Toshio Okada, the former president of Gainax, expressed dissatisfaction with the screenplay for Hiroyuki Yamaga's Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise. And I would have to agree; the screenplay is all over the place. There aren’t really rising or falling actions. Things just happen. This, of course, would be fine if the film wasn't an introspective character study. But the film is a coming of age story and there are multiple montages of him training and preparing for his space flight. So the audience's expectations for a more straight-forward narrative are foiled by plot threads that are introduced and just fade away (like the terrorist bombings) and characters who die off-screen. This is a real shame because Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise is admirably ambitious. It addresses an idea that I can’t say I’ve ever really seen before in a film, animated or otherwise: the battle between scientific pragmatism and scientific idealism. The animation is nothing short of stunning; some of the backgrounds are so realistic that I literally thought they were real-life sets with animated cels projected on top of them. But before this review can end, I must address the elephant in the room: the attempted rape scene. To be fair, it is actually telegraphed. But it still doesn’t make a lot of sense in the context of the character and its resolution promotes this weird narrative about how women are saintly if they forgive their attackers. After that scene, the protagonist is practically unredeemable, at least in the eyes of the audience.
6/10
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