Macross Frontier ~Itsuwari no Utahime~
I should start off this entry by saying it’s been about four months since I’ve see Macross Frontier ~Itsuwari no Utahime~ in Japan, so my memories are pretty foggy. However, thanks to the movie pamphlet and the general story of the series I can still more or else give Macross F fans an idea of how awesome the movie is!
To be blunt, if you’ve been following the TV series the movie will not be that new to you. I would say the movie is roughly 50-70% straight TV footage and general storyline while everything else is movie specific.
Specifically, I would say from the beginning of the TV series until the first major battle with the Vajra during Sheryl’s final Macross Frontier concert.
I’ll get into the movie specific plot in a bit but to continue like me run down the characters real quick. To cut some time on the love triangle, pretty much everyone (or specifically Alto) knows Sheryl and Ranka in the movie. They do show via quick flashback scenes how each met (pretty much the same in the TV series) but I did like how they saved audience’s time with such introductions.
Obviously with the movie only being like an 1 1/2 hours long, the majority of character development went to the three leads, i.e. Alto, Sheryl, and Ranka. I would say for Alto, he’s pretty much SERIOUS BUSINESS in the sense he’s not as undecided about his career and whatnot. Still uber girly looking, though ^^;; Sheryl actually has some development really being more, I guess, down to earth? Don’t know how to put it exactly, but I guess she shows more of her emotions openly versus Alto chipping away at them like in the TV series? Ranka, on the other hand, got to show more of her drive to become a singer/idol and it was great to see that determination a bit more drawn out versus how it was in the TV series.
Going back to the plot, and warning now but these are total spoilers, the movie specific add-ons definitely added a nice touch and overall improvement to the series. Just listing some off the top of my head, one of the biggest is Sheryl is in the know of Grace’s project/communicating with the Vajra… or at least knows Ranka’s “Aimo” song; something like that ^^;;
Also nice and an easy way to get his character involved at the start, Brera is Sheryl’s bodyguard. I don’t think him and Ranka being siblings was established in the movie although I think he knows… really forgot or I could be mixing this up from the TV series.
There’s probably a lot more I’ve forgotten about the movie but two more things I have to mention related to the plot before I forget. Even bigger than Sheryl knowing about the Vajra, MICHAEL FRICKING LIVES! Yes, during the final major battle where you just know he’s going to bite the dust, they pull the wool over our shoulders and have the man live! How crazy is that!?
Really the only thing that topped MICHAEL FRICKING LIVING was the epic, and I do mean epic, final battle during Sheryl’s pirateship live. The concert, fighting, singing… just everything was 100x better than anything the TV series gave us! Like if I wasn’t going to buy the DVD/Bluray of the movie prior to this scene, after the final battle, I would have been sold otherwise! That’s just how insane the final battle & concert scenes are!
I know I didn’t really give much of a review but rather “oh I vaguely remember this and that” free-flowing post, but if I had to say one thing about the movie it would be this: BUY IT!
Even if you’ve never watched Macross F, I believe the movie did a good job of setting up the characters and showed the plot in a way that anyone could enjoy. Heck, the friend I bought to watch the movie with me doesn’t understand Japanese and I could only give him a general rundown of the series, but still enjoyed the movie nonetheless (actually he liked it a lot more than One Piece: World’s Strongest which I thought he would have liked better since OP is pretty straight forward to watch). It may be the lack of sleep talking but I must admit I was pretty impressed with the Macross F movie never expecting it to make me like the series more after watching…
… though I do got to admit seeing Sheryl more dere dere didn’t hurt to improve my opinions either!
Oh, just in case you’re wondering all the images in this post are from the random scans I did from the movie pamphlet one could buy. Sorry if the scans aren’t that great but I’m way too tired to even try to re-do them.
And before I forget, btw this is another spoiler, I remember reading on some site when the movie initially came out, they thought Sheryl’s “Welcome to My Fan Club Night!” outfit’s (i.e. the cowgirl looking one) skirt was dynamite or something. Well to put people’s fear aside, they are in fact not dynamite but mini-rocket boosters that get put into good use to save her at one point ^^;;
… also, the iSlug gets a nice upgrade to orange which was weirdly one of the first things I noticed once the movie started.
Okay, I’ve definitely run out of anything useful at this point, so I’ll leave the rest of the post to the scanned images of the postcards one could also buy for the movie ^^
