Macross Plus
Entry updated 6 July 2026. Tagged: Film, TV.
Japanese Original Video Animation (OVA) (1994-1995). Studio Nue/Triangle Staff. Directed by Shōji Kawamori and Shinichirō Watanabe. Written by Keiko Nobumoto. Music by Yoko Kanno. Voice cast includes Takumi Yamazaki, Unshou Ishizuka, Rica Fukami and Mako Hyōdō. Four episodes of approximately 35-40 minutes. Colour.
The story unfolds in the year 2040, thirty years after the events of Super Dimensional Fortress Macross (1982-1983). Humanity has survived the First Contact and Alien Invasion depicted in the original Macross series and has spread across a network of interstellar colonies (see Colonization of Other Worlds). The narrative unfolds primarily on Eden, a frontier colony planet, where the secret "Supernova Project" pits two military test pilots, childhood friends turned bitter adversaries, and their two prototype next-generation variable fighters – the YF-19, piloted by Isamu Dyson (Yamazaki), and the BioNeural-interface YF-21, piloted by his half-Zentradi (half-alien) rival Guld Goa Bowman (Ishizuka) – against one another in a competitive military evaluation. Their rivalry gains a new dimension when both projects are faced with cancellation since the higher-ups favour the autonomous AI drone fighter X-9 Ghost. Simultaneously, Sharon Apple (Hyōdō), the galaxy's most celebrated virtual idol – a holographic AI, visits Eden, while preparing for a major concert on Earth. Unknown to the public, Sharon's programming is incomplete and her emotional responses are covertly supplied by her human producer Myung Fang Lone (Fukami), a childhood friend – and love interest – of both pilots. Their reunion rekindles a love triangle and resurfaces old tensions as the three protagonists share a traumatic, half-suppressed history involving an accident seven years prior. The story enters its climax as Sharon is enhanced with an illegal chip granting her true autonomous consciousness, and her subsequent megalomania – she Hypnotizes thousands at a mass concert and commandeers both the X-9 Ghost and still-standing original gigantic SDF-1 Macross Mecha fortress – forces both Isamu and Guld to set aside their antagonism and cooperate to defeat her and rescue Myung and the hypnotized hostages.
The screenplay by Nobumoto – who had initially conceived the work as a feature film before it was expanded to a four-episode series – drew its central triangular human drama largely from Howard Hawks-style aviation melodrama; Kawamori and action-animator Ichirō Itano undertook research flights at a civilian dogfighting school in California to lend the aerial sequences authenticity, resulting in the photorealistic flight choreography that would become one of the characteristics of later Macross shows. The production represented a watershed moment in Anime technique, combining traditional cel animation with computer-generated imagery in a manner that became a template for subsequent production in the medium. Yoko Kanno's score – recorded in part by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and Prague's Czech Philharmonic – is arguably the production's most celebrated element, encompassing orchestral passages, electronic club music, songs performed in an invented Zentradi language, and the poignant Japanese-language ballad "Voices", sung by Arai Akino. Kanno's work here brought her to wide industry recognition and led directly to her collaboration with Watanabe and Nobumoto on Cowboy Bebop (1998), another major example of works famous in the context of SF Music.
The OVA's engagement with Music as both theme and weapon – Sharon Apple's concerts function as instruments of mind control, her engineered charisma bypassing rational volition to produce mass Hypnosis – is a recurring theme in the Macross franchise, although Macross Plus has much less focus on the Cultural Engineering than the franchise's longer instalments. Its darker and more mature vibe places the story in a long sf tradition of Media Landscape anxieties about the dangers of emotionally manipulative Technology. Sharon is less a conventional malevolent AI than a figure of the entertainment industry's power to colonize inner life: her "feelings", initially borrowed from Myung (who is accordingly left emotionally hollowed out and voiceless; see also Vampire), become, once she is granted autonomous consciousness, a catastrophically amplified version of the parasocial bond between star and audience. In this the OVA anticipates later debates around virtual and holographic performers and the ethics of synthetic celebrity. Questions of Identity, Memory and suppressed guilt – Guld has psychically repressed his own role in the childhood accident – run through the human drama as a structural parallel to Sharon's engineered absence of genuine self.
The rivalry between Isamu and Guld also recalls the competitive ethos of Space Flight and experimental-flight narratives, with a Military SF bent: Guld's YF-21, controlled through direct neural interface, further complicates the human/machine boundary: his Zentradi genetic inheritance makes his biologically-mediated piloting qualitatively different from Isamu's purely human reflex, troubling the series' otherwise conventional valorization of individual, maverick skill (see Cyborgs; Genetic Engineering), while the autonomous drone fighter X-9 Ghost, which would eliminate the need for human pilots altogether, poses questions about Weapons that the show never resolves decisively in favour of the human agency (in fact, later Macross sequels would show AI operated machines operating alongside human pilots).
Within the Macross franchise, Macross Plus is the first canonical sequel to the original series; the Macross 7 series would follow a few months later. The OVA was also rereleased as a 115-minute theatrical compilation film, Macross Plus: Movie Edition (1995), which incorporated approximately twenty minutes of new and alternate animation. Related media include a 1996 prequel novel by Keiko Nomoto, and a Manga adaptation, Macross Plus: TAC Name, by Naoki Moriya and U.G.E (2010-2012 2vols). In Videogames, there was a 1996 arcade vertical-scrolling shooter and later, a PlayStation video game adaptation, Macross Plus -Game Edition- (2000), both released in Japan only. As with other Macross shows, its Mecha and characters also appear in several franchise-spanning works and crossovers, such as Macross 30: Voices across the Galaxy (PS3, 2013).
Macross Plus is among the franchise's most critically admired instalments and is one of the most accomplished Mecha stories of the 1990s; its integration of technical ambition, ambitious visual effects, character-centred drama, emotional depth, mature, thematic seriousness and memorable soundtrack set a benchmark that few Mecha shows surpassed since. It was also one of the key shows that popularized mature OVA storytelling, influencing Western perceptions of anime as more than Children's SF. [PKo]
links
- Internet Movie Database
- Internet Movie Database – Macross Plus: Movie Edition
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