Some Thoughts on Robotech: The Movies.

Original animation commissioned for Robotech: The Movie.

Robotech's 1985 run linked three distinct series into a single, multi-generational narrative. The episodes were sanitized for after-school viewers and for U. S. sensibilities and were Americanized in general. Still, it was the highest-profile early effort to present anime to Western audiences without directly dumbing down the themes.

As a young viewer at the time, I was spellbound. Most previous imported "Japanimation" titles were ones that had clearly been aimed at children in the first place, and they were further dumbed down for western audiences. Robotech strove to retain as much of that complexity as it could get away with. To young me, it felt as if I was watching an "adult" show that just happened to be in animated form.

I discovered the show when the second episode, Countdown aired. However, even the first episode was not Robotech's first broadcast...

Rick Hunter engages Zentraedi who are monitoring
(but not understanding) a human beauty pageant.

A BIZARRE PROLOGUE: CODENAME - ROBOTECH:

Execs had concerns about young American audiences being able to follow a complicated, ongoing narrative. Signs of this lack of confidence in their viewers permeate the series, from narration that occasionally feels all but omnipresent to such restating of plot points that I think Netflix used it as a template for its original films.

The single strangest attempt at handholding, however, is the "movie" that opened the series: Codename - Robotech.

A compilation film that covers roughly the first third of "The Macross Saga," Codename - Robotech was intended to make it easier for new viewers to follow the series. I'm honestly not sure how. The actual series opens with carefully paced introductions of both the characters and story elements. The movie clarifies that muddle of painstaking setup by instead offering... a context-free space battle in which characters we've never met rattle off Technobabble, with not a single explanation coming until a good ten minutes in.

The entire movie is a bit of an outlier. Unlike the other films, this was an introduction to the series rather than an attempt to continue it. Still, its very existence demonstrated Harmony Gold's lack of trust in its viewers to follow along; and its presentation, which prioritizes plot mechanics over characterization, foreshadowed Robotech's storytelling focus in contrast to the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross, which did the exact opposite.

Robotech: The Movie - Mark Landry and his girlfriend, Becky,
ride into an adventure that's been mostly forgotten. Thankfully.

"THAT'S A CANNON MOVIE!" ROBOTECH - THE MOVIE:

The success of Robotech's 85-episode run was enough to justify making a movie to bridge the gap between seasons. Unfortunately, the distribution deal was with Cannon Films under its most infamous owners: Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, who became notorious for slashing budgets and meddling in productions, invariably to the detriment of the films they released.

With no time to create an original animated movie before the new season, Carl Macek fell back on what had worked for the series: adapting an anime, in this case popular original video animation Megazone 23. Macek reportedly delivered a passably faithful version... only to be told that there were "too many girls and not enough robots and guns," and that this was "not a Cannon movie."

This led to Macek tossing in roughly half an hour of footage from Southern Cross, necessitating deep cuts to Megazone. The result is a mess. Though I could pick out one or two episodes that I think are even worse, I'd label Robotech: The Movie as the series' creative low point. It was barely distributed, and it's largely forgotten today.

There are two silver linings, however. If not for Robotech: The Movie, I'm not sure I'd have ever actually watched Megazone 23, a highly influential work that's well worth watching for any science fiction fan. Beyond which, at least it pleased Menahem Golan, who boasted of the result: "Now that's a Cannon movie!"

The wedding of Rick and Lisa in Robotech: The Sentinels.

THE SEASON THAT WASN'T - THE SENTINELS:

After the first season's success, Carl Macek and Harmony Gold decided to pursue original animation for Season Two. Then the dollar/yen exchange rate shifted, making outsourced animation significantly more expensive. If this had happened a few months later, I suspect the season might have survived. With only three episodes complete, however, Harmony Gold decided that the expense was too much and canceled the project.

The Sentinels compiles the animation that was done into a movie. Fortunately, there is an arc: Rick Hunter balances his upcoming wedding to Lisa Hayes against preparations for the SDF-3's new mission, with the film ending after the wedding and just as the ship leaves Earth. This makes it feel less incomplete than it might have, even if it's evident that the most interesting part of the story is yet to be told.

I wouldn't label what exists as particularly good. Characters are bland, and the animators seem a lot more interested in the "B" plot, focused on the Invid invasion of the planet Rick's crew will soon visit, than in any of the scenes featuring the returning cast. Still, there are elements here that might have become interesting; and just having the casts of the three "generations" interacting with each other helps to unify the overall series.

Even so, based on what was produced, I'm not left with a sense that anything special was lost.

Young pilot Marcus Rush angrily confronts Scott Bernard in The Shadow Chronicles.

AN ATTEMPTED CONTINUATION - THE SHADOW CHRONICLES:

Almost two decades after The Sentinels, and almost certainly in part because of Robotech's healthy home video sales, Harmony Gold produced a continuation: The Shadow Chronicles.

The Shadow Chronicles is almost the flip side of The Sentinels. The earlier film focused mainly on the characters from "The Macross Saga," with smaller roles for a few "Masters" characters and a couple of nods to "The New Generation." In contrast, this film gives leading roles to Scott and Ariel from "New Generation," solid supporting roles to Louis from "The Masters" and to some crew members introduced in The Sentinels; and represents "The Macross Saga" only through a brief appearance by Rick Hunter.

I liked it better than The Sentinels. Unfortunately, it repeats one of the earlier movie's problems, in that it ends just as the story seems to be taking off. A sequel, Shadow Rising, was intended. Despite posting decent sales figures, though, Harmony Gold never managed to move forward with it. They've also never officially canceled it, leaving it in what seems likely to be a permanent state of limbo.

Love Live Alive: Lancer reunites with his friends.

A MINOR EPILOGUE - LOVE LIVE ALIVE:

To date, Robotech's final gasp is Love Live Alive.

I don't know whether or not this will be Robotech's final bow, as one more project keeps struggling out every decade or so. Still, there's an odd symmetry to it ending here. For most of the series' life, Robotech was made up of episodes of '80s anime series dubbed and edited to fit Carl Macek's multi-generational continuity. Love Live Alive carries on that tradition, adapting a music OVA that tied into Genesis Climber Mospeada; and as a compilation film, it provides a sort of mirror to the series' very first release, Codename - Robotech.

Genesis Climber Mospeada: Love Live Alive was a celebration of music. It had little dialogue, instead being almost all music, and it used its clips not to retell Mospeada's story but to punctuate emotions. Robotech reduces the concert to a single scene, with the rest being a bog-standard clip show. Judged on that basis, it isn't bad, and the frame scenes provide a bit of closure for the character of Lancer, but I wish Harmony Gold had retained the structure of the more memorable original version.

I didn't hate watching the Robotech re-edit. Unlike the Japanese original, however, Robotech: Love Live Alive did little to particular justify its own existence.

Lancer pauses in the ruins of a battlefield in Love Live Alive.

OVERALL:

I don't find the Robotech movies to be objectionable. At a minimum, they all manage to be passably entertaining. Even the awful Robotech: The Movie is bad in ways that are sometimes funny... and it's the main reason that I ended up watching the excellent Megazone 23.

But a bit like the Robotech version of Love Live Alive, the movies don't really justify their own existence. They don't make the series larger; The Shadow Chronicles, in particular, muddies the continuity, which just about held together through the 85 televised episodes.

Other opinions are always available. For me, however, the movies add up to nothing more than a handful of curiosity pieces. A viewer who stops watching after the television finale, Symphony of Light, honestly won't miss much if they chose to skip these - though at least they're not a painful experience to watch.

Previous: The New Generation

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Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles.

Ariel warns Scott Bernard about a new threat to humanity.

Original Release Date: Aug. 25, 2006. Running Time: 88 minutes. Screenplay by: Ford Riley, Frank Agrama. Story by: Thomas J. Bateman, Steve Yun, Tommy Yune. Directed by: Tommy Yune, Dong-wook Lee. Produced by: Jason Netter.


THE PLOT:

It is the final day of the Invid occupation of Earth. Even as Scott Bernard and his resistance group join the final assault against Reflex Point, the forces of the Robotech Expeditionary Force engage the enemy in orbit. Failure is not an option: If they cannot drive the Invid from the Earth, they have orders to use the new Neutron-S missiles, which will devastate the planet.

As the battle rages, Capt. Vince Grant takes his ship to locate the missing SDF-3 and Admiral Rick Hunter. He finds Rick, his ship badly damaged by a singularity that was formed from the test firing of the Neutron S missiles. This weapon, prepared in cooperation with a friendly alien species, is actually a trap meant to destroy them.

The sudden arrival of this new enemy prevents Vince from rescuing the SDF-3, but he is able to fold out to warn the fleet. He arrives to discover that the war is over: The Invid Regess abandoned Earth even as it appeared her forces were winning. She also destroyed the Neutron-S missiles as she left, rendering Vince's warning seemingly irrelevant.

But this is more a pause in the action than a victory. The Invid took most of the Earth's protoculture. Without the SDF-3, humanity will run out of the power source in a little over a year. Meanwhile, the new enemy closes in, single-minded in its goal to wipe out every trace of protoculture and any species who uses it!

Young pilot Marcus Rush angrily confronts Scott.

CHARACTERS:

Much like The Sentinels, this movie mixes veterans of all the previous Robotech "generations." Rick, seen only on a viewscreen, has safely aged out of even remotely resembling Super Dimension Fortress Macross's Hikaru; Louis, Dana Sterling's tech guy from "The Masters," is now Vince's science officer and tech guy, while Skull Squadron leader Maia Sterling is Dana's younger sister; Vince and android Janice, both of whom were introduced in The Sentinels; and Scott, Ariel, and the Invid Regess from "The New Generation."

I think this film does a better job than The Sentinels in integrating the returning characters with the new characters. There's a direct connection between Scott and young pilot Marcus Rush, who was his late fiancée's brother. Marcus fills roughly the same role as The Sentinels' Jack Baker, but he's a little less bland. I quite liked Marcus's interactions with Scott; Marcus, angry about the death of his sister, brags about the Invid he's killed, and his attitude resembles Scott near the start of "The New Generation," before his feelings for Ariel made him more conflicted.

None of the characters has much depth - but then, The Shadow Chronicles never tries to be character-centric. This is an action film, and the cast is there to serve the plot and set pieces. They work well enough on that basis, though; and unlike in The Sentinels or Robotech: The Movie, all the characters actually seem to be part of the same story.

Maia Sterling, leader of Skull Squadron, and Marcus's crush.

PROBLEMS: ART STYLE AND CONTINUITY:

The opening credits create an immediate bad impression. After a few bars of Ulpio Minucci's original theme, it quickly devolves into generic "space music" that sounds as if it was taken from an off-brand Stargate knockoff, while we move past CGI planets that look drawn from a PS1 game.

There's a clash of art styles throughout the film. Character animation is a bit basic, with at least one point at which voice-over dialogue covers offscreen actions, but I was able to adjust to it quickly enough. The space scenes, however, use obvious CGI that results in an overly-polished "video game cutscene" look, and the two styles do not mesh well visually.

An even bigger problem is some poor continuity with the original series. The Shadow Chronicles overlaps significantly with the events of Symphony of Light, Robotech's series finale. In concept, this could work well. I might have enjoyed seeing the old events presented from a different viewpoint and with additional context.

However, this movie chooses to contradict Symphony of Light. Scott's team no longer negotiates with the Regess; Ariel talks to her alone. Also, Scott fully trusts Ariel, with absolutely no tension existing between them; yes, "New Generation" toned down the overt hostility of Mospeada's Stig, but the tension still existed. Here, it isn't present at all, even though showing that in Scott's early scenes would have made the parallels between Scott and Marcus stronger (or indeed extant, for those viewing the movie without having seen the series).

There's no actual reason for these contradictions. The end of "The New Generation" shows Scott jettisoning the message from his late fiancée, symbolically letting the past and his anger go, which would fit his warmer attitude toward Ariel here, and the Ariel of "The New Generation" would still warn Scott about the imminent threat. The conflicts appear to exist solely for the sake of making changes, and it doesn't help that those changes are uniformly worse and less interesting than the original scenes.

Even more bizarre is that the obvious audience would be old fans. And science fiction and anime fans are known for forgiving continuity issues in much the way that liquid magma is known for its cooling properties...

Louis assists a wounded Vince Grant.

OTHER MUSINGS:

...And despite all these issues, along with a hefty helping of Robotech's trademark clunky dialogue, I still enjoyed The Shadow Chronicles.

It's nowhere near as good as the series. Still, of the attempts to continue the Robotech story, I would rate this one as the best. Admittedly, "best animated Robotech continuation" is a dubious title, given that the competition consists of Robotech: The Movie (a mess) and The Sentinels (enjoyable, but kind of bland). Still, for what it's worth, it gets my vote.

The Shadow Chronicles is an action movie. The first half is dominated by battle scenes, while the final twenty minutes amounts to one big set piece, with Vince and his crew using what they know about the new enemy to find a way to effectively resist. In between is a roughly 20 minute stretch with some character scenes and expositional material, but even this interval is very much structured to funnel the characters back into the plot as efficiently as possible.

As a rule, I prefer character material to "blowing stuff up real good." In this case, though, I think the action focus is a good choice. The characters have just enough spark to hold my interest for a short action story, but they would need some serious additional development to keep me interested for a weekly series of any length.

The writing has some of the same problems as The Sentinels, with relatively flat characters and dialogue that rarely rises above the level of "functional." That movie suffered from it, as the scenes surrounding the launch of the SDF-3 were... well, mostly boring. The Shadow Chronicles avoids that problem by keeping its plot moving and keeping the 'splosions coming.

It's Robotech as if made by Michael Bay: weak characters, weaker attempts at broad comedy, and villains who appear motivated by Being Evil (TM). But the set pieces keep coming, and even with the artificiality of the space-set action scenes, it's enough to keep me reasonably engaged even if my brain can't help but kick against it a bit.

The Children of the Shadow plot to destroy humanity. Because they're evil.

OVERALL:

I enjoyed The Shadow Chronicles... probably more than I should have, given its many issues. Most of the problems I had with The Sentinels apply here, with extra bad continuity and character animation that clashes with that of the space battles. Still, judged as an action film, it works reasonably well. The new enemy is suitably formidable, which creates a bit of tension, and all of the characters do enough to justify their screentime.

Unfortunately, like The Sentinels before it, it ends at just about the point that the story seems to be kicking into gear. The creative team intended to follow this with a sequel, which has been teased to fans on various occasions. That sequel has persistently not materialized, in part to avoid stepping on the toes of the live action movie that was in development (which also never materialized, and that was probably just as well).

Now Robotech keeps sputtering out attempts at continuations every decade or so, and The Shadow Chronicles doesn't even represent the final release under its banner - so nothing's impossible. Still, I would be extremely surprised if any animated continuation of this story ever actually got released.

I was entertained enough that I might have given this a "7." But the lack of a proper ending, combined with the annoying conflicts with pre-existing continuity, knock that down to...


Overall Rating: 6/10.

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