Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise began not in a studio but in a proposal handed to a toy company executive in September 1984. A group of young men from amateur film circles in Osaka, barely out of school, walked into Bandai with a pitch unlike anything the anime industry had seen. The Bandai president who read it said he was not sure what it was about, and that was exactly why he liked it.

  The film that came out of that meeting would take four years to make, consume the largest budget of any anime up to that point, and still fail to earn back its costs in theaters. Its production was plagued by inexperienced staff, chaotic decision-making, and a marketing campaign that tried to sell it as something it was not. Yet the science fiction writer Ted Chiang would later call it the most impressive example of worldbuilding in fiction. The anime director Hideaki Anno said the film's troubled reception had a major impact on him personally and professionally.

  What made Royal Space Force so different that it couldn't find a mainstream audience? And how did a film that lost money at the box office eventually change what Japanese animation could be? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. The Gainax Origin

  ›

  Hiroyuki Yamaga was 22 years old when he wrote the Royal Space Force proposal. He had already directed episode 9 of the original Macross TV series at age 20, chosen by the series director because he wanted to make something that didn't fit the conventional sense of anime. Yamaga said it took him two months to draw the storyboards for that single episode.

  His collaborator Toshio Okada had co-founded General Products, a fan merchandise company, with Yasuhiro Takeda. By 1984, Takeda was running it well on his own, and Okada felt he had nothing to do. Yamaga recalled approaching Okada when he was feeling down, telling him that their circle at Daicon Film included multiple creative geniuses and it would be foolish not to act on that.

  The two had come to Bandai through Shigeru Watanabe, whom Okada had met at a tokusatsu fan convention in Tokyo in August 1983, where Daicon Film screened a live-action short and ran a merchandise booth. Watanabe had helped develop Mamoru Oshii's Dallos, which became the first anime original video animation when it was released at the end of 1983. He brought the Royal Space Force pitch to Bandai president Makoto Yamashina that same September.

  Yamashina's response captured the spirit of what Bandai was willing to risk: he said he was in the toy business, and had always believed that if he understood a product's appeal, it wouldn't sell. The generation gap, he argued, was profound. He wanted the young creators to run free, and explicitly said he was not aiming for a Star Wars.

• 3. A Proposal Against Anime

  ›

  The written proposal for Royal Space Force carried a subtitle that declared its intent: "Project Intentions: A New Wave in a Time of Lost Collaborative Illusions." It opened with a self-analysis of recent animation culture from the perspective of young people, and what followed was a diagnosis of the entire anime industry.

  Yamaga and Okada argued that anime had fallen into a feedback loop with its audience, producing cute characters and cool mecha that reinforced the more negative and introverted tendencies of fans, rather than connecting with them in any fundamental way. They quoted what they saw as the psychological root: fans were using anime as compensatory behavior, relinquishing themselves to mecha and cute girls because those things didn't require real interaction. "What these people really want, deep down, is to get along well with reality," the proposal stated.

  The solution they proposed was counterintuitive. Rather than setting the story in the real world, they would place it in a completely different one. A foreign-feeling world, like a foreign film, could attract the attention of viewers who found their own reality grubby and unappealing. "If normal things now look impressive and interesting because they've been seen through a different world," the proposal read, "then we'll have achieved what we set out to do."

  The proposal was unusual even in its structure: it described the setting and story in detail but never named the main characters. And it listed five initial core staff for the anime, four of them previously associated with Daicon Film, including Yoshiyuki Sadamoto as chief character designer and Hideaki Anno as chief mechanical designer.

• 4. Building a World

  ›

  Hiroyuki Yamaga imagined the kingdom of Honnêamise as having the scientific level of the 1950s combined with an atmosphere drawn from America and Europe of the 1930s, but with characters who moved to a modern rhythm. In May 1985, Gainax moved to a larger studio in Takadanobaba, where staff gathered friends and acquaintances to visualize the setting.

  The worldbuilding process lasted roughly a year. Yamaga described it as a reciprocal exchange: he expressed abstract ideas to designers, and they brought concrete skills back in return. He gave designers keywords divided into what he called symbolic and non-symbolic categories. A symbolic description of a cup, he explained, would call it a cylindrical object. A non-symbolic one would start from function and sensation: it holds water, it's cold and sweats when filled.

  Among the most prolific designers were Takashi Watabe, whose work included the train station, rocket factory, and lecture hall, and Yoichi Takizawa, who designed the launch gantry, space capsule simulator, and engine test facility. Art director Hiromasa Ogura, who would later be noted for Ghost in the Shell, led a team of 16 background painters. One of them was a student at Tama Art University named Yōji Takeshige, who would later become the art director of Spirited Away.

  Toshio Okada described three artists as shaping the overall look of the world: Sadamoto determined the major color elements of blue and brown; Watabe designed the architectural styles; and Ogura gave it a sense of life through light, shadow, and air. The world displayed different layers of time, with Art Deco as its main motif but with older Art Nouveau and newer postmodern elements present alongside it.

  For the character designs, Sadamoto used the American actor Treat Williams as a model reference for the adult version of Shirotsugh, even though the character is 21 years old. For the child Manna, Yamaga directed Sadamoto to look at actress Tatum O'Neal as she appeared in the first half of Paper Moon. Yamaga would later reflect in a 2018 interview session at Niigata University that he recognized Riquinni as essentially himself: "What I see now is surprisingly the character Riquinni is nothing but me."

• 5. Production and Chaos

  ›

  Royal Space Force had a budget that, at the time it was made, surpassed the records set by Hayao Miyazaki's Castle of Cagliostro and Castle in the Sky, making it the most expensive anime film up to that point. Yamaga requested an additional 40 million yen above the existing 360 million yen budget specifically to bring Ryuichi Sakamoto on as music director.

  The storyboard was not fully completed until June 1986, and Royal Space Force was not formally confirmed as a feature-length film until January 1986, when Toho-Towa agreed to distribute it. Because the sober third section of the film required more precise expression, production began there while the schedule was still loose. Director of photography Hiroshi Isakawa recalled being promised photography could begin in April 1986, but receiving no cuts to film until August.

  The animation approach was unusual for anime. Because Yamaga's storyboards were minimalist, animators were not told what to draw. They were asked to think out the performance in a scene, physically acting through it before deciding how it would move. Higuchi later recalled this as a lot of fun, while noting that some animators refused to work that way and left the production. The most intense period came in January 1987, with filming completed at the end of that month.

  Although the film was pre-digital, computer-assisted animation was used for specific difficult shots: the contra-rotating propellers of an aircraft, the capsule's rotation in orbit, a street sweeper's tilted wheel turn, and the instrument needle in the launch bunker. These were rendered in ASCII 3D software and traced onto cels. By contrast, Hideaki Anno supervised the frost flakes falling from the rocket at liftoff entirely by hand.

  The voice recording was supervised by Atsumi Tashiro, sound director of the influential 1974 TV series Space Battleship Yamato. The lead voice actor was Leo Morimoto, a 43-year-old veteran of live-action film and television with very limited anime experience. His co-star Mitsuki Yayoi, cast as Riquinni after Gainax heard her on the radio, was a stage actor who had never before played an anime role. Tashiro felt their mutual unfamiliarity with anime meant they approached their roles with genuine emotion and honest reactions.

• 6. Sakamoto's Score

  ›

  Ryuichi Sakamoto was selected as musical director of Royal Space Force in April 1986. He was already known internationally for his work with Yellow Magic Orchestra and his soundtrack to the 1983 Nagisa Oshima film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. The year after Royal Space Force was released, Sakamoto would share the Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Last Emperor.

  Three months before the film's Japanese premiere, Sakamoto released a 12-inch maxi single titled The Wings of Honnêamise: Image Sketch, containing early mixes of four key pieces he had composed, listed only as Prototype A through Prototype D. In his liner notes, Sakamoto said one of the main reasons he took the job was that he saw a resemblance between the meticulous care he put into his music and the care the filmmakers were taking with the film.

  Sakamoto brought in musicians Koji Ueno, Yuji Nomi, and Haruo Kubota, his prior collaborators from the Koneko Monogatari soundtrack. Working from a chart table prepared by Sakamoto and sound director Tashiro, each composer arranged pieces independently without working together in the studio. In total, 47 musical arrangements were created, of which 15 appeared on the original soundtrack album released in March 1987.

  Complications arose because Sakamoto was away from Japan during the final months of production, which overlapped with the shooting of The Last Emperor. Communications between his management company and the film's sound director eventually broke down over who had final say on placing the music. Toshio Okada chose to give that authority to Tashiro, accepting responsibility for a decision he believed soured Sakamoto on the film. Sakamoto would later tell an interviewer in 2018 that he had composed for an anime film 35 years earlier but didn't like it very much, declining to name the title.

• 7. A Difficult Release

  ›

  As footage neared completion in late 1986, investors grew nervous. The film offered few opportunities for merchandise spin-offs. Sponsors, led by All Nippon Airways, pushed to change the title. Bandai wanted a subtitle in the form of "Something of Something," following the pattern of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which had been the last major anime hit. Privately, Yamaga objected to the proposed subtitle The Wings of Riquinni, arguing it contradicted the film's goal of expanding the viewer's sense of the world beyond any single character. He suggested using the name Honnêamise instead.

  The official announcement of the film was made on the 4th of June 1986 at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, using Royal Space Force as the main title with a subtitle. By the time the film was about to release, publicity materials had reversed the hierarchy, making The Wings of Honnêamise the primary title. Royal Space Force was relegated to a smaller subtitle.

  Bandai and distributor Toho-Towa spent three weeks considering cutting 20 minutes from the film. Yamashina ultimately decided against it, telling Toho he would accept personal responsibility if the decision hurt ticket sales. He acknowledged that the box office target had been based on Nausicaä, even though the films were completely different.

  Royal Space Force was released in Japan on the 14th of March 1987 by Toho-Towa. It failed to recoup its costs at the box office. Shigeru Watanabe, who had supported the project from the beginning and was caught between Gainax and Bandai during the conflicts, took a year's leave of absence after the film's release. The film held its premiere at Mann's Chinese Theatre and received some support from domestic figures including Hayao Miyazaki and Mamoru Oshii, but mixed reviews elsewhere.

• 8. Lasting Influence

  ›

  Home video sales eventually brought Royal Space Force into profitability. An English-language release did not come until 1994, when Bandai licensed the film to Manga Entertainment. A dubbed 35 mm version toured theaters in North America and the United Kingdom, received coverage in major newspapers, and drew mixed reviews.

  Various surveys of anime have regarded the film more positively over time. The science fiction writer Ted Chiang named it the most impressive example of worldbuilding in fiction. Hideaki Anno stated that the response to Royal Space Force had a major impact on him both personally and professionally.

  In retrospect, Yamaga argued that the elements which made Royal Space Force unsuccessful were the same elements that made possible the later successes of Studio Gainax. Toshio Okada reflected that had he made the screenplay slightly stronger and the story simpler, the film might have found a mainstream audience. He described it as an art film produced with a major film budget: "this was a major motion picture. Bandai spent a lot of money on it. It was our big chance."

  Hiromasa Ogura named Royal Space Force as the top work of his career in a 2012 interview, above Ghost in the Shell. The worldbuilding team that assembled around it seeded much of what followed: Sadamoto's subsequent character designs for Nadia La Arwall and Rei Ayanami each won the Anime Grand Prix fan poll twice for favorite female character, and his Shinji Ikari won twice for favorite male. By contrast, Shirotsugh and Riquinni placed ninth and twentieth respectively in the Grand Prix poll of 1987 releases. The bonus background music tracks not on the original soundtrack were eventually collected for the 1990 Royal Space Force Memorial Box LaserDisc edition, and later included on the 2000 Manga Entertainment DVD.