Wings of Honneamise (Royal Space Force)
When The Right Stuff premiered it claimed that "this was the
way the Space Age began". Wings of Honneamise would claim that
this is the way the Space Age might have begun.
This is one of the
few movies (animated or otherwise) that can legitimately claim to be
an epic. It premiered in Japan in 1987 and was the first film released
by the studio
Gainax
(the folks who later went on make
Gunbuster and
Nadia).
Wings of Honneamise takes place on an alternative Earth and tells
the story of the first person in space, Shirotzugh Lhadatto. Honneamano is
a kingdom which
is a strange mixture of Japanese, European, and American cultures. Shiro
has joined the Royal Space Force because his grades weren't good enough
to get into the Royal Navy and become a pilot. The Royal Space Force is a
woefully underfunded group of aging engineers and young lazy military
recruits. The engineers (reminiscent of the German rocket society
engineers of the 1920s) have been working for years without much success to
build a rocket that can launch a person into space. Now that the "cold
war" with the neighboring kingdom is starting to heat up, the top military
leaders decide that the rocket can be used as a threat against the
opposing kingdom, so they begin increase the funding of the Royal Space Force.
Progress finally begins to occur. Meanwhile the aimless Shiro meets a young
woman named Leiqunni Nondelaiko passing out religious tracts. He visits
her home and discovers that she thinks the idea of traveling into space
is wonderful. He begins to fall in love and his love for her rekindles
his own dreams of space flight.
The movie chronicles the struggles of the Royal Space Force as they race to
succeed in launching Shiro into orbit, unaware until almost too late that
the military had no intention of them succeeding. The real purpose was
to use the rocket as bait and force the neighboring kingdom to make a
preemptive attack to capture it, thus giving Honneamano an excuse to invade.
Shiro is launched at the last moment just as the invading army reaches
the launch site. Rising above the conflict of the world below, Shiro realizes
that Leiqunni was right, that space flight is not just a physical journey
but a spiritual journey as well.
Wings of Honneamise has been translated and dubbed into English and
began to make the rounds of art houses and
college campuses in the fall of 1994. Both a dubbed and a subtitled version
of the film were released on videotape in summer 1995 by Manga Video.
The soundtrack is by Ryuichi Sakamoto, who won an Oscar for his work on
the soundtrack to The Last Emperor. For further information, check
out Carl Horn's articles about it in
in Protoculture Addicts Sep/Oct 1992 and Animerica vol. 3, no. 5
(May 1995). Trivia note from Carl by
way of rec.arts.anime: the name "Honneamise" is pseudo-French combining the
words "homme" for man (Japanese frequently changes "n" and "m") and "amis"
meaning friends, thus "Honneamise" denotes comradeship.
Marc Hairston, August 1995
Go to
the Wings of Honneamise resources at this site.
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