Harlock Space Pirate (2013)
Director: Shinji Aramaki
The universe of science fiction anime films is vast and
wondrous, I’ve been exploring it as of late, I hope you guys are enjoying my
exploration of anime films. But anyways, within anime science fiction, there’s
a small niche reserved for films about space pirates. For example, today I’ll
be talking about Harlock Space Pirate, but there’s Space Adventure
Cobra (1982), also about a space pirate. There’s a bunch
of other anime sci-fi films worth mentioning in case you feel the need to
explore this type of film more, for example there’s Space Battleship Yamato (1979),
Final Yamato (1983), and yet another one we could mention is one of my all time
favorite anime science fiction films: Lensman: The Secret of the Lens (1984)
a film that I’ll be reviewing here soon, so keep your eyes peeled. But what
concerns me today is this super cool animated film called Harlock Space Pirate (2013). I’d never seen the series or read the manga that it is based on,
but there was something about the concept of a space pirate driving a gigantic
spaceship that looks like a skull, that just grabbed me. There’s just something
cool about the idea…add to that the James Cameron quote on the cover that
reads: “This is truly an unprecedented movie. This movie is already legendary,
with its overflowing imagination and magnificent visuals; this movie is one
that the world has never seen before. Harlock leads the way to a world of new
ideas!” and I was sold. I’m ultra happy I decided to buy this one; it’s an
amazing science fiction film! Epic in every sense of the word!
Harlock Space Pirate (2013) is a computer animated
film based on the manga written and illustrated by Leiji Matsumoto. I have
never read the manga or seen the television series that followed, so I went into
Harlock Space Pirate without any previous knowledge of the character or
its mythos. I don’t know if this is even considered a good adaptation, but if
the positive reviews are any indication, then it is. So what was my impression?
I was blown away! That’s my official impression! Totally blown away. Personally,
I’m not a huge fan of computer animated films, because sometimes the result can
be cold and mechanical because sometimes the filmmakers focus so much on the
visuals that they forget that story is equally important for a movie to work,
which is why we get films like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), big on
visuals, not so big on creating characters and stories we can identify with.
Which is one of the many things I loved about Harlock Space Pirate (2013),
it has a story that grabs you and characters you can care about. It has a
heart!
The story concerns Captain Harlock, a pirate that’s going
around the universe placing these bombs in specific points in the universe.
When he blows up all 100 bombs, the explosion is supposed to trigger some sort
of cataclysmic event that would send the universe back in time, to a time when
there wasn’t an over population of planet earth, to a time when humans hadn’t
destroyed the earth beyond recognition. Of course, not everybody wants this to
happen. The powers that be want the status quo to remain as is, so of course,
it’s the government chasing Captain Harlock through the universe, trying to
stop him from detonating the bombs. Will the corrupt Gaia Coalition stop
Harlock and his crew of space pirates from blowing up the galaxy and restarting
humanity?
So like I was saying, it’s the characters that pulled me in
first because they are all a bunch of rebels who fly through the cosmos with
one concept on their minds: freedom! Freedom is what drives their ship; it’s
the reason why you become part of the crew, because you believe in freedom. The
filmmakers managed to make Captain Harlock a truly intriguing and fascinating
character, at first they don’t show him much to keep you in anticipation, but
once Captain Harlock takes over the film, let’s just say he has an intriguing
and magnetic personality, he’s a very fleshed out character. I’m sure that has
a lot to do with all the back story the character has, what with the manga and
various television series to back him up, well, of course Captain Harlock didn’t
end up being a cardboard cutout of a character. This is a character with a well established
personality and solid motivations. He is a man who will stop at nothing until
things are set right for the human race! But this is only the tip of the
iceberg when it comes to the story behind this film, there’s a lot of intrigue,
there’s revenge and plots within plots. In other words, even though this film
has tons of style and coolness to it, it doesn’t forget to back that up with
decent story and characters.
When a film has awesome story and characters, and is
accompanied by amazing effects and visuals, well, it makes it a perfect package
for me. And boy did this movie blow me away with its concepts and visuals! I
mean, here’s a film that puts a lot of effort into making things look cool,
this movie just oozes coolness from every pore! I loved the numerous space
battles! Captain Harlock’s ship looks like something H.R. Giger might have
designed, with this giant skull on the front, which at some points smashes into
other spaceships! What’s so cool about Harlock's ship is that besides the skull
in the front, it also looks like an old pirate ship…and get this, the spaceship
has a healing factor! It repairs itself! From what I gather, on the cartoon
show the spaceship looks even more like a pirate ship, with these awesome laser
cannons on the side, which made it onto the movie as well. It’s just an awesome
visual, a pirate ship shooting lasers in space, in fact, the characters in this
movie are so well developed that even Captain Harlock’s spaceship (called The
Arcadia) has a shroud of mystery about it, even the ship is a character on its
own! There are scenes with hundreds of spaceships shooting lasers at each other!
Suddenly it feels like a pirate movie, but instead of cannonballs, the
spaceships shoot lasers, the result is pure eye candy!
Final word is I loved this movie and the character of
Captain Harlock so much that I will be purchasing some of the old television
series to explore this character further; this is no easy task because this
character has had many incarnations throughout the years. This 2013 film was
directed by Shinki Aramaki, the director behind most of the Appleseed computer
animated films like Appleseed (2004), Appleseed Ex Machina (2007) and most
recently Appleseed: Alpha (2014). But for those of you interested in exploring
the character past, there’s been a couple of different Captain Harlock series.
They are: Space Pirate Captain Harlock (1978), The Mystery of the Arcadia (1978),
Arcadia of My Youth (1982), which by the way was a feature film. It was
followed by a series called Albator or Orbit Road/SSX (1982). Then came Harlock
Saga (1999) and Space Pirate Captain Harlock: The Endless Odyssey (2002). I’m
really looking forward to seeing all of these and catching up with this excellent
character and the universe that surrounds him. But as far this new 2013 movie
goes, I highly recommend it to lovers of epic science fiction with an emphasis
on cool.
Rating: 5 out of 5
2 comments:
I'm definitely interested. Thanks for your full work up on this. You give it an enthusiastic, resounding nod in the YES column. Nice.
I thought you would love this one! Highly recommend it man, I haven't seen any of the old shows or movies, but this one blew me away. Hope you get a chance to check it out!
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