Forum - View topicREVIEW: Macross 7 Episodes 1–26 Anime Streaming Review
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Cardcaptor Takato
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nyaa
Posts: 160 |
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I'm gonna go ahead and say it-I abhor all Macross except Frontier, + and to a lesser degree Delta. 7 is especially abysmal with the lame Basura shit. Frontier is my runaway favorite series and I really like +, Delta is ok and quite watchable. I got the jpbd sets of both Frontier and Delta and the movies for each series. As for + I vastly favor the individual 4 ova episodes, the movie version is a total hackjob. That about covers it for me.
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braket
Posts: 17 |
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7 is incredible. Basara owns. Anybody who thinks otherwise is trying too hard to act like a child's conception of a caricature of an adult.
The entire series is a sequence of extremely deeply-drawn, sincere jokes. Every single element -- shot blocking, timing, the placement of musical cues in a scene, characters' oblivious refusal to accept what's right in front of them, Fire Bomber's music itself -- is specifically calculated to be the goofiest, most ridiculous thing imaginable, and the joke's on anybody who has pretensions of being a serious person despite going out of their way to watch cartoons. Planet Dance is the funniest song in the entire world. it's the stupidest thing imaginable and it perfectly distills everything about this ridiculous show into being the most insipid thing you could ever hear. It's repeated thirty times in the front half of the show because that's the entire point. The whole reason it's there is for you to laugh at how stupid it is, how much fun everybody is having making this silly cartoon, and how sincerely the show treats its subject matter -- if you aren't laughing and singing along with Planet Dance and Totsugeki Love Heart every single time Basara pulls it out, you've frankly got your head up your ass and need to get over yourself. The moment Basara spoiler[pulls out his gun and shoots someone] in an early episode while gritting his teeth and getting absolutely furious that THE POWER OF SONG wasn't enough, I instinctively muttered to myself "You made me spoiler[shoot my own gun]!" only for Basara to immediately yell spoiler[WHY DID YOU MAKE ME SHOOT DAMN IT] and I just about lost it. That's the wavelength you have to be on to be receptive to this show. In the end, it takes a stronger person to fully accept what Kawamori was going for here and allow him to play with you this way, than it does to sit there like a moody teen complaining about one of the most revered entries in one of the most revered franchises Japan has ever come out with. You have to completely drop your ego barrier and allow yourself to have fun watching a silly cartoon about space vampires being repelled by the power of hot-blooded singing by a lunatic with a terminal case of idiocy. Just wait until you get to the back half where spoiler[the military tries to make their own competing fleet of Fire Bomber knockoffs, and has them sing "Riding In Your Valkyrie" from Macross II.] Not only is that song emblematic of the position that particular show holds in the series' history, but on top of that: it's in Eb. You can't play that on guitar comfortably without either using a capo or tuning down a half step, because otherwise you're having to play it in D while barring the first fret which is extraordinarily unwieldy. It's an artificial contrivance within an artificial contrivance and it's all so, so deeply funny. |
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Shay Guy
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I'm not a fan of telling people that there's something wrong with them for not enjoying an anime you love. |
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braket
Posts: 17 |
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There's a world of difference between reading something correctly and not liking it for what it is, and misreading something and not liking it due to the misread. While not true of everybody, there certainly are people whose dislike of 7 stems from a lack of understanding of what it is, and why it is what it is, compounded by an immature lack of being able to engage with a cartoon show because they think it's not "serious" enough. 7 takes its subject extremely seriously, it's just that its subject is also inherently goofy, though not really any more goofy than any other Macross entry. There's a lot of people (thankfully, not as many as there were back in the day) who get super mad at 7 because it isn't ~dark~ and ~mature~ enough compared to the rest of Macross. These are often the same type of people whose media appreciation begins and ends at "plot" and don't have enough practice watching things for "execution", which is really where critical assessment happens, and is the fundamental matter of concern for anybody engaged with the art and craft of storytelling in any medium. |
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Fluwm
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This review is pretty much spot-on. I can't say that Macross 7 is the *best* Macross series -- I think that title would probably go to either the original series (for it's plot -- such a great riff on War of the Worlds, and that extended denouement in the final arc) or Macross Frontier (for everything else), but it is my favorite Macross series.
There's just something so appealing about how it's structured -- the more laid-back, slice-of-life style really fits. And I really like how the central (military) conflict is pretty low-stakes. There may be less drama, but I think that also corresponds to less melodrama, and not having to worry so much about mortal threats gives the series a lot more leeway to explore the setting, and make it feel like a real place. And I find the whole concept of these giant migratory fleets, slowly plying their way through the galaxy, immensely interesting. But, uh, yeah... it can definitely be a bit too repetitive.
Thanks for posting this -- I wasn't sure if there'd been any news on M7 or Frontier BRDs yet, and those are the ones I'm most looking forward to. And also, maybe, a regular release of Macross Plus. I may be willing to shell out a few hundred dollars for Macross 7, maybe, but that's far, far too much for Macross Plus. Anyway, IIRC, the Japanese BRDs for both Frontier movies, as well as DYRL, had English subtitle tracks. I may be misremembering, however, as it's been several years since I've pulled out those old discs.
I don't think that you necessarily intended to come across this way, but your comments come across as kind of contemptuous. There's not one single piece of media in the world that can only be interpreted the one way: not everyone who likes Macross 7 is going to like it for the same reasons (I, personally, don't see it all as one big joke, and I feel like that's an interpretation based on the same "cartoons are for children and shouldn't be taken as serious storytelling" logic that you're projecting onto those who dislike the series); and, conversely, not everyone is going to dislike Macross 7 for the same reasons. That's the fun thing about media criticism! We're all gonna be watching the same thing, but experiencing it -- and interpreting it -- differently. Those differences are very often valid and worth exploring -- they're not something to dismiss or be disdainful of. If someone doesn't like Macross 7 because they don't like the tone, and prefer the more conventionally dramatic tone of something like Macross Plus, that's a perfectly valid opinion. It absolutely does not mean that they don't "get" or "understand" Macross 7: it only means that it doesn't align with their tastes. |
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braket
Posts: 17 |
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The cool part here is that we're saying the exact same thing! Someone "getting" something and "liking" it are two entirely different things. My stated frustration doesn't come from people not liking something that I like, or that a bunch of other people like. It comes from people not knowing how to read media and still getting mad at something -- doesn't have to be this, it could be anything -- for surface-level reasons, reasons that are actively disproved by either the text or the subtext, because of inadequate media literacy. Like that's fine and everything, and who cares what other people think, absolutely, let other people do their thing, I'm not arguing that; but at the same time it's also very much an unfortunate symptom of enthusiast media that a bunch of people out there just don't have the language to adequately engage with a workpiece because they don't know how to read it across multiple axes. It honestly took me 8 episodes of watching Macross 7 before my "hah, this is kinda weird, I'm not sure I get why certain choices are being made here" opinion gave way to "Oh my god, I understand the wavelength this is operating on now" -- that exact moment being, when Mylene gets mad at Basara for not acting with logic or reason, runs off, and spoiler[bumps into Veffidas, who speaks out loud for the first time in the entire show so far and tells Mylene that Basara isn't ever going to operate under any sort of reason or logic.] Mylene stands there mouth agape for several seconds, as the show holds on that moment, fully and entirely aware that this is probably the first time Mylene spoiler[has ever heard her say a single word as well.] Besides the inversion of the expectations we've built up for the characters at that point, there's the recognition that according to established conventions of storytelling, if we're going to have a spoiler[previously silent character suddenly speak out] it should be for some *important reason*. The fact that instead it's all just to clue Mylene in on the blisteringly obvious from the audience perspective is inherently funny; Mylene's reaction face and the length of time it holds on that moment is inherently funny; the fact that Ray seems just as perplexed as Mylene is inherently funny (because Mylene is explicitly shown to have only been around the group for a relatively short amount of time). That was the exact moment that recontextualized every single other weird choice that the show had made up to that point into being "nobody is taking any of this seriously, at all; but at the same time they're absolutely using formal and classical techniques of filmmaking, deliberate conscious choices in editing and the presentation of both background and foreground material, to impress that it's not ineptitude that's the reason for those baffling choices. Everything is a purposeful and meaningful decision, precisely placed because there is a specific tone they are aiming at, and the humor largely comes from the juxtaposition between the materials and their presentation." When I realized this I actually sat there with the episode paused while I laughed my ass off for the next ten minutes as I remembered every single stupid thing that I had seen in the previous three hours of the show and realized it's all one big long joke, and what makes the joke really funny is: the longer you go on being confused that Basara isn't acting with logic or common sense, the more cathartic it is when you realize that it ultimately doesn't matter at all and that's not the point. What makes it actually funny and not eye-rolling or tedious is that the show doesn't depend on one single expression of this big joke, especially not through dialogue, but underlines it through every single possible element of filmmaking craft to make its point, on top of the dialogue, and that there's always another fun understated joke waiting in the wings. Later in the show Basara's characterization is underlined by the depiction of his earliest moments spoiler[as a young boy, guitar slung around his shoulder, singing at a mountain, trying to get it to move.] There isn't a more obvious way to distill his character. Basara looks like an idiot on the surface, but he's got a dream in his heart and he believes in the fundamental truth of Macross -- a song can save the world: if you have a heart and soul, you can be moved past differences by the power of music -- and has devoted his entire existence to proving that thesis to everybody in the universe, no matter what odds he faces. For him to recognize and believe in that ideal, he necessarily can't hold back in anything he does. No matter what resistance others put up towards him and his methods, he has to keep doing it, because he's utterly convinced in the correctness of his methods, and the show goes out of its way to demonstrate that he actually is correct at the end of the day. (At the very turning point in the final episode spoiler[he screams "I swear I'm going to move it today! The mountain! The galaxy! Listen to my song!"]) The magic of the show comes about when everybody else in his orbit starts slowly coming around to the idea, despite themselves, and the key element of several other characters' arcs is precisely about that transformation. The whole point of the show is "sometimes, there are things you can't take too seriously, and sometimes your mature adult brain is giving you the wrong answers to life's problems, and you'll have to toss out your fear and believe in yourself and other people, even if people call you an idiot for going against the grain" -- which the older someone gets the more they realize that that's actually a much more mature attitude to have about the world. And that's fundamentally the exact same goofy message that embodies all of Macross, so from that perspective, if someone likes Macross for the pewpew robots but gets frustrated when it leans into being a cartoon that actually has something to say, it's worth interrogating whether they actually understand what Macross is really about to begin with. Again, does it matter? Not really I guess! But maybe we'd have a few more interesting stories out there if more people were able to separate "getting" something and "liking" it. I've watched, read, and listened to a bunch of stuff I didn't think I'd "like" because I wanted to expand my understanding of how to "get" things, and I'd like to believe that it's informed my ability to appreciate the things I do like. If nothing else, someone who aspires to be a writer or director needs to be able to deeply read a lot of different things across many different axes for the sake of educating themselves about the craft of storytelling in order to make something worth other people's time, and I'd feel bad if someone didn't give something a shot because they mistakenly thought it was making the decisions they don't like for stupid, inept reasons based off the testimony of people who were misreading it from the beginning. |
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Fluwm
Posts: 1061 |
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What I always think back to is something one of my elementary school teachers -- could've been 3rd to 5th grade, so young, around age 10 -- tried to I press upon us (so I guess she succeeded, in my case at least): the appropriate and correct way to discuss art is to never use objective, declarative statements like, "This is good/bad," or "X is sayin Y," but to rather make more subjective statements centering ourselves personally. She framed it differently, of course, but that was the gist.
EG this painting doesn't do anything for me; I didn't read this theme in the novel; I liked that tone in the movie, etc., etc. The idea being that when it comes to discussing and analyzing art, what we're really talking about isn't the art itself, but rather our own, individual perceptions of and reactions to it. In retrospect, I think it was one of the most valuable lessons I learned at that age -- from the intended curriculum, at least.[/i] |
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