Macross Zero (2002–2004) User Reviews

Good stuff

[Bungle-9 · 9/10 · 13 March 2005]

After watching Macross Plus, I was very interested in having a look at other anime series bearing the Macross name. Macross Plus is one of my favourite anime series of all time, so I thought it would be hard to top. After discovering Kawamori had made another Macross mini-series, Macross Zero, I was really looking forward to seeing it, and I have to say I wasn't disappointed. At the very least, this mini-series is, for my part, well on par with the Macross Plus series. Both had a very memorable main song that will have you humming it for a good while after watching it.

Parts are funny, parts are heartwarming and parts are incredibly emotional and sad. Oh, and let's not forget the fantastic action sequences. The blend of CG and cel animation was interesting, and one didn't intrude too much on the other's turf. One thing though - I really hate the way that characters don't finish sentences, for example they might say "Is that..." or "That's...." etc. This is a typical anime trait that I'm not fond of, but given all the plus points of the series I am more than willing to overlook this annoyance.

Thoroughly recommended if you are a Macross fan, but if you haven't seen any Macross stuff before you might want to go over the history of the series by looking at the older ones first. That way you will get the most out of this gem of an anime.

My First True Macross Experience

[kevingamin-1 · 9/10 · 22 May 2005]

As I am from the United States, my first exposure to the world that is Macross actually came from Robotech, the combination of three anime titles: Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada. While there were some similarities to the original Macross storyline, between the Americanization of the story and the new English dialog, I don't consider that my first exposure to REAL Macross, although it did get me interested in the original anime.

I recently had the opportunity to watch Macross Zero, a 5-part OVA (direct-to-video) prequel to Macross. I was just going to watch one episode at a time and decide if I enjoyed it or not. I ended up watching the entire story in one afternoon.

The animation in Macross Zero is nothing short of stunning. The use of CGI animation with "old school" 2D animation is almost seamless and there are sequences which will just cause your jaw to drop (Roy Focker's first transformation of his VF-0 to Battloid is a prime example).

The story, however, is not as strong. Part 5 of the series seems to suffer from a need for a part 6. Too many plot lines are resolved in the final episode in an unsatisfactory manner. The viewer is expected to assume the causes of some of the events seen at the beginning of part 5 which were not even hinted at in earlier episodes. The story is still quite entertaining, but it just loses cohesiveness at the end.

The music is either good or bad. Actually, it is either extremely good or extremely bad. The battle sequences have a soundtrack which just draws you into the action. If you're REALLY crazy, you could even take the battle sequence music and plop into any Hollywood dogfight footage from the past 30 years. It's that good. On the other hand, incidental music for other non-combat moments is sub par at best, especially one of the main themes (don't know the name, sorry). You'll know the one I'm talking about, though, for two reasons:

1) There's a real high note which the singer just CANNOT hit, always comes up short.

2) Obligatory naked anime chick in the scene where the music is used. What is it with this obsession with naked women in anime, anyway?

This is a series which I will want to watch over and over (not for the naked chick - get your mind out of the gutter). I would even put money down for the soundtrack, although only for certain tracks. Too bad iTunes doesn't have an anime soundtrack section.

A series worth watching

[bhermann-40608 · 7/10 · 31 March 2020]

This series involves a pilot crash-landing on an island where he meets a stern priestess and fire-spirited island, with the pilot learning that the island and its inhabitants have a secret linking them to the mysterious Protoculture alien spaceship. Of the Macross franchise, this is one of my favorites. I would say it is better than some of the others and deserves the current rating, especially due to the obvious criticism of colonialism and its ill effects on people.

back for good

[chris_scherer · 4 April 2003]

A prequel to tthe eighties "Macross" series ? It could have been junk, but asides of some lackluster animation and stylistic differences between the traditional cell animation (characters, bgs) and non-ILM-quality CG (dogfights, mecha) it´s quite probably one of the finest first episodes I´ve seen in some time. Rumored to be a 5-part series, it deals with several interesting issues: UN forces unifiyng the world under one government to oppose alien invasion, anti-unificationists rebelling with superior mecha, anthropological research beginning to suspect mankind is genengineered by aliens, Roy Fokker (hero of the original series) testing the first production run VFs (modernized decently and visualized with one of the most beautiful transformation sequences ever)...and our hero is stranded not only on an island, but also without any distinctive political opinion.

Technically great stuff, good writing, decent humor, interesting characters bearing some resemblance to the original "Rick Hunter" character, a youth shaped by the conflicts around him.

confusing prequel to the Macross saga

[heero_yuy2 · 3/10 · 6 April 2005]

I've been waiting for another Macross series or movie coming up to reinstate its own strong genre in the anime industry, but i found it disappointing in this new prequel.

1999. The year when an alien craft from space fell on earth, nations tremble upon knowing they are not alone in the universe, and different factions wage war upon the search for the ultimate weapon related to alien technology. Shin Kudo, a Un-Spacey pilot of an F-14-like aircraft fell to an island after having being shot by anti-UN fighter plane/mecha. He met the ancestral villages of a certain island led by Sara Noome as a girl with mystical powers that enable to float organic rocks through a song. After Shin's discovery of the mysticism, certain UN-Spacey troops landed on the island for related underground research that led also to more attacks and casualties by the anti-UN...and an unearthing revelation of a massive organic weapon 10,000 years buried beneath the island that may wipe out the whole human civilization.

There were some points on the need to expand the Macross saga (amidst the non-inclusion of Kawanori's Minmay-Hikaru-Misa trilogy due to the copyright restraints) but it still cannot save the fact about the more details pertaining to one of the most viable weapon used in the whole Macross saga...the SDF-1. There is still no conclusion as to where the detailed origin of the space fortress being inclusive and informed in the prequel, and how the whole world had united to form the defense attacks prior to the first encounters with the Zentraedi. Furthermore, the good points goes to the relation of Protoculture origin through relations with the Mayan Civilization, and to the adaptability of evolving designs that leads to the famous VF-1.

The prequel answers the crave for wanting to watch a new Macross saga, but after watching it, it's still lacks relative detail to the original story.

It's candy: Tasty, but ultimately unfulfilling.

[mahatmarandy · 25 November 2006]

Don't get me wrong, I love anything Macross-related, and this isn't a total disaster: the animation is beautiful, particularly in the dogfights, there's some nice humor here and there, some pulse pounding action and so forth, though the musical score struck me as rather generic and bland, and there's much to praise in the beautifully-realized transforming mecha, that's all great stuff.

Alas, the story is goofy and the conclusion is incoherent. Young Buck Pilot crash lands on a Polynesian island that's populated by Aztecs (Or maybe it was Mayans). Excuse me? Turns out the Aztecs were experimented on 10,000 years ago by aliens they called "The Birdmen," and the priestly bloodline in these Polynesian Aztecs (Or Mayans) have the ability to psychically control various Birdmen artifacts left behind, including a machine that will wipe out all of humanity if we haven't figured out how to control our more base instincts (Violence, hate) by the time it's activated. Well, despite what Thor Heyerdahl wrote, neither Mayans nor Aztecs were Polynesian, and Polynesians are no mesoamericans, and even if they were, Polynesia was only settled in the last two or three thousand years and neither Mayan nor Aztec civilization was anywhere near 10,000 years old. In essence, it's just ancient astronauts crap that would play well in the 70s, but is kind of dated and silly now. That notwithstanding, we have the UN fighting the aptly-but-unimaginatively-named "Anti-UN" over control of this island and it's artifacts. The Anti-UN are not given any great depth or motivation, and the characters are not exactly compelling. It's good to see Roy Fokker again, but he's more of a jerk than usual in this OVA, and we get a cameo of Captain Bruno Global towards the end, but aside from that, no one we know is here. All of this would be merely annoying, of course, if the story were good, but the story is not good. It's merely an excuse to show some admittedly amazing dogfights, some cool transforming robots, and a (Typically) hot naked chick. The story is something to string action pieces to, but doesn't really have any umph behind it. It's ending is utterly abrupt and incoherent, and in the end none of this has any real relevance to the rest of the Macross universe. (or, for that matter, the Robotech universe where I think it could probably fit in somewhat easier.) In the end, it's just a bunch of stuff that happened that no one ever bothers to talk about again afterwards, so it may as well have not happened.

Many people complain about the hokey-jokey nature of Macross 7. (Occasionally for good reason) Macross Zero goes to the exact opposite extreme, and is positively grim, far far grimmer than the original Macross, and remember the original Macross involved the deaths of 6 billion 999 million human beings in the space of about ten minutes, so it's a pretty grim show on occasion by itself. Everybody in this miniseries is so dour and unlikeable and grim all the time, to the point that it was hard to get involved in the whisper-thin storyline.

Also, I found the redesign of Fokker's character to be particularly distracting. Pilots in Macross generally had long hair, and Roy was no exception. In flashbacks in Macross we also saw that he had long hair years in the past, however in Zero he's got a more typical military buzz-cut in 2008. Unless he's wearing a wig or hair extensions (Unlikely), there's no way he could have grown his hair out to Macross lengths in a year or so. This creates a continuity error through the series, and I'm probably taking this too seriously, but it really distracted me.

Macross embraces Disney Voodoo

[hugh_booth · 4/10 · 29 July 2009]

I've seen a fair bit of Macross, understand the back story, and was looking for some new stuff to watch. I was sorely disappointed. The bag guys they brought in were clichéd and unbelievable, and the central plot descends from a great Sci-Fi story into sub par fantasy.

To understand why the bad guys don't work, you need to know a little about the original series. Alien ship crashes in 1999 ending a global war and uniting the world. Some anti-unification dissidents make a little trouble, and then in 2009 the aliens arrive. This takes place between 1999 and 2009.

With little else to work with, the anti-unification guys get tasked as the main bad guys for this. While Macross is known for variable fighters, here we learn that it was these bad guys that came up with them first. Theirs also seem to be better than the United Earth versions which are just coming out. So without any access to the alien technology on the ship, they have better variable fighters first, that actually work. Right, and what they're not telling us in the real world is that Al Queda was really the first to deploy the F-22 Raptor.

Otherwise the central story revolves around an island with remains of an alien culture that influenced our evolution. This is standard Macross fair, but they manage to take it to ludicrous ends. On this island, singing by the shrine maiden can induce spontaneous high level mutation in nearby life. I can just see the cautionary warnings now. Be sure not to teach the shrine maiden any Britney Spears, it causes cancer. Now music has always played an important part in Macross, but I'll buy it having an emotionally debilitating effect on a group of emotionally sheltered giants long before this makes any sense. In the end this is all to support an unnecessary claim that life on Earth evolved way faster than it should have. It's like the makers saw some of the more clichéd Disney fair of the princess dancing around and singing while the animals rally and decided they needed to throw it in.

It's a real shame, but Macross sequels and spin-offs have been extremely hit and miss. If you want action this is okay, but if you want a logical storyline, stick to the original Super-Dimensional Fortress Macross, and Macross Plus.

Quality Entertainment

[dhenwood · 25 August 2004]

Once again Shoki Kawamori-San has given us something that rivals the complexity and sheer beauty of Macross Plus. Seeming to follow a Lucas-esque trend he has chosen to do a prequel instead of a sequel in an attempt to show us a key point of the Macross 7 series. Spiritia.

This strange, mystical, yet apparently inherent part of us all all, force. Stirrings of the Force from Star Wars abound, but you won't be seeing people leaping 50 feet in to the air. Its more nature based. With episodes 1, 2, 3 & 4 out, and only 5 to go we are all still a little confused as to spiritia and more important the 'birdman' alien device, for which the head is running around whilst the body is sat on a Stealth Aircraft carrier. Hopefully all will be explained in the final episode as its set one year before the original series, (set in 2009, but released in 1984.)

The artwork and action is amazing in some places, (during fight scenes mostly,) and a little lacking in some others, but overall is pretty good. Better even than Macross Plus. Unlike before however characters are not predominantly Japanese but American or European. An attempt to play to the large US and European fan bases that have had immense difficulty getting hold of Macross material due to legal constraints over distribution rights. Shin is an often confused character, much like Hikaru Ichyjo in the original series, (NOT Rick Hunter his americanised version in the stolen series.) The stories have progressed and are more mature, although still comprehensible and enjoyable by the kids.

All in all an excellent buy, if you can find a copy outside of Japan.