New Macross Animation Announced, to be animated by Sunrise

[Big s]

5 hours ago, Duke Togo said:

I'd be quite happy if what came next deviates from what we've seen recently from Macross. Not looking to cause trouble with those who like Delta, but it just wasn't for me. I'd prefer something more traditional out of this next show. Even if that means Kawamori isn't involved.

So, a sequel to Macross 2……

[CaptRico]

On 6/4/2023 at 7:47 AM, BlueMax said:

Cautiously optimistic. Since it is Sunrise, hopefully there will be a refocus back to the Mecha. Mecha has played a distant 3rd fiddle to the idols and love triangles long enough.

Shoji Kawamori for the VFs and Kazutaka Miyatake for non VFs. Yoko Kanno for music. Kawamori should take a break from directing. 

Main concern is the possible “Gundamification” of the VFs though.

"Gundamification" of VFs? I say bring it on. It can be the ultimate Crossover, with the both themes of Man Vs. Machine and the Love Triangle and Culture being merged. It be both interesting and new to me.

[CaptRico]

After seeing Bernard-Chan's "Macross S" concept art for his own Valkyrie designs, I would just love to see a Macross series/OVA that focuses on Man Vs. Machine, like Gundam does - maybe have "different factions" with different Valkyries representing those factions, like seen in Bernard-Chan's work on ArtStation: https://www.artstation.com/uzuki

[Raikkonen]

5 hours ago, CaptRico said:

After seeing Bernard-Chan's "Macross S" concept art for his own Valkyrie designs, I would just love to see a Macross series/OVA that focuses on Man Vs. Machine, like Gundam does - maybe have "different factions" with different Valkyries representing those factions, like seen in Bernard-Chan's work on ArtStation: https://www.artstation.com/uzuki

Obsoletely gorgeous image. Wish there was a clean one... 

 

[Raikkonen]

6 hours ago, CaptRico said:

"Gundamification" of VFs? I say bring it on. It can be the ultimate Crossover, with the both themes of Man Vs. Machine and the Love Triangle and Culture being merged. It be both interesting and new to me.

For me...

More of this 'Man Vs. Machine'

Less to none of this 'Love Triangle'

[twich]

2 hours ago, Raikkonen said:

For me...

More of this 'Man Vs. Machine'

Less to none of this 'Love Triangle'

As others have said, no Love Triangle, it isn’t Macross.

Twich

[Seto Kaiba]

9 hours ago, CaptRico said:

"Gundamification" of VFs? I say bring it on. It can be the ultimate Crossover, with the both themes of Man Vs. Machine and the Love Triangle and Culture being merged. It be both interesting and new to me.

I wouldn't hold my breath for that.

Bandai Namco Filmworks/Sunrise may be handling production of the animation, but it's a relatively safe bet the series concept and direction will come from Kawamori and that its mechanical design works will come from The Usual Suspects (Kawamori, Ishigaki, Hidetaka).

 

3 hours ago, Raikkonen said:

More of this 'Man Vs. Machine'

Less to none of this 'Love Triangle'

"I want Macross, but without the things that make it Macross" will never not be the weirdest hot take from old fans.

Macross has always been a love story first, and a war story second.  If you ask Kawamori, the war story has never been more than a backdrop for the love story from the original series onward.

[azrael]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

"I want Macross, but without the things that make it Macross" will never not be the weirdest hot take from old fans.

"I want Macross but without all the Macross-y stuff"
"So you want Gundam?"
"No. I want Macross. But without the stuff that makes it Macross."
"So you want Gundam?"
....

🤦‍♂️ Every time we get a new Macross, this exact conversation comes up. Every. Damn. Time.

[Raikkonen]

3 hours ago, twich said:

As others have said, no Love Triangle, it isn’t Macross.

Twich

But was there one in Zero?

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Macross has always been a love story first, and a war story second.  If you ask Kawamori, the war story has never been more than a backdrop for the love story from the original series onward.

I know. I'm just weighing in on the absolutely long shot as Sunrise might surprise us. 

30 minutes ago, azrael said:

"I want Macross but without all the Macross-y stuff"
"So you want Gundam?"
"No. I want Macross. But without the stuff that makes it Macross."
"So you want Gundam?"
....

🤦‍♂️ Every time we get a new Macross, this exact conversation comes up. Every. Damn. Time.

We just want transformable planes that pew pew giant alien walker pods. 🤣😅

Edited July 17, 2023 by Raikkonen

[azrael]

8 minutes ago, Raikkonen said:

We just want transformable planes that pew pew giant alien walker pods.

So you want Robotech? HEY EVERYONE!  ☝️ HE WANTS ROBOTECH! ☝️

🏃‍♂️💨 *quickly runs away*

[Raikkonen]

6 minutes ago, azrael said:

So you want Robotech? HEY EVERYONE!  ☝️ HE WANTS ROBOTECH! ☝️

🏃‍♂️💨 *quickly runs away*

No, no, no, no. I still want my uncensored shower scene and alcoholic sempai.

*Now, I too quickly run away*

[TG Remix]

1 hour ago, azrael said:

"I want Macross but without all the Macross-y stuff"
"So you want Gundam?"
"No. I want Macross. But without the stuff that makes it Macross."
"So you want Gundam?"
....

 

Soooo what does this say about Macross VF-X2? 🤣 

 

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

6 hours ago, Raikkonen said:

More of this 'Man Vs. Machine'

Less to none of this 'Love Triangle'

"I want Macross, but without the things that make it Macross" will never not be the weirdest hot take from old fans.

Macross has always been a love story first, and a war story second.  If you ask Kawamori, the war story has never been more than a backdrop for the love story from the original series onward.

iirc Delta wasn't even supposed to have its love triangle, and as someone who does like it, it does feel a bit more phoned in compared to Frontier's before it. It didn't get me as upset as repeating it in the last 9 episodes of SDF though. 😅

 

I do think if not a love triangle then love in general should be the common theme for Macross. It was the thing that opened the eyes of the Zentradi, twistedly the reason why Sharon went mad, Basara and Sheryl love singing and makes it their life mission, etc.

 

53 minutes ago, Raikkonen said:

We just want transformable planes that pew pew giant alien walker pods. 🤣😅

Honestly, after Delta gave me a taste of Regults again I also share the same sentiment whether they're on the good or bad side. Something has to give about the Variable/Neo Glaug being left in the dust!

Edited July 17, 2023 by TG Remix

[JB0]

1 hour ago, azrael said:

"I want Macross but without all the Macross-y stuff"
"So you want Gundam?"
"No. I want Macross. But without the stuff that makes it Macross."
"So you want Gundam?"
....

🤦‍♂️ Every time we get a new Macross, this exact conversation comes up. Every. Damn. Time.

We don't want Gundam. We need transforming jets.

We want ZETA GUNDAM. Huge difference.

[azrael]

1 hour ago, JB0 said:

We want ZETA GUNDAM. Huge difference.

"So you want Gundam?" 😁😝

[Master Dex]

4 hours ago, Raikkonen said:

But was there one in Zero?

Yes. With Sara, Shin, and Mao. They did underplay the Mao leg though. She was more into Shin then he really acknowledged her in that way. Sara was about as obvious the answer as Freyja was in Delta. 

Edited July 17, 2023 by Master Dex

[Seto Kaiba]

5 hours ago, Raikkonen said:

But was there one in Zero?

Sara, Shin, and Mao.

It's even diagrammed on the Macross Chronicle character sheets.

 

 

4 hours ago, Raikkonen said:

No, no, no, no. I still want my uncensored shower scene and alcoholic sempai.

*Now, I too quickly run away*

So... how much of a head start are we supposed to give before we hunt the heretics for sport? 😛 

 

 

4 hours ago, TG Remix said:

Soooo what does this say about Macross VF-X2? 🤣 

It's Suzie-Aegis-Aegis's VF-19 isn't it?

 

 

4 hours ago, JB0 said:

We don't want Gundam. We need transforming jets.

We want ZETA GUNDAM. Huge difference.

A difference as big as Camille being a boy's name too!  

[Master Dex]

7 hours ago, azrael said:

"I want Macross but without all the Macross-y stuff"
"So you want Gundam?"
"No. I want Macross. But without the stuff that makes it Macross."
"So you want Gundam?"
....

🤦‍♂️ Every time we get a new Macross, this exact conversation comes up. Every. Damn. Time.

"Those damn Macross fans, they are ruining Macross!"

[twich]

8 hours ago, Raikkonen said:

But was there one in Zero?

I know. I'm just weighing in on the absolutely long shot as Sunrise might surprise us. 

We just want transformable planes that pew pew giant alien walker pods. 🤣😅

Yup!, Shin, Mao, Sara

Twich

[Radd]

My wishlist for a new Macross, in no particular order:

• Characters I will absolutely fall in love with by the end of the series.
• Unique looking variable fighters that will be instantly recognizable.
• Either a unique and interesting art style, or just bring back Mikimoto because that man can do no wrong.
• Some new ship designs to fall in love with that aren't trying too hard to just be the old designs warmed over.
• Music that will remain in my playlist for the next 30+ years.
• I'm not holding my breath for 2D mecha animation, but I'd certainly love to see it.

Delta didn't do it for me. The characters, music, mecha, the art style, the ships...none of it really clicked with me. So I'm hoping this new show will give me something to get excited about. I'm not one of those "SDF or bust" types. I love Macross 7 and Frontier. Plus is a classic, and I enjoyed Zero. One thing I love about Macross is that it rarely just tries to repackage old ideas. 

 

[no3Ljm]

I wish after this new animation, Sunrise will explore other side stories. Would love to see an OAV based on Macross R.

[kalvasflam]

ikenai borderline could possibly stay on the playlist, right?  it wasn't that bad.

 

 

[Seto Kaiba]

19 minutes ago, kalvasflam said:

ikenai borderline could possibly stay on the playlist, right?  it wasn't that bad.

It's staying on mine, sure as sure... but the May'n and Megumi cover, not the Walkure original version.  It really is kinda sad that Frontier's singers do a better job with Delta's music than Delta's singers do.

[kalvasflam]

Really? May'n and Megumi did Ikenai borderline?  Wow, never new that...

yeah, I agree.  Frontier signers were just much better whenever you compare them, and May'n seem to be getting better with age.

[Seto Kaiba]

4 minutes ago, kalvasflam said:

Really? May'n and Megumi did Ikenai borderline?  Wow, never new that...

yeah, I agree.  Frontier signers were just much better whenever you compare them, and May'n seem to be getting better with age.

Yep... the Macross 40th Anniversary Super Dimension Collaboration Deculture!! Mixture!!!!! album.

May'n and Megumi cover five Walkure songs, and Walkure covers five May'n or Megumi songs.  Walkure did an OK job with Lion, Northern Cross, After School Overflow, Universal Bunny, and The Wings of Goodbye.  May'n and Megumi absolutely crushed it with Forbidden Borderline, Our Battlefield, Giraffe Blues, Cosmic Movement, and The Ruin of a Pure Heart.  All seven singers also collaborated on a 40th anniversary cover of DYRL, and there was a special medley track that was different depending on which edition you got.  It's available on streaming music services.

[SebastianP]

Some controversial opinions, in reply to several posts across the last couple of pages (and the last month, so I don't want to bother quoting all of them);

1 - I can't bring myself to watch the original SDF Macross. I watched it as Robotech in the mid 80s, as my second ever anime (though at the time it was just "that cartoon with the actual plot and character death!" which made it stick out like a sore thumb - or maybe a diamond in the bag of coal), and again in the late 1990s when it aired on Scifi and basically reignited my anime fandom. I know I *should*, but the music feels so *wrong*. It's very strange, and I will probably give it a go *sometime*, but it's just hard to let go. (I did watch DYRL though, and it was gorgeous. It's just... not the version of the plot that anything else seems to actually build on,)

2 - Macross Plus might have been better off as the non-Macross movie that Kawamori originally wanted, if I recall correctly. Having seen all of the rest of Macross (even if the original series was in Robotech form) I feel like it's actually Plus which is the outlier that doesn't quite fit, stylistically. It integrates fine plot-wise, but it doesn't *feel* like the rest of Macross.

3 - Technically, Macross 7 is more Macross than any of the other shows or movies, because there more *of* Macross 7 by runtime; and by the time it was finished, it made up roughly *half* of what Macross even was. More, once you add in Encore and Dynamite 7. Saying that Macross 7 does not fit the concept is doing it a great disservice, it more or less codified the concept. All of the other TV shows follow in its footsteps, using elements of the tech, elements of the cosmological worldbuilding, and the whole "let's *properly* weaponize music!" parts. Most of its glaring flaws are in the early parts where they made some really dumb decisions with sound and animation direction - like cutting to the silence of space multiple times in the middle of the songs Fire Bomber were performing and the excessive reuse of certain animation clips in the first episode; and then not having Basara try *anything* except Planet Dance for the next several episodes. There was a whole album worth of Fire Bomber songs already recorded at the start, but only one song gets heard in its entirety (other than the OP and ED songs) for half a dozen episodes IIRC.

4 - Up until the last half of Delta, Zero was the weakest point of the franchise. Sure, spiffy new artstyle, textured 3D variable fighters were an awesome treat; but the plot made little sense, the pacing was weird, and the transition between the last two episodes was weird as heck. Also, the VF-0 looks neat, but makes no sense either design wise (it looks like it came out of the 2030s), or designation-wise (why backtrack to "VF-0"? That was nonsensical, they should have just named it VF-2, but they wouldn't have had the spiffy "Zero" title.) It looks awesome, but I feel there's no substance and barely any relevance to the rest of Macross.

5 - Frontier TV is the best entry into the franchise, because they did basically everything right. Spectacular animation. What little stock footage reuse there was, was difficult to detect as the scenes I *did* detect were reused several episodes apart. The textured VFs looked awesome, and the VF-25 was not just a love-letter to the VF-1 with its similar (if much sleeker) overall configuration, but it also had exactly the right variants and equipment packages to really sell it. The setting hearkened back to both 7 and SDF M with the fleet being harried in space; the tech and worldbuilding obviously built off of 7; and it did the music *right*. As in, perfectly, in all respects. I liked the movies, and they had some even more awesome scenes and redesigns; but the TV-series was all in all the better *Macross*, IMO.

6 - Delta TV was excellent for thirteen episodes and then someone walked off with the script for the rest of it, is what I feel about that whole thing. Maybe it should have ended with Sigur Valens' shields failing and the Windermere leadership taking Hemera's bad breath to the face, though that wouldn't have been very Macross (where the moral is that communication always wins). I did still watch every episode as they came out, but with decreasing urgency. The movies *sort of* fix the problem... but then the second one ends on the biggest downer in the franchise. 

7 - I have to admit, I haven't watched a Sunrise mecha series since Build Fighters Try, though I did see the WFM prologue. I don't know if they're up to the task of making a Macross title worthy of the name, because I have no current data. I will watch it though. It took The Last Jedi to sour me on Star Wars, so unless the new installment is worse than that, I'll be watching it.

 

[kalvasflam]

nice..  I just listened to it, pretty good, remember watching May'n and Walkure do Bokura no Senjo, and Junna and May'n doing Diamond Crevasse. 

At least no Walkure singing my personal favorite: Iteza Gogo Kuji Don't be late

Edited July 30, 2023 by kalvasflam

[Seto Kaiba]

Yeah, both parties did a pretty good job with the covers... but there's no denying that JUNNA's just no substitute for May'n.

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Yeah, both parties did a pretty good job with the covers... but there's no denying that JUNNA's just no substitute for May'n.

That is for sure.  I listen to the Macross F girl covers more than the originals.

[Seto Kaiba]

On 7/29/2023 at 6:23 PM, SebastianP said:

Some controversial opinions, in reply to several posts across the last couple of pages (and the last month, so I don't want to bother quoting all of them);

Not a lot that's controversial there, TBH... at least not to the majority of the Macross fandom.

The one thing I'll say in Zero's defense is that it's really not meant to be watched as a stand-alone title.  It builds on a lot of what Macross 7 did, and it sets up a lot of what went on in Macross Frontier and Macross Delta.  There are some reasonably cogent explanations for the VF-0's designation and anachronistically advanced appearance, but a lot of that is "all in the manual" stuff.  It works much better as a part of the larger whole.

 

 

2 hours ago, Hikaru Ichijo SL said:

That is for sure.  I listen to the Macross F girl covers more than the originals.

They really are just that good.  I imported the album, but was surprised and delighted when my YouTube Music "My Supermix" picked the album up seemingly of its own accord. 

Honestly, I'd love to see a duet version of some of them between May'n/Sheryl and Minori Suzuki/Freyja.

[SebastianP]

3 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Not a lot that's controversial there, TBH... at least not to the majority of the Macross fandom.

My defense of Macross 7 over Macross Plus as defining what Macross really is might ruffle some feathers at least, given what I saw over the last couple of pages. 

Also... Zero not being a stand-alone title is kind of awkward because there's so far between it an the two surrounding titles. I watched it on release, and it really didn't feel like it connected, especially when the last episode felt like "oh, the action scenes got kind of long, and we don't want to cut any of them, so we cut out the beginning instead". 

(I was also watching Sento Yousei Yukikaze at the time, and it had similar problems with figuring out what the story even was. I think both of them suffered from being OVAs with long intervals between episodes; on top of having way too much plot that needed to fit in each episode). 

 

 

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

20 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Not a lot that's controversial there, TBH... at least not to the majority of the Macross fandom.

The one thing I'll say in Zero's defense is that it's really not meant to be watched as a stand-alone title.  It builds on a lot of what Macross 7 did, and it sets up a lot of what went on in Macross Frontier and Macross Delta.  There are some reasonably cogent explanations for the VF-0's designation and anachronistically advanced appearance, but a lot of that is "all in the manual" stuff.  It works much better as a part of the larger whole.

 

 

They really are just that good.  I imported the album, but was surprised and delighted when my YouTube Music "My Supermix" picked the album up seemingly of its own accord. 

Honestly, I'd love to see a duet version of some of them between May'n/Sheryl and Minori Suzuki/Freyja.

I would love to see Sheryl and Reina Prowler.  I am a huge Touyama Nao fan. 

 

[Bolt]

It will be a Macross +Mazinger cross over 

[JB0]

2 hours ago, Bolt said:

It will be a Macross +Mazinger cross over 

I'd watch it.

[Old_Nash_II]

9 hours ago, Bolt said:

It will be a Macross +Mazinger cross over 

We already, almost, it on Macross7^^

(Escape Pods XD)

[Seto Kaiba]

18 hours ago, Bolt said:

It will be a Macross +Mazinger cross over 

But, oddly, not our first flirtation with Mazinger in Macross...

Viz Media's original follow-up to their translated release of Tsuguo Okazuki's official Macross II: Lovers Again manga adaptation has characters from several unrelated anime and manga properties show up as holograms including Dr. Hell, Berg Katse, Char Aznable, and Usagi Tsukino (one of these things is not like the other...).