Super Dimension Fortress Macross

Super Dimension Fortress Macross:  C

It always feels so mean to give truly classic and formative anime poor ratings, because usually it's not that they're bad, just that they haven't aged particularly well.

Super Dimension Fortress Macross is an early 80's mecha anime about a war with aliens.  It was intended (according to some reasearch I did) as a modest parody of the original Mobile Suit Gundam, but it quickly became its own serious series.  For me personally, the oddest thing was seeing that the series was responsible for a number of mecha designs which were used in BattleTech, a game I thought was totally awesome when I was 12.  This is because the rights for Macross' use and distribution in the United States caused it to be combined with two other series to make Robotech.

The series itself breaks a number of traditional conventions over its knee, and I do appreciate that.  The main character, Ichijo Hikaru, is not a super-ace unstoppable superman, and feels very real and believable (at least until late in the series, but I'll get to that in a bit).  Lynn Minmay also feels like a relatively normal girl thrown into extraordinary circumstances, and shows believable confusion at her sudden popularity and such things.

The alien invaders (The Zentradi) are an interesting take on a supremely militaristic society, having an... unusual reaction to human culture, which creates a much different dynamic surrounding the conflict than most series present.

Now I'm praising it an awful lot, so why did I give it only a C?  Well, the animation has aged very poorly and the romance plot, which is very important to the development of the series as a whole, drags on, with the main characters becoming incredibly self-absorbed and thoughtless by the end to justify failing to resolve it.  Sound familiar?  It should, because it's a very modern harem series conceit, appearing about 20 years early.

Finally, episode 27 wraps the series up nicely and provides a superb finishing point for the series... which is why it's a shame that the series is 36 episodes long.  The final 9 episodes kind of jog around, feeling epoxyed on at the last minute to keep cashing in on a popular series.  That's not the sort of thing that happens in modern anime, and it's something I personally really like about it as an art form, and Macross' actual ending episode feels kind of out of nowhere, failing to wrap up a lot of supporting characters' stories and generally leaving us hanging with regards to conclusion.

It IS a classic, don't get me wrong, and not unreasonably so, it has some genuinely moving sections and a very thoughtful interpretation of culture and culture shock, but considered as a whole the experience falls short of a lot of more complex modern stories.