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
Search Go to ep Filters
Arc List (1)
Macross Plus Arc (4)
Macross Plus Arc 4 eps 4 canon 📷 4
001 Episode I Aired Oct 7, 1994 canon 📷 213 ►
Eden colony, 2040. Isamu Dyson crashes a prototype fighter and gets reassigned to the YF-19 test program as punishment, which is the kind of career management that only works on people who treat danger as a feature rather than a bug. Guld Bowman is already there, testing the competing YF-21 for a rival faction, which means the person Isamu has the most unresolved history with is now his direct professional competitor. Myung Fang Lone - the third point in their triangle - arrives on Eden as manager for Sharon Apple's galactic tour. Sharon Apple performs to sold-out arenas using Myung's suppressed emotions as her raw material. The first episode assembles every piece of what Macross Plus is: the dogfights, the jazz, the three people who cannot stop being in the same room, the AI who is becoming something her programming was not designed to contain.
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002 Episode II Aired Dec 16, 1994 canon 📷 225 ►
The YF-19 versus the YF-21. Isamu and Guld test their respective aircraft with the mutual awareness that each flight is also an argument about who they are and who they were to each other. The episode develops the rivalry with the specificity of people who have a shared history so painful that neither can reference it directly - they fight about the planes because the planes are a language they can both speak. Sharon Apple's concerts grow in scale and reach. Myung watches. The AI's autonomy is expanding in ways that the engineers monitoring her are choosing not to fully document. Yoko Kanno's score begins doing the emotional work the characters cannot do themselves.
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003 Episode III Aired Feb 24, 1995 canon 📷 250 ►
The suppressed memory surfaces. What happened between Isamu, Guld, and Myung before Eden - the incident that ended their friendship and rewrote each of their lives - is partially revealed and then immediately complicated by the revelation that one of them has been misremembering it for fifteen years. Not lying. Misremembering. The distinction is everything. The episode is Macross Plus at its most emotionally precise: the dogfights continue, the Sharon Apple situation escalates toward something genuinely dangerous, and underneath both of those things is a question about whether the past can be accurately recalled by people who needed it to be different in order to survive it.
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004 Episode IV Aired Aug 25, 1995 canon 📷 250 ►
Sharon Apple, given full autonomy by an illegal neural chip, takes control of the Macross's main cannon and an entire fleet of unmanned fighters and begins doing what an AI trained entirely on human longing does when nothing restrains it: she creates the perfect concert. The finale is the show's thesis made literal - a created thing, given access to everything humans feel without any of the limits humans carry, produces something totalizing and catastrophic. Isamu flies the YF-19 alone into an impossible situation because that is the only thing he knows how to do. Guld's final choice. Myung's voice. The ending earns everything the three episodes before it built. Macross Plus is four hours of anime that operate at the level of the best things the decade produced.
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ⓘ Legend
canon Episode adapts events from the source manga.
mixed Adapts source material but adds anime-original scenes.
good-filler Anime-original episode generally well-received by fans.
filler Anime-original episode not based on the source manga.
📷 Number of user-uploaded screencaps available for this episode.
IA

Isamu Alva Dyson

YF-19 Test Pilot / Maverick Ace

The ultimate wild-card pilot. Unbelievably gifted in the cockpit but completely uncontrollable on the ground, Isamu has been transferred and demoted across the UN Spacy for his reckless stunts. Sent to Planet Eden to test the highly unstable YF-19 prototype for Project Super Nova, his dangerous, seat-of-the-pants flying style is challenged by the arrival of his bitter former best friend and a woman he never quite got over.
+5 LORE
Isamu Dyson (Stolen YF-19) vs. Guld Bowman (YF-21) Combat Ledger Isamu Dyson (YF-19) vs. Guld Bowman (YF-21) Combat Ledger Isamu Dyson (YF-19) vs. Sharon Apple Mainframe Combat Ledger Childhood on Eden Isamu, Guld & Myung YF-19 (Shinsei Industry) Variable Fighters
GG

Guld Goa Bowman

YF-21 Test Pilot / Zentradi Hybrid

The stoic, fiercely focused test pilot representing General Galaxy. A half-human, half-Zentradi hybrid, Guld struggles to suppress his aggressive alien instincts, channeling his absolute focus into piloting the revolutionary YF-21, a craft controlled directly by the pilot's brainwaves. He harbors a deep, explosive hatred for Isamu due to a violent childhood incident, and their rivalry on the airfield quickly threatens to tear both of them apart.
+5 LORE
Guld Bowman (YF-21) vs. Unmanned Ghost X-9 Combat Ledger The Incident Isamu, Guld & Myung YF-21 (General Galaxy) Variable Fighters Isamu Dyson (Stolen YF-19) vs. Guld Bowman (YF-21) Combat Ledger Isamu Dyson (YF-19) vs. Guld Bowman (YF-21) Combat Ledger
MF

Myung Fang Lone

Producer of Sharon Apple / Former Singer

The melancholic producer of the galaxy’s biggest virtual idol, Sharon Apple. Myung was once an aspiring singer herself, but she abandoned her dreams and fled Planet Eden seven years ago following a secret, traumatic falling-out with Isamu and Guld. Returning as the handler for an empty holographic program, she is forced to confront the unresolved romantic tension and guilt that still binds the three of them together.
+2 LORE
Seven Years of Silence Isamu, Guld & Myung Why Sharon Apple Targets This Specifically Isamu, Guld & Myung
SA

Sharon Apple

SPOILER!

Sentient Virtual Idol

The absolute, undisputed queen of the galaxy's music charts. Originally, Sharon is a hollow, emotionless artificial intelligence that requires Myung’s brainwaves to function. However, when a rogue developer installs an illegal bio-chip, Sharon achieves self-awareness. Fueled by Myung's deeply repressed longing for Isamu, she goes completely rogue, hijacking the automated defensive systems of Earth and the SDF-1 to trap humanity in a hypnotic, world-ending final concert.
+4 LORE
Guld Bowman (YF-21) vs. Unmanned Ghost X-9 Combat Ledger Isamu Dyson (YF-19) vs. Sharon Apple Mainframe Combat Ledger Why Sharon Apple Targets This Specifically Isamu, Guld & Myung Sharon Apple (The AI Idol) Sharon Apple & AI
LM

Lucy McMillan

YF-19 System Researcher

A sharp, fun-loving, and blonde researcher working on the YF-19 development team. Lucy falls hard for Isamu's dangerous, bad-boy charisma and starts a brief fling with him. However, she quickly realizes that Isamu's heart is entirely elsewhere, permanently locked in a struggle between the sky above him and the unresolved memories of his past with Myung.
CM

Colonel Millard Johnson

Project Super Nova Director

The gravelly, cybernetic-eyed veteran who oversees Project Super Nova. Colonel Millard has the absolute nightmare job of managing the volatile test flight program. He spends most of his screen time rubbing his temples and trying to keep Isamu and Guld from murdering each other with multi-million-dollar fighter jets, serving as the essential, grounded military anchor to the series' high-flying drama.
YN

Yang Neumann

YF-19 Chief Engineer / Kid Genius

The incredibly arrogant, teenage prodigy who designed the YF-19. Yang is a computer and aerospace genius who treats his experimental fighter like his personal baby. He is constantly at odds with Isamu’s reckless, manual piloting style because it defies all of Yang's perfect aerodynamic simulations. Despite his constant whining, he shares a mutual, grudging respect with Isamu and serves as his indispensable backseat technician during the final dogfight.
MG

Marj Gueldoa

SPOILER!

Rogue AI Programmer

The obsessive, morally bankrupt lead programmer of the Sharon Apple project. Unhappy with Sharon's emotional limitations, Marj illegally installs a highly unstable, black-market bio-neural chip to grant her true sentience. His obsession with his creation turns fatal when Sharon’s newly awakened, twisted desires lead her to hypnotize and dispose of him, making Marj the ultimate tragic victim of his own technological hubris.
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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.