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“Escape Resonance”
What They Say:
The year is 2067. Tactical Sound Unit Walküre performs their songs to quell Vár Syndrome, a strange disease that causes humans to go berserk. Meanwhile, the Aerial Knights, a variable fighter unit of Windermere Kingdom, take action. A story of teamwork and love that transcends star systems unfolds.
Review: (Please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Being a child of Robotech, my connection to the Macross universe is pretty significant and one of the biggest reasons I’m an anime fan. While Robotech was my entry, a fansub of Do You Remember Love in the late 1980s cemented it. But I struggled after that with Macross II, loved Macross Plus, but then struggled again with Macross Zero, and just fell out of it since it was unavailable subtitled for so long. But with Macross Delta on Hulu in the past few years, it’s time to sit down and watch. The 2016 TV series saw Shoji Kawamori serving as the chief director with Kenji Yasuda directing from Toshizo Nemoto’s overall scripts. Satelight handled the animation for this run, which clocks in at twenty-six episodes as a whole after doing a prologue “movie” in 2015 to tease what was coming.
With the core trio of Hayate, Freyja, and Mirage falling into the trip of the Aerial Knights, we get some nice tension there amid the flashiness of the moment. Some face-to-face time is definitely good at this point so that our Walkure folks know what they’re facing more clearly, but you also know it adds its own complications, especially as the guys try to push back and get knocked down pretty quickly. Freya’s in her own predicament beyond that, having been called a traitor, so a lot is just going to ride on the rest of the team to rescue them at some point. But Freya’s got that kind of bravery about her that has her kind of oblivious to the depth of the danger, and her pushing back on the Knights for even harming the apples is both good and comical. It’s very much in character for her, but also just reminds her that she’s not quite understanding the reality of the moment.
The eventual escape goes about as you’d expect, and the second half works through the fight from there while dealing with Windermere. Again, these fights are generally well-animated, but I continue to find the use of the music/song with characters like Freyja to just feel incredibly forced, a twisting of the original concept into something that just feels like it’s purely for marketing and selling goods. It undercuts the impact of the show to me because of that. I know exactly why I feel this way, and even getting a sequence with Freyja getting to step up and sing doesn’t work for me, even as it provides important in the moment in the fight. It’s a pivotal moment that’s changing things that are happening, and makes clear that Freyja will be the key to the series, as if we didn’t know that already, but it just falls with a thud for me with how the series has been so far. It just lacks depth and impact.
In Summary:
I can’t shake the feeling how much Macross Delta reminds me of later Aquarion works. It’s got so many similarities at times that it might as well just be another entry in that franchise than in Macross itself sometimes. This episode works well in every technical sense with good animation, solid fights, and the pivotal moment where people are going to realize that Freyja is more than she already seemed. But with such a light touch on the basics of character and worldbuilding that we’ve had so far, it simply doesn’t have the impact it should and it just kind of flows from you. Again, I don’t think it’s bad per se, but it’s drawing on a lot of elements and ideas that I found to be tired even before this originally came out and they feel even more so now.
Grade: B-
Streamed By: Hulu
Chris Beveridge
http://www.fandompost.com
Chris has been writing about anime, manga, movies and comics for well on twenty years now. He began AnimeOnDVD.com back in 1998 and has covered nearly every anime release that’s come out in the US ever since.
He likes to write a lot, as you can see.
