© BANDAI VISUAL / GAINAX All Rights Reserved.
ROYAL SPACE FORCE Jonathan Clements on some of the battles behind The Wings of Honneamise.
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obody knows who it was who walked into a Tokyo coffee shop, one summer day in 1984, and ordered a mix of Assam and Darjeeling, known in Japan as a Royal Milk Tea. But there was a cluster of earnest young men at the next table who overheard the words, and one of them suddenly looked up.“Royal Space Force,” said the 22-year-old Hiroyuki Yamaga, and his companions nodded and smiled. They had finally come up with a title for their animated film, the first professional venture by Gainax, the company they would set up six months later on Christmas Day. The collective of young fans had previously made a splash with their tonguein-cheek opening animations for the Daicon science fiction conventions. In a Japan that was scrambling to serve the new market for video cassettes, they had been propelled out of their amateur endeavours and handed the chance to make their own film. Shigeru Watanabe, then a producer at Bandai,
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had championed their initial pitch, which contained within it a prolonged meditation on what was wrong with the anime world, in particular the newly stigmatised otaku, and how they planned to fix it:“If you look at the psychology of anime fans today, they don’t interact with society... Instead they surrender themselves to mecha and cute young girls. However, because these are things that don’t really exist— it just means that there isn’t actually any genuine interaction at work. They get frustrated, and then just go out looking for the next [anime] to give them a hit. If you examine this situation, you’ll see that deep-down, what these people really want is to get along with the real world. And we propose to deliver the kind of project that will encourage them to reconsider the society around them...” There was a lot more along these lines, along with promises to invest the production with meticulous and intricate world-building. Concept art included in the proposal included 30 water-colour images painted by Yoshiyuki
