The legacy of the franchise still resonates today, if only through secondhand references – usually via the funky, out-of-context Vaporwave AMV, which inserts its dream-like, cel-shaded imagery into something somehow imaginary and half-remembered, like the answer to a trivia question to test your mecha street credentials. Street Cred- I’ll be the first to admit that I’m slowly working on avoiding deficiencies in the anime department.
After being vaguely aware for almost 30 years of my life macros plus Even though most people said this anime, as old as I am, was a certified classic, I finally took a page from the playbook of its rough pilot and saw for myself what the four-episode OVA was talking about.
I came into the OVA expecting a dark patch of mecha anime technology to light up like a map in a video game. well-organized, large-scale robots; RAD analog technology; And the elegy characters and mech designs are all laudable hallmarks of the era. What I found was far more profound: the ecstatic human suffering of dreaming, a mournful work of art wrestling with the technology that dares to dream. For We all gave a hopeful message to the dreamers of the future in our final frame, which brought tears to my eyes.
in its heart, macros plus It’s a love story – in the literal sense and in the romantic, smaller sense, it treats dreams as something sacred. Set in the not-too-distant future of 2040, three decades after a great war between humanity and an alien race, it follows a fractured love triangle of three wayward friends: hotshot pilot Isamu (Bryan Cranston – yes, that Bryan Cranston), his rival in the skies and in love, Guld (Richard Epcar), and Myung (Riva Spear), the woman they both loved and once swore to protect.
The OVA starts off innocently enough as Guld and Isamu come back into each other’s lives as test pilots for Project Super Nova, a prototype jet mech designed to protect the colony world of Eden. But the story really takes off when Myung re-enters the picture.
For millions of fans, Myung – my personal favorite of the trio – is the creator behind Sharon Apple, a virtual idol akin to Hatsune Miku dancing three-way fusion with Michael Jackson and Taylor Swift. Walking the runway’s red carpet, Sharon poses in a dress with nothing more than a halved-sized black box atop a mannequin. But when she hits the stage, she becomes everyone’s dream digital icon. It is its cultural cache that changes the world.
The secret behind Sharon’s tremendous success is what I like to call advanced evil. You see, they have an uncanny ability to sense the emotional state of their audiences, a feat that their handlers monitor through the most dystopian form of algorithmic surveillance imaginable: festival wristbands that measure every spike of emotion and precisely tune their siren song for the listening pleasure of their loved ones.
As if the trio’s unresolved drama from seven years ago wasn’t messed up enough, we learn that Sharon Apple isn’t just a sophisticated Vocaloid program – she’s an AI on the verge of autonomy, something like HAL 9000, but somewhat worse. How? Well, it oppresses Myung by having an illegal neural implant living rent-free in his brain. And As Myung pours out her emotions to perform the songs she once sang for the men she loved, she also plans to go rogue on a global scale. And now that she’s gone rogue, Sharon has focused on expanding her cult of personality by hijacking a secret military AI microship and claiming Isamu for herself.
Sharon Apple’s Volakoid mind control works so well that millions of mesmerized fans and military personnel alike fail to notice her giant hologram, projected on a giant mech looming above their fair city, firing missiles into the sky like fireworks.
But the scariest thing about Sharon isn’t the Skynet-impending apocalypse she’s announcing. It’s that she believes she is helping. Worse, she insists that she will dream for us, as if it’s a pity – a sentiment that lands with a frightening clarity in 2026. She steals Myung’s songs, tries to seduce his position, and threatens to erase the thing that makes Isamu special to Myung: his tireless, carefree, beautiful dream of flying freely in the sky.
It’s true that its final episode explodes with all the bombast and decadent animation you’d expect from a frankly ridiculous lineup of anime legends – chief among them Shoji Kawamori, Shinichiro Watanabe, Hideki Anno, Yoko Kanno, and the late Keiko Nobumoto. But what confused me was the way the anime bookended its miraculously realized epic by reaching through space and time for today’s dreamers, urging them to keep fighting the good fight so that its story endures. Not as a future-proof prediction of how ready we will be in 14 years, but as a hopeful belief in our ability to get everything right.
While I’m not entirely sure we can live up to the film’s trustworthiness, I can’t help but hope that we’re worthy of the final frames it leaves.
you can see macros plus On Hulu.
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