to 24 they completely forgot they had mecha.

[seti88]

c'mon armored 31 valk! *rolls dice*

[arbit]

4 hours ago, Graham said:

And then from episodes 14 to 24 they completely forgot they had mecha.

Someone by the name of Jenius also kind of disappeared...

I am getting old and all, but did they forget the story lines of most of the main characters?

Something to look forward to in the movie.

[Seto Kaiba]

16 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

I think that's actually kind of my biggest letdown with the series, honestly.  They made such a big deal in the first couple of episodes about Hayate's skill in battroid mode.... aaaaaaaannnndd then they forgot about the other two modes, and we got enough scissors to put Fiskars out of business. 

IMO, that's more a symptom of the show's biggest letdown.

Macross Delta had serious potential that the writers completely squandered.  The series had great character and mechanical designs, an interesting and well-developed setting, great music, and the main cast was engaging and immediately likeable.  All the individual pieces were as good as what the Macross Frontier series had at its start, but the writers just couldn't join up the dots and make the pieces into a cohesive whole.  Hayate wasn't the only one who got cheated out of a payoff on plot threads the show abandoned for no reason...

 

16 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

There were so many potential ways the entire series could have gone that would have been so much more interesting than where it actually went.

It would've been a much better show if they'd actually come up with an original plot in the second half instead of blatantly trying to crib Macross Frontier's.  

 

4 hours ago, Graham said:

And then from episodes 14 to 24 they completely forgot they had mecha.

From episodes 3-26 they forgot they were supposed to be developing the supporting cast as well... it's a bad sign when your show centers on an idol group and only two of the five members got any actual characterization.

[azrael]

I expect which ever characters got marginalized in the TV series to get further marginalized in the movie. Two hours just isn't enough to devote to minor characters.

[Valkyrie Driver]

With so much pessimism, what hope is there for the movie, and the new series...

[arbit]

18 minutes ago, Valkyrie Driver said:

With so much pessimism, what hope is there for the movie, and the new series...

Hope burns eternally into the future.

[azrael]

New series = new writers. I. Hope.

The movie, which sounds like a rehash, feels like a cop out to all the problems I had with the show, namely the story and characters. Music was apparently a hit (I found it OK). Mecha...I guess was OK. But Delta lacked a good story and characters to drive the story.

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Valkyrie Driver said:

With so much pessimism, [...]

Realism.  Calling a spade a spade is not pessimism.

 

1 hour ago, Valkyrie Driver said:

[...] what hope is there for the movie, and the new series...

For the movie?  Very little.  A reduced runtime is not at all likely to be conducive to solving the many problems the Macross Delta story had in its TV series format.  It's likely to exacerbate some of them, particularly the lack of character development across the vast majority of its cast.

For the new series?  Bare minimum we're probably looking at a major shakeup of the staff, which is likely to include different writers.  That alone makes improvement highly probable.

[kajnrig]

6 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Realism.  Calling a spade a spade is not pessimism.

"Do you think we'll really find airbenders?"
"Do you want me to be like you, or totally honest?"
"Are you saying I'm a liar?"
"I'm saying you're an optimist. Same thing, basically."

[Sildani]

On 10/17/2017 at 11:57 AM, Valkyrie Driver said:

With so much pessimism, what hope is there for the movie, and the new series...

Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment. 

[Mommar]

1 hour ago, Sildani said:

Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment. 

No, expectation is.  I hope the movie is good, I expect it will not.

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, Sildani said:

Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment. 

2 hours ago, Mommar said:

No, expectation is.  I hope the movie is good, I expect it will not.

Hope leads to belief, belief leads to expectation, expectation leads to disappointment.

The flipside of platitudes like "pressure makes diamonds" is the less-selective reality that pressure much more commonly just makes garbage more compact.

There's a very small outside chance that compacting twenty-six episodes of Macross Delta into a two-hour feature film will induce improvement... but that's all.  Better to invest our hopes in the series to follow, which will almost certainly be operating with a substantially different staff and concept.  

[arbit]

8 hours ago, Sildani said:

Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment. 

Disappointment leads to fear, fear leads to anger...

[no3Ljm]

23 minutes ago, arbit said:

Disappointment leads to fear, fear leads to anger...

"...anger leads to hate, hate leads to... suffering."

 

 

[Mommar]

Faith leads to belief, not hope.  I have no faith they'll fix it.

[SMS007]

What are the realistic odds that the Windermereans will actually get their comeuppance in Gekijō no Walküre versus the writers letting them get away with everything as in the TV anime?

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, SMS007 said:

What are the realistic odds that the Windermereans will actually get their comeuppance in Gekijō no Walküre versus the writers letting them get away with everything as in the TV anime?

Considering the compressed format, unlikely but not completely out of the question... it'd be a neater conclusion to the story if the Kingdom of the Wind's forces got their comeuppance instead of engaging in a brief bout of fratricide and then going home.

[Marzan]

5 hours ago, SMS007 said:

What are the realistic odds that the Windermereans will actually get their comeuppance in Gekijō no Walküre versus the writers letting them get away with everything as in the TV anime?

I would bet against it. First of all there's a tendency in anime for obnoxious characters to never really get their comeuppance. For some weird reason they're celebrated nowadays. I miss the days of the Bright Slap.

Secondly (and a bit more seriously), antagonists in Macross rarely are beaten in a conventional sense. They get co-opted, turned and if they're killed, it's mostly with love (or more appropiately song).

I'll be content if they limit the amount of times they say the word "wind" to less than 60. I hope that's not too much to ask.

[Sildani]

Limit the usage of “rune” to 100 times. 

[Seto Kaiba]

23 hours ago, Marzan said:

I'll be content if they limit the amount of times they say the word "wind" to less than 60. I hope that's not too much to ask.

1 minute ago, Sildani said:

Limit the usage of “rune” to 100 times. 

Y'know what, I'm now going to bet that the Windermerean dialog is all rendered in Pokemon-speak, with them saying nothing but "wind" and "rune".  

Edited November 1, 2017 by Seto Kaiba

[SMS007]

On 10/31/2017 at 4:18 PM, Marzan said:

I would bet against it. First of all there's a tendency in anime for obnoxious characters to never really get their comeuppance. For some weird reason they're celebrated nowadays. I miss the days of the Bright Slap.

When you say obnoxious, do you mean that both Japanese and international audiences as a whole are in agreement on this? I'd be happy to know that Japan as an aggregate shares our view of Bogue, but you can't always assume when to comes to Japan. After all, TVTropes has a whole page devoted to cross-region audience dissonance on characters.

Edited November 9, 2017 by SMS007

[Seto Kaiba]

8 hours ago, SMS007 said:

When you say obnoxious, do you mean that both Japanese and international audiences as a whole are in agreement on this?

Fairly certain there's no consensus between East and West on the level of obnoxiousness exhibited by the Aerial Knights... but the point may stand anyway, on the grounds that characters with those particular traits that western audiences find annoying do seldom get their comeuppance due to the Japanese audience feeling sorry for them.

Spoiler

Almost every popular series to make it to the west suffers from some degree of cultural values dissonance.

For example, Neon Genesis Evangelion's Shinji Ikari is an extremely polarizing character if you compare Japanese and American impressions.  In Japan, his passivity, aversion to conflict, his tendency to run away from his problems, etc. make him a sympathetic character.  A different perception of those same traits holds in the west, where he's seen as something of a coward, whiny crybaby, and extreme doormat.

As a result of her tendency to solve all her problems with sorcery of mass destruction, Slayers protagonist Lina Inverse is seen as kind of an amoral heroic comedic sociopath in Japan... but among western fans she's almost the One Sane Man for responding decisively to threats with overwhelming force.

I've seen culturally driven differences of opinion over the girls in Tenchi Muyo!'s metaseries devolve into actual fisticuffs on two separate occasions... and ALWAYS over whether it's the tomboy or the yamato nadeshiko who's better.  To westerners, the yamato nadeshiko (e.g. Ayeka, Kiriko, Yukine) is the plain, boring, uninteresting one.  In Japan, the tomboy (e.g. Ryoko, Amane, Aura) is unattractively crass, rude, and undignified.

 

 

8 hours ago, SMS007 said:

I'd be happy to know that Japan as an aggregate shares our view of Bogue, but you can't always assume when to comes to Japan. After all, TVTropes has a whole page devoted to cross-region audience dissonance on characters.

From what I've read, Bogue seems to have been The Scrappy until the show started hinting he had a thing for Reina Prowler... which the omakes mercilessly took advantage of for comedy's sake and made him a fountain of suspiciously specific denials.  After The Black-Winged White Knight, he's a more sympathetic character in general even among western fans, since it became clear the reason he's such a blood knight circa the events of Macross Delta is because the universe seemingly went WAY out of its way to ruin his life once Windermere went to war with the New UN Gov't in 2060... he's informed that huge swaths of his family perished in the destruction of cities TWICE in that one manga, leaving him as practically the only member of his noble family left.

(But in Japan, a fair number of them seemed to get a pass simply because they're pretty... and all Keith's sins seem to have been forgotten in the wake of all the ho yay from the Keith x Messer and Keith x Roid shippers.)

[Marzan]

On 11/9/2017 at 7:40 AM, SMS007 said:

When you say obnoxious, do you mean that both Japanese and international audiences as a whole are in agreement on this? I'd be happy to know that Japan as an aggregate shares our view of Bogue, but you can't always assume when to comes to Japan. After all, TVTropes has a whole page devoted to cross-region audience dissonance on characters.

I find him obnoxious (and i think by the reaction of most fans here that most western fans would too), but i have no idea what Japanese fans might think of him. But I think Seto's breakdown is probably on the money on him and the Knights.

[kajnrig]

For my part, I just thought he was boring. I thought all of the Aerial Knights were boring. It's hard for anyone to be obnoxious when the only reaction they can muster out of you is utter apathy.

[Valkyrie Driver]

There were two Aerial Knights that weren't obnoxious, Cassim and the other Older guy. 

[SMS007]

3 hours ago, Valkyrie Driver said:

There were two Aerial Knights that weren't obnoxious, Cassim and the other Older guy. 

Ehhhh. I thought Herman deserved comeuppance for constantly talking noble ideals of honor and yet supporting every action of his government the whole time. 

[Sildani]

We all thought Herman was gonna buy the farm in the first few episodes anyway. In the original pilot it seemed he had an entire pineapple grove following him. I was mildly surprised he made it all the way. 

[Seto Kaiba]

10 hours ago, Sildani said:

We all thought Herman was gonna buy the farm in the first few episodes anyway. In the original pilot it seemed he had an entire pineapple grove following him. I was mildly surprised he made it all the way. 

Initially, I was certain Master Hermann Kroos was going to bite it simply because he seemed to be Windermere's own riff on Roy Focker... the beloved mentor figure that even psychotic blood knight Bogue Con-Vaart seemed to respect unconditionally.  After Hermann had survived the season finale of Delta's first season I knew he was going to go all the way.

There was just no way he was going to survive all that and get killed off in some piddling small conflict in the second half.

That said, they clearly weren't above telegraphing imminent character death.  Messer Ihlefeld might as well have been living on an all-pineapple diet, it was painfully obvious he was going to die and die BADLY by the end of episode 3.  Macross is not a series that has ever been kind to characters who insist that violence is the only answer, or those who know it isn't but got it wrong on purpose.  Messer is basically Man-Nora, the ace who lives to fight because a prior traumatic injury took all the joy out of life.

Qasim Eber-hardt was also an incredibly obvious telegraphed death.  Like Hermann, he doesn't appear in ANY of the show's promo material... but he had even less dialog than Hermann did, he was doubled up with Hermann in the status of the team stoic¹, and he was the only one of the lot who wasn't drawn as either a bishounen or a ruggedly handsome older man.  I'm flat amazed they didn't kill him off earlier, but the minute he started talking about his family and his desire to return home, he raised the standard "X days until retirement" death flag and promptly died.

King Grammier was also a cert for getting killed for most of the same reasons as Qasim... he doesn't fit into the standard list of archetypes, he's not in the promotional material, and he's a literally crusty old man.

 

1. Ouran High School Host Club provides, as an invoked trope on numerous occasions, a standard list of what you might call shoujo manga or BL romance character archetypes... albeit played for comedy in that case.  If you look back at Macross Delta with that list in mind it becomes painfully obvious who was going to die in the course of the series AND who the real mastermind of the Aerial Knights was.

Keith Aero Windermere was The Prince, the young man of high social standing who is ruled by his emotions and dogged by a past familial trauma (almost invariably involving being the child of a mistress) and is easily swayed or manipulated by playing on his emotions.  Chancellor Roid Brehm was obviously The Cool character, a wicked cultured master manipulator with ominous glasses who plays the role of the voice of reason and calm foil to The Prince while being the real shot-caller in the Prince's group and secretly rather vindictive.  The twins, Theo and Xao Jussila, are The Twins; the identical twin boys who are so close that they dress and act identically and even finish each other's sentences who appeal to the girls who want to be fought over by two men or prefer two very close men who have "more than just a warm friendship".  Hermann Kroos and Kassim Eber-hardt double up in the role as The Stoic, the older character who keeps his emotions under rigid control, is terrifyingly strong and good in a hand-to-hand fight compared to the other characters, and generally doesn't speak much.  Bogue Con-vaart is The Natural, the new kid who has incredible natural talent and good looks, but who harbors a chip on his shoulder due to a family-related problem that drives him to devote his life to one goal and makes it difficult for him to form relationships, leading him to bond with The Prince over similar traumas.  Prince Heinz Neirich Windermere is the Lol/Shota, the one who looks like (or is) a younger kid and whose innocence and naivete are meant to invoke maternally protective feelings from the female audience.

Pretty obvious, once you look at it, that the redundancy and the one character who doesn't fit (Qasim and Grammier) were going to be the ones to snuff it.