It's Long, Long Goodbye: A Review of (Rewatching) Macross Frontier

Although I only watched Macross Frontier for the first time last November, the fact that it almost instantly became one of my favorite series got me to convince Emma that she wanted to watch it this summer, so I find myself about 3/4 year later having finished watching the show for the second time, and figured I should post my impressions of the show again.

In short, the show lost none of its brilliance in a rewatching. The art is still fantastic, the characters deep, the music mesmerizing, and the story compelling. The only complaint I could possibly think of on the first watching was that the show takes about 10 episodes to really get going (but once it does it never stops, in a good way) and while that remains, it's a small price to pay for an outstanding series, and it remains the only flaw.

First of all are, naturally, the characters. I was always impressed with the amount of detail and originality each character had (even a very minor character like the Captain of the Macross Quarter gets a surprisingly large amount of character shown for the amount of screen time he gets). What's nice is knowing the arc of the story, I was able to more closely watch the character progression and enjoy the transition, especially with Sheryl. The foreknowledge of events also made characters like Michel and Ozma more compelling than they already were. The main three of Alto, Ranka, and Sheryl remain great characters.

The story also benefited from a second viewing. Since this is the first (and only) Macross show I've watched, there was a small but definite bit of confusion about certain facts, like people yelling "DECULTURE!" I remember quite vividly asking Max why singing was so important, for instance. Obviously I grasped these things as they went along (sometimes with internet help) but knowing all these things going in made it so I could focus on the subtleties rather than trying to figure out what fold quartz's significance was.

One of the nice surprises was the fact that after the first viewing, I acquired the Vocal Collection, which is all the sung songs from the series. I got really into it, but expected it to be a phase, but I find myself almost a year later still listening to the song. This meant, for instance, that during Sheryl's first concert I kind of felt like a fan in-show, singing along to the music and enjoying it even more from the familiarity. The other nice benefit is that on the first viewing I was constantly trying to read the lyrics while appreciating the fight scenes, whereas this time since I knew most of them I could just appreciate the action.

And man, was that still great. I remember the first time I loved the fight scenes, and wished they went slower just so I could appreciate them, and they still remain great. The super high quality of the animation helps a lot, but the fights are some of the best I've seen in anime, period. I like fighter jets, I like sci-fi, so it just kind of works perfectly for me.

I feel like if I told someone (as I had) that the show revolves around a sci-fi war and Jpop, I'd probably be very skeptical, but the key point is that it works. Despite the second viewing and knowing how it would end, I still got swept up in the story, still felt strong emotions and connected with the story. It probably helped to be watching it with someone watching it for the first time, and noticing her shock at various certain events, but I'm also pretty certain I would have felt the same regardless.

I could probably go into a lot more intricacies--for instance, I was just discussing Alto's psychological battles with Max-- but that's it: the show is deep enough that I feel like I could analyze a lot of the aspects very deeply. I feel like I would watch the show again in the near future and enjoy it.

In fact, I will kind of being doing that: now that I have the movie version of the first season, I'll be watching it tomorrow and probably posting my impressions. But regardless, I highly recommend the show to anyone to whom any of this has sounded even remotely appealing. The rewatching has also made me more interested in seeing more of the universe, although I'm slightly afraid the lesser art style may turn me off initially. If nothing else, I have the second movie and the Klan Klan spin-off to look forward to.



And finally, while Ranka was very endearing, I thought that the decision to leave Alto unattached at the end was a sublime choice on the part of the director.