It’s still March, and there is still Macross. Thus, Macross March continues. This time, we’re taking a look at the franchise’s 25th Anniversary production and third full-size TV anime, 2008’s Macross Frontier.
Our story begins in 2059 – fourteen years after the events of Macross 7, nearly matching their difference in production time. And boy do those years show both in and out of character. Out of character, we’re now looking at a widescreen aspect ratio and animation that’s basically indistinguishable from what you’d see nowadays except that maybe, on the outside, the CGI used for some of the space stuff might not be entirely mature. In character, the titular Macross Frontier is said to be the 25th colonist fleet, and while many of the core ships like the clamshell city and barrel extensions are reproductions of the Macross 7 designs, suggesting that technology that sprung ahead through contact with the Zentradi wasn’t going to make another great leap in less than two decades, the scope and scale of the Frontier fleet is, from the very first shots, well beyond what Macross 7 sold.
But seriously, where are all the people coming from? It’s been 50 years since Earth was massively depopulated and ecologically devastated. Did everyone just get even busier than Max and Milia? And we were somehow able to feed that kind of boom on a world that was only slowly recovering?
Thus, we meet our main characters. In order of appearance they are legendary idol singer Sheryl Nome, who has just arrived at Frontier on tour, since hopping fleets is possible, called the “Galactic Fairy”. Next is Alto Saotome; former kabuki actor, current high school student, and presumable Galactic Pretty Boy set to be part of an opening act at Sheryl’s concert. Finally we have Ranka Lee, a teen girl who works at a Chinese restaurant (because callback to Minmay) and who seems to be Sheryl’s biggest fan.
During the concert, the Frontier is attacked by killer space bugs that come to be known as the Vajra. When one gets in to the city and starts wreaking havoc near the evacuated venue, Alto jumps in a downed Valkyrie and, since it was apparently in good enough repair, pilots it against the monster, saving Ranka in the process, including with a lot of fancy flying that impresses the real soldiers when they know he’s a newbie.
I actually wanted to highlight a couple elements of this bit, even though it is short. First, it’s one place where it’s noticeable that Macross Frontier really wants to call back to older entries, but still makes the scenario its own. There are a number of elements in this sequence that heavily recall Hikaru and Minmay’s meeting during the Zentradi attack at the very start of Super Dimension Fortress Macross. In both cases, the guy is a civilian who has no actual business being in a Valkyrie and who isn’t known to the military folks on the radio. But, rather than Hikaru who ended up in the pilot seat out of happenstance, Alto directly chooses to get in the robot in order to protect people. In both cases, the guy has to carry a girl around in Gerwalk mode, starts out holding her in the robot hand, gets the arm holding her blown off, and has to do a diving save to pull her into the cockpit. But there’s a different pacing to the fight here in Frontier, and the diving save uses the environment by having Ranka fall up towards a hole in the outer shell of the city-ship. The two of them also miss recreating the catch from SDF Macross, instead having Ranka get sucked out of the ship and Alto leap from the cockpit (with tether) to grab her and pull her back to safety from the void (she’s quarter Zentradi, apparently still with some of their vacuum hardiness, so she’s fine with a split second of exposure). The gist of the setup, some of the details, and even some of the shots are clearly trying to call back directly, but the scenes are not the same. This is how you do an homage, at least when you’re as direct as something in the same franchise can be.
Second, while the 2008 CGI is at least a little conspicuous, like you can tell what bits were created with digital means and which were drawn in at least a somewhat traditional fashion, it’s used extremely well here. There are elements I deeply enjoy about good, classical hand-drawn animation, which is impressive in its own right, but there’s a speed, clarity, and fluidity that the creators of Macross Frontier get with the CGI that’s also a worthwhile pursuit. Honestly, the Valkyries and Vajra are animated with a skill that would be rare to see in modern anime, with over a decade and a half of technological development and accumulated industry skill since Frontier. Of special note is the fact that the Valkyries in Frontier have a lot of weight and mechanical solidity to them, hearkening back to their portrayal in Super Dimension Fortress rather than the breezy Macross 7, while moving and probably even transforming faster than their Macross 7 counterparts. This is pretty much the same time Blassreiter came out, and while that show wasn’t bad in terms of applying its CG, Macross Frontier blows it out of the water.
Third and finally, this sequence gets us our very first stereotypical “Accidental boob grab into shriek” moment despite having two whole shows with teen-ish protagonists under our belts. At least they don’t dwell on it. Unlike Hikaru’s VF-01, Frontier Valkyries aren’t two-seaters so there was some uncomfortable re-adjusting in the cockpit once Alto and Ranka were away from danger, and once the second has passed the errant hand amidst that is not mentioned again any more than her bumping the control stick while squirming around. I highlight this not just to sort of shed a light on how standards and expectations have changed over time, bringing the old boob grab joke into fashion as well as, by now, back out of it… but also because this one is a plot point. When Ranka gets emotionally agitated and shrieks, we cut to a long shot of her voice resounding… and the Vajra reacting to it. They hesitate (getting some of the remaining giant biomechanical bugs killed) and retreat for reasons unknown to anyone else but strongly hinted to the audience to be related to Ranka.
Circumstances see all three leads run into each other, and have a somewhat harrowing experience in a later, smaller attack. This being Macross, we can say obviously they’re a love triangle in the making, which starts out with Sheryl and Alto having a chemistry that has some bickering reminiscent of Hikaru and Misa or Basara and Mylene, but with more softer moments and (from Sheryl’s side) teasing. Ranka is much more affable – quickly befriending Sheryl and building rapport with Alto. She gets quite a few good scenes with both her co-stars.
Before this full meeting, Alto got the plot hook that the military wants him and is willing to twist his arm to get him. However, the head of the mercenary group that the pilot he replaced came from steps in and takes charge. This is Ozma, Ranka’s (adopted) big brother. After the crisis, Sheryl and Alto’s support has convinced Ranka to follow her love of singing into the Miss Macross contest (haven’t heard that one before…) while Alto signs on with Ozma to become a mercenary pilot himself. Sheryl is given reasons to keep interacting with Alto, and it’s brought up that Ranka is actually amnesiac, due to the trauma of seeing her family slaughtered by the Vajra – which are still secret – years ago. Her PTSD is clearly not going to go too well now that she knows big bro is still flying rather than having a desk job at his company.
Alto trains, Ranka tries out, and in the end the pageant and Alto’s practical exam end up being at the same time. They even have Ranka sing “My Boyfriend is a Pilot”, admittedly a song everybody would know in-character given how SDF Macross went, while at the same time Alto is in a mock battle dogfight (which is eventually interrupted by a lone Vajra, against which he performs more than well enough to make the grade). Ranka doesn’t win the contest, but she does at least do pretty well for herself, and shortly after she’s scouted to hopefully kick off her singing career.
The show lays on the love triangle aspect fairly heavily, with Sheryl getting flirty enough with Alto that even her manager thinks she might mean something by it and most of Alto’s friends concerned about the topics of both Sheryl and Ranka. It seems like things are going to wrap up, with Sheryl set to give one last performance before returning to her home fleet, but the the news comes across, revealing the Vajra to the populace at large and that said home fleet, Galaxy, has fallen under attack, with its current whereabouts and status unknown.
So, Sheryl is stuck on Frontier for a while, and for Ranka’s part, she can’t stay in her strict girls’ school while doing work… so both of them end up transferring into Alto’s school, of course!
Oddly enough, while Ranka joins the Performing Arts program, Sheryl steps into Piloting as her schedule.
For a while, we get many plot threads running at once. The fight against the Vajra and the hunt for Macross Galaxy continues. There are what appear to be at least two groups of shady folks running around: some mysterious cyborgs who seem to have ties to both Sheryl (whose manager is herself a cyborg, something illegal on Frontier but common on Galaxy, and seemingly the conspiracy leader), and Ranka (who one of them interacts with) on one side and a slimy government-type guy called Leon. And, along with all this, we get episodes for lower deck characters like Alto’s classmate and coworker Mikhail and his Zentradi “It’s complicated” Klan Klang. Since it’s somewhat amusing, the complication seems to be that while Mikhail is a flirt and womanizer, he doesn’t seem to recognize that Klan is into him, and she has a genetic quirk that while she’s quite the bombshell at full scale, she ends up kid-shaped when shifted to Miclone.
The main love triangle’s dynamic is actually really interesting. Ranka’s affection for Alto is very much in the cute and pure bracket, and while she was and remains a fan of Sheryl, she also finds herself getting jealous when Sheryl is able to be very forward with Alto. Sheryl seems to honestly support Ranka and very much root for her… in matters of career. In matters of the heart, she’s more willing to play dirty. In terms of her interactions with Alto, they’re much spicier in both senses: Sheryl will bicker and fight with Alto and often seem like a very tsundere match, but all the same she’ll also steal a kiss if she wants to, even in a fairly public setting that Alto’s going to have trouble playing off… or in view of Ranka, seemingly purposefully. On Alto’s side, I’d complain more about him not getting a hint, but Sheryl is pretty good at mixing her messages, Ranka is fairly timid, and it always feels kind of bad to pick on that anyway. Suffice to say he’s got some good chemistry with the girls; he plays off Sheryl very well, and care for Ranka seems to cut through his otherwise generally sour disposition.
This underscores the next major plot movement. It starts with Alto’s birthday, when three different individuals want his time: a friendly member of his dad’s Kabuki troupe wants him to present himself to be forgiven and rejoin, which does seem to shake Alto a bit. More temptingly, Ranka wants to meet up so she can give him a birthday present in person (home-baked sweets and tickets to her big debut concert is the goal). But then Sheryl, who knows what the travel involved would mean in terms of his schedule, makes Alto an offer he can’t refuse to instead come as her escort to a morale-boosting show for some rowdy Zentradi, meaning he’d be able to fly on a planet with an actual sky (if a tidally locked planet; true earth-likes are very rare in this setting), something that had been a big dream of his.
To his credit, Alto doesn’t entirely stand Ranka up, having one of his friends meet her, which would seem fine presuming he missed the romantic overtones intended. That’s not the end of it, though. When Sheryl arrives, it turns out that the misfit Zentradi fleet is in a far worse place than expected, and her falling ill and not being able to perform immediately is used to spark a mutiny.
As news of this gets back to Frontier, though, Ranka decides to risk her debut in order to team up with their other mercenary classmates and take an experimental faster Fold drive to go sing in Sheryl’s place, calming the rank and file and saving Alto as part one of his birthday present.
When Alto and Ranka try to leave to get back to Frontier, though, something sinister happens, grounding the Valkyrie they’re in near the wreck of a Macross class ship… one that has ties to Ranka’s lost memories. There, they find that it’s been used as a research lab for the Vajra, and that there’s a Vajra hive along with it. The hive takes off as a mothership and fleet, abducting Ranka with them, while Sheryl’s manager goes openly hostile and sets off some sort of void bomb that seems poised to wreck the whole planet they’re on, with Sheryl herself explicitly meant to be a casualty for some reason. She gets out, like the other named characters, following the Vajra through a Fold… right to Frontier.
Macross has a quota for planetary devastation to meet
The defensive battle is hard pressed, but ultimately Ranka, in the depths of the hive fleet, manages to awake something inside herself that contacts the Vajra consciousness with her song, disrupting them enough for Alto and the cyborg ace to get in, rescue her, and start blowing up the Vajra fleet, bringing Ranka to tears as it seems slaughter is unavoidable on one side or the other.
After a recap segment that’s actually somewhat interesting and informative (it’s told from the point of view of Sheryl’s manager, who it turns out is just a proxy for an entire council of digital intellects who can pilot the body and who detail how they masterminded things up to this point, albeit being surprised by Ranka’s status as the “little queen” or Q-1), we get more engagement with the cloak and dagger stuff, as the cyborgs and their military co-conspirator move to control Ranka and burn Sheryl.
On the former objective, the cyborg who had been managing Sheryl takes over managing Ranka, while the cyborg fighter is placed as her bodyguard. Since they’re now open with the fact that her songs can influence the Vajra, they rewrite what had been her main song – “Aimo” – from being a haunting expression of beautiful imagery into a militaristic anthem and have her go out and perform live, which works pretty well.
Unlike Macross 7 this isn’t through firing magic sound lasers that work in space, but rather through a mechanism that’s kept mysterious for the time being, but is implied to be that something about Ranka allows her to basically hack the Fold-based communication the Vajra must use for their own hive mind, possibly along with the fact that the corpses of Vajra can be processed to recover “Fold Quartz”, crystals that promise to make FTL navigation radically faster and easier which the conspiracy is eager to harvest.
The experience leaves Ranka… conflicted. She’s told she’s helping save the day, becoming the Frontier’s light of hope, but witnessing battle and slaughter leaves her shaken.
Meanwhile, on Sheryl’s side, we learn that her health problems aren’t just bitter overwork. She’s sick, and has been sick for a long time, with medication managing her symptoms but not actually treating the cause since the illness in question, called V-Type Infection, is both incurable and terminal. Now, though, she’s either past such help or being abjectly denied. Either way, cyborg manager (also her original doctor) is content, even gleeful, to abandon her to die.
We then get the part where everything goes to hell in a handbasket. After fighting off the Vajra and making a large-distance Fold away, the fleet seems safe. However, it turns out it’s actually infested with Vajra larvae, who call their fleet while swarming the Frontier like flies. During the chaos, the Leon offs the president and assumes authority, while Ozma and his old flame are forced into hiding, and Mikhail dies protecting Klan while she size changes for the mission. In the aftermath, Ranka finds her little mascot critter as it metamorphoses into a second-stage Vajra. However, it’s still friendly to her, and she has a tearful break with Alto as she goes on her mission to take the little guy home.
The cyborg soldier, Brera, helps her out even when Alto won’t understand, because he appears to have divided loyalties between the scheming cyborg group and Ranka personally. In the wake of her departure, Sheryl is scouted by the government. It seems that her V-Type infection (which is founded in Vajra-borne bacteria) reaching her brain and thus terminal condition allows her to do something approximating what Ranka was capable of. With her on board, more or less, Leon offs the cyborg in order to solidify control, but we know she can handle losing a body or two, so that clearly was not going to work out for him even if she didn’t take out the hit squad. Also not liable to work out for him is that Ozma gets back into contact with our hero mercenaries, and they prepare to strike out on their own rather than being folded into the military, becoming space pirates.
This does not include Alto or his remaining classmate, leaving them on Frontier. It won’t be long for a reunion though, as Ranka’s quest has led her to the Vajra homeworld – a habitable planet and thus the ultimate prize in this universe, which our cyborgs and the Frontier government now know the whereabouts of.
Ranka’s mission gets her captured, and the conspiracy takes control of Brera, stripping him of free will even as he realizes that he was Ranka’s brother all along. On the Frontier, Alto faces the final preparations for war, while Sheryl indulges in some moments of “live-in girlfriend” before what she fully expects to be her inevitable death.
Thus we get the full explanation of things and the final battle: The cyborg conspiracy wants to establish a human group intellect but with the ability to hijack it, modeled off the Vajra hive mind. Ranka, who was infected with V-type (Vajra bacteria that regulate their hive mind’s Fold communication, recall) in utero is capable of interfacing with both species, and her capture and brainwashing gives the cyborgs control of the Vajra right as Frontier comes in for a last ditch effort to take the Vajra planet, being out of resources due to all of the damaging combats otherwise.
Thus, Frontier goes in with Sheryl singing the way, which works only until brainwashed Ranka offers her own song to bolster the Vajra. Team Pirate shows up and turns the tides, resulting in a quick and anticlimactic ousting of Leon and Ranka being freed from control, but not before the cyborg leader integrates herself with the Vajra queen to become the ultimate life-form and kick off a final battle across the galaxy.
Unfortunately for her, she doesn’t use her first move to take out Ranka, and Ranka is in position to match her. For an encore, Ranka uses her Vajra powers to turn Sheryl’s V-Type into a symbiosis like her own, meaning it’s two on one. The duet even allows the Vajra to finally understand that humans are thinking, communicating creatures despite not being a hive mind, and boy are they pissed at what the cyborgs are up to, while Brera was freed from evil control after being hit a little. Thus, it’s everyone against the corrupted queen, and we get an epic fight breaking through the defenses to cut the cyborg mastermind out like a tumor and blow her to hell.
Thus, the crippled Frontier is allowed to land on the Vajra planet as it seems most of the Vajra are willing to shove off to another galaxy entirely if they have to, earning a home for Sheryl and Ranka (who are all set to compete for that unresolved love triangle for real) and a sky for Alto. The end.
Macross Frontier is… great. It’s a good show from start to finish. It’s got stunning action, a plot that’s so well-woven it’s actually difficult to summarize, great characters, beautiful music… honestly, it’s harder to find fault in it than something to praise.
One thing I think is especially strong is how the creators know how much they have to tell. For an example, I want to use the song “Aimo”. It’s one of the first songs introduced in the show, with Ranka singing it in an early episode before she’s even become an idol, a haunting melody with lyrics that are half untranslated and half beautiful imagery. It’s strong and memorable, but still just feels like something she’d sing for a moment of melancholy beauty. Later, it’s revealed that Aimo is the only memory Ranka has of her mother, and it also proves to be the song that has the strongest effect on the Vajra. When the cyborgs are managing Ranka, they write an alternate version, where the lyrics are switched out from ones of natural beauty to a hymn of war calling soldiers to victory. And it’s clear that this hurts Ranka… but she never says it hurts her. She gives her all singing it for the fleet, but you can see it in her animation, and understand from how she questions her path around those moments, that she’s not comfortable with the situation. At the very end, we hear that the song is actually connected to the Vajra themselves, being (presumably adapted from) their “love song” for other minds they hoped to find, which Ranka’s mother learned while initially researching the Vajra, before the cyborgs betrayed her and everything went to hell. It’s a footnote, but really pins down that the song itself, like a character, has an entire arc.
Other examples are all over Frontier. Every note is where it needs to be, and the writing knows that the viewer can really soak in the atmosphere and be carried along by the story without being bludgeoned over the head with it.
I said at the start of Macross March that Macross, as a franchise, is usually regarded as being less doggedly anti-war than Gundam. Which isn’t hard, and doesn’t mean that those notes aren’t there in pretty much every entry, seeing as by Frontier we’re three for three on music and mutual understanding being the real key to any sort of lasting “victory”. But it’s addressed with subtlety. Several times, when questioned, Alto indicates his belief that it’s us or them with regards to the Vajra, and he’s not really called out on it. Not directly. But the framing of the scenes suggests there’s more to it, that he’s arrived at an incorrect answer. When he can’t let go of his hatred in the face of evidence it causes the big split with Ranka from which precipitates the whole ending, but at the same time you do understand where he’s coming from, having had to, extremely recently, watch a good friend be killed by the bugs. Of course he’s angry, he’s grieving.
Sheryl, for her part, walks an interesting tight-rope as a character. She can be harsh, and her introduction in particular…
Let’s just say she leaves herself a long way up to climb. Despite that, I know she’s a common favorite, and I can absolutely see why. Both she and Basara from Macross 7 have the ego you would expect out of a big-time star. Sheryl actually is a major star at the beginning of the show, and unlike Basara she can show other sides, grow, change, and express a likable energy and charisma that makes it clear why people would enjoy her on and off stage.
In fact, let’s compare and contrast 7 and Frontier for a moment, because I think it’s an interesting topic. Now, Macross Frontier does, in reality, exist in a world that already had Macross 7. It even references it a couple times, with Ozma in particular being a huge fan of Fire Bomber. But the references to 7 in Frontier are mostly passing acknowledgments as opposed to its homages to Super Dimension Fortress and even larger references to Macross Zero, which I have not yet covered.
In the end, it really feels like Macross 7 and Macross Frontier could have been submissions by different students for the same class project. The project? Here’s Super Dimension Fortress Macross and some vague notes on what the setting is like in a few decades, create a sequel. And from there, they went entirely different directions.
Macross 7 looked at the history of Robotech and clearly thought “Well, they worked SDF Macross into what was basically a Saturday Morning Cartoon, so why don’t I lean into that?”. So Macross 7 was bright and colorful. It was extremely episodic, with plenty of filler and repetition. It decided that its characters – particularly its main hero – didn’t need or want backstories and relied on powerful, archetypical characters. It had any concept of “science fiction” take a back seat to a fantastical story, and allowed rule of cool to take the wheel. In that sense, it succeeded, even if I think the final product was weaker.
Macross Frontier saw SDF Macross more as a space opera, and wanted to have the next one be bigger and better. It kept in things like Human-Zentradi relations being less than total integration that 7 mostly dropped, it addressed the realities of living in a generation ship both in terms of emerging cultural strains and the problems when an ecosystem in a bottle starts to suffer losses. It brought us not just a new foe but an extremely different one, expanding from “Hostile alien forces that can be converted by the power of music” to a bug monster hive mind that doesn’t look like that and the cyborg conspiracy that presents a threat – not just an obstacle – from within humanity with a real meaty scheme. It evolved its characters, and told a tight story the whole way through, working the show into a timeless epic like Super Dimension Fortress but larger and more expansive.
It’s a much stronger direction, and the execution is not something I can fault.
If I have any problem with Macross Frontier, and understand that I’m reaching hard to find something, it would probably be that there are a couple subplots that don’t quite land. The tangle around Leon is probably the biggest one. We have this setup where there’s sort of a secondary love triangle. The president’s daughter, Caitlin, is a military officer. She’s engaged to Leon, but has Ozma as what seems to be an old flame, with an unspecified break in the past. Gradually, she begins seeing Leon for the wormy guy he is, and falling more in with Ozma once again. Then Leon does his power grab, offing her dad and basically forcing her and Ozma into exile since they tried to confront him with evidence of his wrongdoing a little late.
But… Leon doesn’t really do much lifting as a secondary antagonist. I guess in theory he gets the Cyborgs access to more of Frontier than they would have had otherwise. Once he takes over he… pretty much makes sane choices, and tries to run Frontier right even if he is a jerk. It’s clear that he’s a ruthless person who will use anything he has, but by then Frontier is behind the eight-ball, so that’s not a stand that’s uniquely villainous. In fact, several characters we want to root for both work for him willingly (if not knowing his crimes) and express a similar conviction to do what has to be done for mankind. I think you could have dropped his entire concept and just had the Cyborgs pulling strings with the powerful tech they can offer.
Another one would be the bad blood between Alto and his family. Much is made of this backstory where he comes from a line of Kabuki actors, and was even really good himself (specifically focused on playing female parts) until he up and quit to be a pilot… but little is really done with it. One of the other students of the troupe, someone Alto was close enough to that he refers to this guy as his brother, tries repeatedly to get Alto to come back, having these conversations that seem inclined to shake either Alto, the audience, or both where he goes on about how Alto was born to be an actor and is just “playing the role” of pilot. But Alto rebuffs him every time, never seems to actually reflect on it, never really gets over the estrangement from his father on his side even if we do see a tiny cut in the final episodes where it looks like dad now accepts Alto’s choice… it’s this big part of his character in terms of what we’re told but I’m not sure how much would change or be missed if you cut it.
If you’re being generous, there might be some general theme of biological determinism, especially in something like the latter parts, where we worry if the Vajra are inherently adversarial to man or “evil” from birth and thus okay to go exterminating. But the through line between wanting to answer that “no” and Alto rejecting being an actor because he was born to an acting family is weak at best.
That said, there clearly are reasons for these arcs; the Leon material is at least entertaining in its own right while the Alto material gives him some texture right at the start. These aren’t bad problems, especially not in a show where pretty much everything does tie together very well.
With all that I’ve said, I’m giving Macross Frontier an A+. If you only have time and energy for one Macross experience, this is the one to go for.