Aeronautical worlds, while hardly unknown in fantasy, often feel kind of fresh and magical. Maybe it’s just easy to make the sky – and mysteries in it – seem magical, especially in visual media that can give you vast sweeping shots of cloudscapes or a good sense of motion. Miyazaki’s love of flying scenes is well known (with Castle in the Sky being perhaps a template for the aerial fantasy), but you get other properties that dive into it like Granblue Fantasy, Skies of Arcadia, Last Exile, or this week’s topic, The Pilot’s Love Song.
Like most of these sorts of works, The Pilot’s Love Song doesn’t take place in a world of really modern or futuristic aviation, but one where different paths have created a sort of retro-futuristic look and feel that would easily have the “-punk” label applied if it were ever dirty enough to earn it, which oddly enough is seldom the case. I don’t know if anybody has coined “Skypunk” but if that is a thing maybe the aesthetic is just on the cleaner end.
We’re made aware of this in the opening scene, featuring a massive dogfight between prop planes (most of which seem technologically somewhere between the offerings of the world wars, though at least some seem to have tiltrotor designs that read as more fantastical)… and a massive flying battleship. But this largely out-of-context violence serves to do little more than get you ready for the world that this show will be taking place in.
Our story begins proper by introducing… quite a few characters really, but our lead is Kal-el. He’s not the last son of Krypton, but rather a young goofball seen first interacting with his adoptive family, sister Ariel and father Michael. We do learn pretty quickly that he is some kind of deposed prince, though. Of those relations, the former is the more important as Ari will be joining him on the big adventure they’re setting out on: training on the floating island of Isla and, with its journey, attempting to reach the “end of the sky”.
On the floating island, Kal ends up running into mysterious cutie Claire Cruz. They start laying things on pretty heavy in good time.
But, at least to begin with, there seems to be a pretty big rank disparity getting in the way, with commoner Kal not even being able to go to the same part of the island where the blueblood Claire lives. Okay, nice setup: one episode in and we have the basis of the romance we’d expect from the title and a reason it doesn’t sew itself up without giving us some strife worth watching. But wait, there’s more.
At Pilot High School, Kal quickly lands himself with his very own Draco Malfoy type bully (named Fausto) from the Nobles’ class, while still managing to partner up with dear Claire as his co-pilot (leaving Ari with mysterious white-haired grump Ignacio).
After spending some time indulging in that history of Kal as a deposed prince (who was smuggled out by his jailers since nobody was willing to behead a little kid, and the people in charge of him didn’t take well to the rebel scheme of poisoning him slowly to death with “no one to blame”) and his vendetta with Nina Viento, a priestess who controls wind and did so at “weapon of mass destruction” levels to topple the imperial authority, we get more of Fausto being a jerk.
The bad behavior he displays manages to drive Kal (and Claire) off course, leaving them stranded in their plane on the open sea with a storm coming in.
Naturally this results in the two getting quite a bit closer. Claire even briefly suspects Kal’s real identity, before writing it off that he’s supposed to be dead. (though she will get the idea again in the future). I guess the guy still can’t keep a secret, as Ari apparently put two and two together shortly after he was introduced to the family. At the end of it, we find a twist in this otherwise saccharine love drama: meek and mild Claire lives a double life as Nina Viento, the same figure Kal has sworn vengeance upon. To be fair, they don’t look a lot alike, thanks to a white wig for “Nina”, presumably a lot of makeup, and certainly a fair bit of acting the part. Later on, we get that she was traumatized into accepting the role and also no longer has magic, reinforcing the idea that the whole voyage is just a disposal mechanism for troublesome people according to the new government.
This doesn’t do much right away since, of course, Kal doesn’t get to know at this juncture. So surely there must be something else to give this show some bite, right? Well, by one thing and another four months of the voyage pass and the floating island arrives as its first and last landmark before “the end of the sky”, a place known as The Holy Spring. It’s said once someone passes that point, the “Sky Clan” will attack.
Still, from the first distant sighting of potentially enemy ships, it takes more time puttering around with the kids running a ramen restaurant, Kal and Claire getting shippy, and a lower deck ship with the girly girl and fat guy moving suspiciously fast.
Then, everything changes when the Sky Clan attacks.
Like proper enemies, they quickly outmaneuver the pigheaded administration’s maneuvers. The students are ordered into the air to perform recon, which the Fat guy/girly girl pair does all too well, spotting a bomber wing but getting poor fat guy killed lighting it up for the real fighters. I know we’re supposed to feel really sorry for him and his beloved girly girl, but they had one scene the episode before and other than that were basically set dressing, maybe a joke. It’s not the worst death to lead off with, as he wasn’t literally a faceless extra, but for the time it’s given it doesn’t have the weight of, say, Roy Focker’s death in Macross. Or even Kakizaki, the kind of hefty subordinate to Hikaru in said other show. The Pilot’s Love Song goes for a more operatic framing, but in this particular case that doesn’t work in its favor.
The battle proper reaches the floating island. During it, most of the trainees are slaughtered (even the bully, who would normally live for future antagonizing). Claire gets called away (with bodyguard Ignacio), so Kal ends up flying with Ari, and giving her some very passionate words when she’s injured. This buys us in to a love triangle frankly a little late in the game.
In the mourning that follows, we get a lot of down-time. Claire chooses angst, rejecting Kal after their true identities are revealed to each other in the most awkward way possible.
In this time, we also learn that Ari supposedly won’t be able to fly any more and is transferring to mechanic, before Ignacio hauls Kal out of his moping to beat the snot out of him. Ignacio tells Kal he’s an idiot, and there’s little chance to process that before the Sky Clan renews their attack. The students (what’s left of them) are called into battle, and while their commander recommends deserting, the boys refuse, leading to Kal and Ignacio being back in the air while Claire as the now-powerless Nina acts as figurehead over her broken heart.
We get one good episode of aerial dogfights, culminating in Kal and Claire reconciling from a distance at which they shouldn’t be able to hear each other, and Claire’s healed heart restoring her wind powers to rout the enemy just before some allied forces show up.
The next episode plays us out, with the Sky Clan being willing to negotiate: safe passage in exchange for the wind-calling girl, who is some kind of messiah in their culture. The trade is made, sending Claire off to an unknown fate, but Kal promises that no matter how long it takes, he’ll both reach the End of the Sky and return to her.
Sure enough, reaching the End of the Sky doesn’t take long. It’s either six months from the treaty or in general (it was four months from launch to Sky Clan), I think the former, but either way the character models don’t have to change when they witness a giant rainbow wall at the edge of the world, into which the (evacuated) floating island flies to its ultimate destruction.
And, if you thought this show might end there, ambiguously hopeful… no, the writers who have been obsessed with taking it slow aren’t going to cut before they’re good and done. Instead, it’s time for international politics! Kal’s true identity is revealed as part of a scheme on the parts of the authorities who were sent on this suicide mission to topple the already ineffectual and corrupt revolutionary government and create a stronger future united with those random allies they found, and on Kal’s part to get an army to go rescue Claire.
Since people like drama, it works at least in getting a mission to rescue Claire greenlit. We putter a little with some last failed pathos about Ari as a losing heroine, the other obvious couples resolving, and then Kal and his fleet flying into battle against the Sky Clan, even shooting down the one ace they badly established before. The last bit has Claire’s voice come across the wind as she speaks to Kal from the advanced city of the Sky Clan and Kal promises they’ll be together. Thus, we end… hopefully ambiguous anyway. Honestly, the last episode was not needed.
But then, a lot of this show wasn’t needed. This is honestly one that I think might have been hurt by the transition between media types. When you get down to it, there’s a fantastical world to explore, action, romance, and pretty significant drama. It should be primed to be a good mix. The problems are mostly down to pacing, where some subplots and character moments seem to drag on and on while others don’t get the time they need. In a book (which this originally was), pacing issues are more forgiving in general, and I could easily see several of the characters coming off a good deal better, either because they’d get more scenes to give us depth or because the scenes they do have would be better leveraged to make us interesting.
But, I am an anime reviewer. I have to limit myself to what is on screen, and not what might be in some better version, original or otherwise. The times when I can cogently comment on the source material are bonuses, not the meat of any given topic.
In the anime, the biggest problem is the central romance between Claire and Kal. It’s dull. There are the parts in play to make it not dull, but they aren’t used in the ways that would work. As it is, Kal falls for Claire with preposterous rapidity, and Claire mostly plays the soft-spoken shrinking violet.
To the material’s credit, when we get Claire’s backstory episode and after, she starts to show a good deal more spine and become a more intriguing character in her own right, but by that point she and Kal are pretty set because, again, they click really quickly.
To step into the land of speculation once again, what if Claire knew Kal’s identity from the beginning? We see that Revolutionary forces put him on the island to get rid of him, so clearly people do actually know. What if she expressed actual reticence because of her guilt from the very start, and we had to learn (as Kal does) why she needed to come out of a serious shell. Kal taking longer to have truly romantic interactions with Claire would help as well. What if he were first drawn to her because she seems like the kind of person who needs a hand or protection, and not because he seems to get the hots for her right away? That would give Ari more wiggle room rather than having her try to horn in on a resolved romantic plot (a shame, because she’s one of the best developed characters in the show), and make watching the early scenes with Kal and Claire less soporific because you would see the chemistry building rather than it taking hold right away.
I sort of come to the episode where the two get stranded on the ocean because that Malfoy-esque jerk decided to mess with them. It’s very reminiscent of the episode of Knights of Sidonia where Tanikaze and Hoshijiro are trapped adrift and alone in space getting to know each other. That episode feels deserved and strong because it’s what establishes their bond, something that the rest of the show needs to use and something that it doesn’t have much time for given what transpires in the next major engagement. In The Pilot’s Love Song, Claire and Kal are already pretty close. Maybe they get closer, but Kal was such a happy puppy around Claire already that it’s hard to tell. She almost guesses his identity at that point, but she draws back from it, so nothing really changes on her side either.
These were two episodes that needed to do very similar things, but one of them was shot in the foot by the fact that the setup had gone too far, too well, too easily. Conflict is the basis of any story: wants have to be in opposition to each other, or there needs to be trouble achieving them. And it’s missing from The Pilot’s Love Song until the Sky Clan shows up, unless you count an extremely weak cardboard bully, which I wouldn’t.
For that matter, Kal says a few times that he agreed to his participation in the mission for a chance at revenge against Nina Viento… but he never schemes anything, tries to learn about her, or takes a shot. I think there might be enough gutterballs in this show to finish a round of bowling.
Once the Sky Clan shows up, things are a little better, but the show still takes more downtime than it probably needs. It’s a weird complaint – I often want shows to take more downtime, and express their characters better. But I think the critical issue is that this downtime isn’t very well used. We have an entire episode with the commoner trainees running a restaurant, and it’s really not worth much. We don’t learn much about the characters, we don’t see many fun interactions. We already knew they had a community spirit, we already knew Ari was a really good cook, and they don’t even use the fact that the kids brought in absurd numbers of money. Contrast this with the class running a restaurant in Assassination Classroom and it’s night and day.
At the end of it all, I’m going to give The Pilot’s Love Song a D. It honestly bored me. Its romance was trite, its characters were mostly flat, its fantastical world got surprisingly little work, and its sky battles while really well done were few and back-loaded. Some creative ideas or no, this is one to skip.