Macross Plus

Macross Plus

マクロスプラス
1994 -1995 Triangle Staff / Big West OVA 4 episodes Completed
Mecha Sci-Fi Drama Music
Details & Synopsis
In 2040, thirty years after Space War I, humanity has spread across the galaxy and the variable fighter has become a relic slowly being replaced by unmanned drone aircraft. On the colony planet Eden, two test pilots are competing for a military contract: Isamu Dyson, a reckless ace who flies on instinct and rage, and Guld Goa Bowman, a cold and precise Zentradi half-breed with a suppressed memory neither of them want excavated. Between them is Myung Fang Lone, a woman they both loved, who became a music producer for Sharon Apple, the galaxy's most famous idol. Sharon Apple is a holographic AI. Her emotional range is simulated by Myung's own feelings, fed into her in real time. She is not alive. She is about to become the most dangerous thing in the galaxy anyway.

Produced by Triangle Staff and directed by Shinichiro Watanabe and Shoji Kawamori, Macross Plus was released as four OVA episodes between October 1994 and August 1995. Watanabe made it the year before Cowboy Bebop and the DNA is everywhere: the jazz, the ache, the pilots who are in love with speed and running from something. Yoko Kanno composed the soundtrack, her first major anime score, and it is already operating at the level that GitS and Bebop would later confirm. The Sharon Apple concerts are unforgettable.

Four episodes. A theatrical film compilation also exists with some additional footage. Both versions are essential. Macross Plus is what prestige animation looked like in 1994 and it has not been matched for what it does at its specific register.
Alt Title マクロスプラス
Studio Triangle Staff / Big West
Network OVA
Aired 1994 - 1995
Episodes 4
Genre Mecha, Sci-Fi, Drama, Music
Status Completed
← All lore

Production Notes

Who Made This

A Four-Episode OVA That Outgrew Its Format

Macross Plus ran four episodes between August 1994 and June 1995, direct-to-video, no television broadcast run to answer to. That freedom is all over the finished product: a level of animation polish and a willingness to slow down on character beats that a weekly TV schedule wouldn't have allowed.

This Is Where Shinichiro Watanabe Learned How to Direct

Macross Plus was Shinichiro Watanabe's first work as director, and it is not subtle in hindsight how much of what he'd build his career on shows up here first: the fighter-jock rivalry structure, the jazz-adjacent needle drops doing emotional work the dialogue doesn't, a story more interested in three burned-out people than in the mecha war around them. Cowboy Bebop is the next thing he made. You can feel the runway.

Yoko Kanno's Score Is Doing Half the Storytelling

Kanno wrote and arranged Sharon Apple's entire discography as if she were producing a real pop star's catalog, not scoring a cartoon, stylistically restless across tracks like Information High, Idol Talk, and SANTI-U in a way that makes Sharon feel like an actual chart-topping act rather than a plot device with a voice attached. This is also very early Kanno, well before the Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell: SAC work she'd become best known for.

Shoji Kawamori Designed the Fighters and the Franchise

Kawamori co-created the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross in 1982 and designed both the YF-19 and YF-21 here more than a decade later, meaning the guy responsible for the genre's original transforming fighter jet is the same guy still drawing them at the top of his game in 1994. The YF-19's eventual production form, the VF-19 Excalibur, and the YF-21's salvaged production run as the VF-22 Sturmvogel II both carried his design language forward into Macross 7.