Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise

Journal reflection

Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise arrived as a surprise. KC expected a space adventure and found a strange, slow-moving alternate world whose culture and relation to Earth remained difficult to place. The character story and long mundane stretches did not pull him through, though the launch, Ryuichi Sakamoto score, and extraordinary hand-drawn machinery made the film worthwhile.

• He had heard people rave about it and expected some kind of space action and adventure.
• The launch buildup and Shirotsugh's speech captured the awe of space flight, culminating in a lift-off powerful enough to stop people in the middle of a life-or-death battle.
• The animation's detailed motion and lingering close-ups of machinery kept rewarding his attention, even when he was zoning out from the story.
• The music felt amazingly emotional and driving. As a longtime Sakamoto fan, he heard this score as a strikingly different step from the electronic work he already loved.
• The slow pace itself was not the whole issue. Totoro works for him at a very slow tempo, while Shirotsugh and Riquinni's connection never gave this film enough emotional pull.