New Macross Animation Announced, to be animated by Sunrise

[Graham]

Every time I see there's a new post, it gets my hopes up that it's some actual news about the new series, but nope.😅🤣

[Old_Nash_II]

Same here 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[Black Valkyrie]

 

Not really interest, only if its like Macross Plus. 

 

[Space Casual Life]

On 2/1/2024 at 1:45 PM, sketchley said:

It's possible.  Kawamori-san has always said that contact was lost—what amounts to the original cast having their happy ending and having ridden into the sunset.  The specifics (and time) where unknown until that mail-in gift card.

As for Macross timelines: they tend to get rewritten a lot, and tailored to the latest Macross series.

 

Hearing those names brings back a lot of memories! LOL

Hmm. Good thoughts. Thanks. Thinking more yeah I could be wrong about Toren Smith on Animerica?, Maybe he just translated a lot of manga I read then?  Trish Ledoux was def the lead editor of Animerica though and there was a great encyclopedia of anime she did in the day and my sister gifted me back then. 

[Space Casual Life]

On 2/1/2024 at 1:51 PM, Master Dex said:

Easily, he's my favorite character.. I mean he's often my avatar lol.

I love Max too. Like me, he's a dork but got the women. 

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But also Hikaru is frankly, kind of a dumbass lol. He's a good audience avatar in the show so he is a better main character to relate to however. His character story is essentially about learning to grow up amid the end of the world and becoming responsible for his choices.

Hikaru, imo wasn't half as annoying as Amuro Rei, you could definitely empathise with him and you didn't hate him. Well I didn't as a kid anyway. Hikaru actually had depth to his character. Max is an ace pilot that uses his womanising skills to marry a hot alien. He's pretty shallow compared to Hikaru imho. 

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Minmay is honestly a great character study in someone thrust into fame with no preparation and naturally that fame breaks them down from the stress until they are just going through the motions in the post-war world while dealing with depression. They only had a passing interest in Hikaru (plus they were a kid with no sense of what they wanted in a partner at the beginning), but post-war they gravitated to him in hopes of finding comfort in a world she couldn't stand to live in. Her realization to leave Earth to seek out a better life for herself on her terms instead of letting it be based on other people is a solid endpoint for her journey.

Is it an endpoint? Doesn't have to be. And I like how you highlight the complexity of Minmay's character. On point man. 

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Misa kinda runs the broken bird ice queen that thaws out as her chemistry with Hikaru grows and she helps him grow up while he helps her to heal from the issues in her past. It's not super inventive but it was well told. I'm glad she's a Captain now but that was kinda inevitable. A show about her wouldn't offer anything different than a show about another Captain married to a pilot in their fleet.

Other than Max and Milia?

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I have no comment on Star Wars but yeah, sometimes new stuff isn't as good. That happens. Sometimes it is good or better. You'll never find the next great story if you don't venture out past the old and comfortable. Macross has proven this out with both amazing and not so amazing sequels. I'd prefer the risk to get the rewards. 

The amazing ones still weren't "Macross" to me, they were off the shelf projects with the name Macross and transforming mecha slapped onto them. Just my opinion though. 

 

Edited February 2 by Space Casual Life

[Space Casual Life]

On 2/1/2024 at 6:55 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

That Megaroad-01 disappeared in 2016 has, yes, been a part of the setting since the late 90's... though I don't believe it was definitively made official that she vanished in July 2016 until Macross Chronicle came out in the wake of Macross Frontier in the late 2000s.

Ah I see, thanks.

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Kawamori always avoided the subject of what became of the ship after its disappearance, citing that Macross: Flash Back 2012 was the coda of Hikaru, Misa, and Minmay's story and that their departure from Earth aboard the Megaroad-01 was them sailing off into the proverbial sunset at the conclusion of their story.  Their disappearance isn't even treated like some kind of enduring mystery for subsequent generations.  Ships just sometimes go missing due to fold accidents and it's treated like an unfortunate statistic.  It wasn't until the most recent movie, Absolute Live!!!!!!, that the Megaroad-01's fate was revisited and it was a huge anticlimax...

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... because the obvious answer turned out to be correct.  The Megaroad-01's disappearane was because of a fold accident, and the only remarkable thing about it was that the ship HADN'T been destroyed.  It was stuck in a fold fault instead, trapped in the higher dimensional spacetime of fold space for decades.

Even then, its appearance in the Absolute Live!!!!!! movie was basically incidental.  The only reason anyone was looking was because someone operating under the alias "Lady M" was using the Megaroad-01's communications frequency while manipulating the New UN Government and New UN Forces, and did so blatantly and frequently enough that one particularly respected commander went rogue and formed a paramilitary organization devoted to hunting them down.

Hmm what if Megaroad-01 travelled through that black hole and confronted the Supervision Army in the same lush animation as DRYL? or the Trumotion sequence in the DYRL video games in a second movie? (can confirm Trumotion animation in SS version I own, haven't checked out PS1 version) With ancient ruins representing the origins of humanity and epic battles?  Imagine if they resolved the universe in an epic way like Gunbuster? Would you hate it? Could all the other "Macross" sequels stand alone as "cool" anime without the Macross name but with Kawamori involvment? I think so.

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the obvious answer being "the love triangle in question is already resolved".

The problem with this premise being that, like Hikaru and Minmay, Misa's character arc is over... there isn't really a direction for her character to develop in now.  She was already a confident military officer in the original series, and she overcame her romantic difficulties with Hikaru in the original series. 

So Max getting married to Milia was "already over" too but you enjoyed a sequel involving them.  Why do you think a sequel involving a relationship and characters with more complex backstories would be potentially somehow less interesting?

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All things considered, isn't it rather ironic to make this argument given that Star Wars fans are also quite unhappy with the new trilogy for mindlessly recapitulating the story arcs of the original trilogy and for overriding the happy ending of same to drag the original characters back into action long past their use-by date

No, I and many SW fans are not unhappy for "recapilating the story"!. The original grittiness, design, real sets, story themes and great characters were absent. The "feeling" was gone. It didn't have anything to do with bring back the original cast. 

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Macross has found consistent success over the years by making each new installment a self-contained story and moving on to a new part of the setting with new characters when that story reaches its natural conclusion.  That, plus its broad strokes approach to continuity, has allowed it to continually reinvent itself and take new approaches to its premise in each successive title without being chained down to what was popular forty years ago, burying new viewers in prerequisite viewing, or wearing out its welcome.  I suspect what we can look forward to another fresh installment set somewhere different from previous works, with its own characters, set pieces, and local flavor.

I'm glad Macross is successful and new fans love it. However, I do not enjoy the new iterations. They don't FEEL like Macross to me at all. IN MY OPINOIN They could be anything with superficial transforming mecha and a band or singer tacked on.  Just an opinion. Don't ban me "bro" - appreciate being here and sharing data. I respect anyone to feel how they want about Macross but I will not necessarily feel positive about all shows just because they have the name Macross on them. 

[Space Casual Life]

I guess I'm talking about THEMES. In or before the Unification War you had mass nuclear carnage. At the end of SW1 you had Earth getting 90+% taken out by a massive orbital bombardment. Humanity still managed to play an ace, with the Grand Canon/s. It's Earth vs the Universe. That was a great thing about Macross, the HUMAN thing about Macross. It had an epic background. Macross 7 vs space vampires was..uh..non epic..the only sequel that had close to epic themes was Macross II with Earth threatened again...Anyways I always wished the series continued in the way that Earth took the fight to what threatened Earth. That would be an epic theme that would be an appropriate continuing/ending of the story, I.M.H.O. I have to admit I love the original Mars Attacks trading card story too. haha. 

Edited February 2 by Space Casual Life
clarity

[snakerbot]

2 hours ago, Space Casual Life said:

It's Earth vs the Universe.

The point of Macross is that it's not supposed to be "Earth vs the universe". Every Macross series is fundamentally about how war is dumb and bad and completely unnecessary if we could just communicate better.

Zero featured an alien death machine whose entire purpose was to destroy humanity if we hadn't figured out how to live in peace. SDF had a race of aliens who were almost identical to humans and a marriage between one of those aliens and a human and their first child was a major plot point in showing how the two races could come together. Plus wasn't really a war story, but the conflict between Guld and Isamu was entirely predicated on a misunderstanding. In 7 for pretty much the entire series Basara was just trying to reach out to the Protodeviln with his music, and once the Protodeviln realized they could use music to generate their own spiritia they didn't need to fight anymore. The Vajra in Frontier were only attacking because they didn't understand humanity and thought one of their own had been kidnapped. Once Sheryl and Ranka's song got through to them they stopped fighting and just left.

I don't remember much of Delta and I haven't seen II so I won't comment on those.

You can see an "Earth vs the universe" theme in SDF, but the other series decided to expand upon a theme from it that wasn't that one.

[Jeff J]

3 hours ago, Space Casual Life said:

So Max getting married to Milia was "already over" too but you enjoyed a sequel involving them.  Why do you think a sequel involving a relationship and characters with more complex backstories would be potentially somehow less interesting?

Sometimes, lesser-covered characters like Max and Milia are better candidates for a spin-off series. Think of how the Breaking Bad universe spun off into Better Call Saul and focused on Saul, Mike, and Gus instead of doing a 6-season continuation for a character like Jesse Pinkman or making the prequel series about Walter White instead.

I haven't liked every Macross title, but I do appreciate that they didn't go back to the well with Hikaru, Misa, and Minmay. Their story as is was satisfying and didn't suffer from sequel-itis. They're my favorite characters, and I'll always associate Macross with them ahead of any other characters, but this is one case where I think they made the right decision to leave well enough alone. Understood YMMV.

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, Space Casual Life said:

Hmm what if Megaroad-01 travelled through that black hole and confronted the Supervision Army [...]

Apart from the fact that that's not how black holes work, there are three major problems with this idea right off the bat:

1. Macross 7 already did a story involving confronting remnants of the Supervision Army.  They fought its founders, the Protodeviln, and a "v2.0" of the Supervision Army in the Varauta forces.  
2. That would be a death sentence.  The 1st Large-Scale Long Distance Emigrant fleet had a population in the tens of thousands, only a few warships and a few hundred VFs, and the Megaroad-class has basically zero combat capability.  The Supervision Army operates on the same scale as the Zentradi main fleets.
3. It would also just be a lazy retread of the original series plot.

 

4 hours ago, Space Casual Life said:

So Max getting married to Milia was "already over" too but you enjoyed a sequel involving them.  Why do you think a sequel involving a relationship and characters with more complex backstories would be potentially somehow less interesting?

Max and Milia's "romance" in the original series was a subplot in someone else's story.  Namely, Hikaru, Misa, and Minmay's story.

Excluding the Macross M3 game, Max and Milia have never really been main characters in a Macross story.  They've a recurring pair of supporting characters who have never really been the focus of the story.  They come in for a subplot here and there but mainly because they're fan favorite secondary characters... like Sgt. Johnson in Halo, Reg Barclay in Star Trek, or Vegeta in Dragon Ball Z.

 

4 hours ago, Space Casual Life said:

No, I and many SW fans are not unhappy for "recapilating the story"!. The original grittiness, design, real sets, story themes and great characters were absent. The "feeling" was gone. It didn't have anything to do with bring back the original cast. 

I have a feeling that's more "just you", given the complaints that drove actual changes to the sequel trilogy.

 

4 hours ago, Space Casual Life said:

I'm glad Macross is successful and new fans love it. However, I do not enjoy the new iterations. They don't FEEL like Macross to me at all. IN MY OPINOIN They could be anything with superficial transforming mecha and a band or singer tacked on.  Just an opinion. Don't ban me "bro" - appreciate being here and sharing data. I respect anyone to feel how they want about Macross but I will not necessarily feel positive about all shows just because they have the name Macross on them. 

Then why are you here, commenting nonsense on a topic about the next Macross series?  Seriously.

 

4 hours ago, Space Casual Life said:

I guess I'm talking about THEMES.

But apparently not Macross's themes... given that you seem fixated on "gritty" war and mass death.

Macross's themes are music as communication, love triangles, and war being based on preventable failures to communicate that, once resolved, bring peace.

 

4 hours ago, Space Casual Life said:

In or before the Unification War you had mass nuclear carnage.

... no, we didn't. 🤔

I think I see the problem, though.  With an assertion like that, it's likely your view of Macross is actually your view of Robotech's "Macross Saga" and not actual Macross.

In Macross, the Unification Wars (plural!) were a series of small regional conflicts that sprang up in various unstable regions around the world after the United Nations announced the existence of aliens and plans for the formation of the Earth Unification Government.  Basically a lot of little Desert Storm-y fights over things like territorial disputes, ethnic and sectarian beefs, and so on.  There was some organized opposition to the Earth UN Gov't from the so-called Anti-Unification Alliance, but that was mostly just skirmishes.  Nothing even close to national warfare.  The only use of nuclear weapons was the Anti-Unification Alliance's use of a reaction warhead against St. Petersburg in 2006, which led directly to the Alliance's collapse and the end of the Unification Wars because it absolutely annihilated support for their position.

 

4 hours ago, Space Casual Life said:

It's Earth vs the Universe. That was a great thing about Macross, the HUMAN thing about Macross.

No... it's never been that.  In fact, it's always been about how conflict comes from misunderstanding or failure to communicate.  

@snakerbot has a pretty good summary of the truth of the matter.

To fill in the gaps...

• Macross II: Lovers Again was a story about an encounter with an alien race so desperate to preserve its own culture in a hostile galaxy that it turned to militant xenophobia, and the war ended when they were confronted with the reality that there's more to life than simple survival, that there's beauty in other cultures too, and that coexistence is not a threat to their way of life.
• Macross Delta was also a story about how xenophobia (and particularly nationalism) can drive conflicts by creating hate and fear, how breakdowns in communication can lead to confict, and that the desire to understand each other can bridge those gaps from both sides.  (Even the villain was anti-conflict in it, his endgame was a galaxy-wide hive mind that would prevent conflict by forcing everyone to understand each other telepathically.)

Even in the original series and DYRL?, Humanity's victory is only possible because they partner with those Zentradi whose exposure to Earth's culture had given them an interest in life outside of military duty and a forever war.  The thing that led to victory in both cases was that Humanity and the Zentradi's representatives put the guns down and started talking.  That's how they partnered with the Vrlitwhai, Laplamiz, and Quamzin branch fleets in the original series (and came up with the Minmay Attack) in the TV series, and how they came up with the Minmay Attack in DYRL? using the sheet music they got from Boddole Zer himself.  In both cases, the war ends as a direct result of both sides sitting down and talking.

It's not "Earth vs. the Universe", it's "the Power of Communication vs. Conflict".

Edited February 2 by Seto Kaiba

[Shawn]

Lets stay on target and move other discussions to a new thread please, thank you
Next comment is to be actual NEWS on some new animation

[djivaldi7]

New series, new opportunities to woo outside Japan, i.e. North America using Disney+  

Hoping the action sequences don't flash by so quickly like in Delta. There's no opportunity to enjoy the panorama and mechanicals.  After the Oscar's "crush Miyazaki" statement... well,  look at the artistry as much as his productions' depth of storytelling. Sunrise could do anything Ghibli does, leverage some Gundam talent, but they'd have to value that perspective.  

For Marketing, kids have so much ultra-fantasy out there now, sticking to neo-reality tech like Macross still has its appeal, plus grandpa is more likely to introduce the series and buy "Junior" a Macross toy since he can relate to it too...bridging fan  generations can have huge market penetration impact because you start with a large base.  Neo-reality, Newtonian Physics friendly shows like The Expanse can still attract younger viewers.  The "magic" should be applied sparingly like fold crystals and protoculture.

Zettai Live-like elements should be used.  It was the best fix to major characters and plot progress on several fronts. 

It brought back Max and Megaroad 1. It revealed AI and future tech possibilities...AI singers, and the clone/daughter baby set a new stage.  How about time travel or inter-dimensional travel to encounter the Ancients?

In Zettai-Live!!! the Fighter vs. Battleship victory took us back climactically to M7 Lt. Kinryu's suicidal run in his armored VF11.  Make sure "against the odds" sub-victories happen.

Embrace some space physics...sure, let us still hear the explosions,  but in dogfights how about exploring some true-physics spin-around and shoot the guy who's chasing you (remember Atari's Asteroids?) while you're still going in the same direction? Maybe that evens out some of the freakish high-G advantage ghost, squire(m2) and SV303 Vivasvats have?

 If this new series can continue that,  letting us have time to admire the scenery, action and mechanicals, and getting more Gundam/Ghibli-esque in the narrative,  my grandkids will surely get to visit Disney's "Macross-World" in Orlando someday.