Live action Robotech rights goes to Sony

It looks like the proposed live action Robotech movie isn't dead, it's now moved from Warner and Toby Maguire to Sony.


http://variety.com/2015/film/news/robotech-movie-sony-tv-series-anime-1201460191/

Man I am almost as excited about this news as I was when I heard that the Deadpool movie was actually being made!!!

Considering Sony's track record and the track record in general of adapting animes into American live action films I really don't have too high of hopes for this. Of course, of all animes Robotech/Macross has the least Asian/Japanese ties in its story and settings so there's really only one character that can really be white-washed and that's Min-Mei. I hope that whoever they get to direct and do the effects stay pretty true to the original Valkyrie design and don't go all Transformers on and make them all unrecognizable.

While I am totally giddy about seeing giant transforming mecha in a live action movie again where Michael Bay has no connection to, I do not really care for the story. I was kind of disappointed when I first saw the Macross movie a few years ago.

OP...

Do you HAVE to say "white-washed" in EVERY single post??? I've held back from asking the last 90 or so times I've seen it...

Why is it only ok to use racist terms against white people???

I'm half Cherokee, btw.

Can you imagine if someone here posted that the new Johnny Storm casting is "Black-washed"?

Or that the Asian lady in battlestar galactica was "yellow-washed"???

Makes me feel like a jerk just for typing that to make an example.

To be more to the point...

WE ALL KNOW that you feel the USA ruins anime with its casting decisions...

Maybe you should focus on trying to get these movies made properly in an Asian country???

BTW I WOULD love to see Akira or robotech done "right".

But 9 times out of 10 the way anime characters are drawn... They look like white people...

They do.

Personally (changing the subject here) I can't wait to see a Robotech movie if it's done right... don't change the Valkyrie designs. Keep them the same... why? Because I remember building these puppies when I was a boy and they worked perfectly. If they change them, they'll end up ruining not only my childhood, but something that could actually work! Bring on the giant Zentrati army!!

i can't wait to see a robotech movie....as long as the people making it can do it justice!

OldKen said:

OP...

Do you HAVE to say "white-washed" in EVERY single post??? I've held back from asking the last 90 or so times I've seen it...

Why is it only ok to use racist terms against white people???

I'm half Cherokee, btw.

Can you imagine if someone here posted that the new Johnny Storm casting is "Black-washed"?

Or that the Asian lady in battlestar galactica was "yellow-washed"???

Makes me feel like a jerk just for typing that to make an example.

To be more to the point...

WE ALL KNOW that you feel the USA ruins anime with its casting decisions...

Maybe you should focus on trying to get these movies made properly in an Asian country???

BTW I WOULD love to see Akira or robotech done "right".

But 9 times out of 10 the way anime characters are drawn... They look like white people...

They do.

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Where do you get all of that from? Since when did I say "white wash" to everything or say that the US "ruins anime with its casting decisions", sure I said it in this thread but I hardly complain about it all the time; I'm hardly a Jeyl of anime casting. If you check out the Ghost in the Shell thread you'll see that I'm actually in the minority over the decision to case Skarjo in the lead.

As far as the way the characters are drawn in anime, yes, in many anime they're drawn sort of generically or as white but in any number of animes it's readily apparent that they're not supposed to be white. Names are one way although that can be debated, the biggest clue is the setting, if you have a character with a Japanese name living and working or going to school in Japan then logic would dictate that they're supposed to be Japanese, unless otherwise indicated in the dialogue, regardless of how they might be drawn.

I prefer the term "caucasoidal reimagining".

I keed, I keed. Really I keed and don't care.


Watched it in the eighties but haven't since, so it would be pretty much all new again to me.

CessnaDriver said:

I prefer the term "caucasoidal reimagining".

I keed, I keed. Really I keed and don't care.


Watched it in the eighties but haven't since, so it would be pretty much all new again to me.

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1. If Sony's got their hands on this, I think white-washing/caucasoidal reimagining/whatever else is the least of anyone's worries...

2. My advice: grab a copy of the Animeigo remaster of the original Macross, if you can find it anywhere, and watch that. It's AWESOME and GORGEOUS. Unfortunately, it may be out of print. ADV, I think, did another take on it, and might be good, too.

In my opinion, the story mostly holds up. The Robotech version is ok, but the voice acting isn't as good.

I think that ADV ended up releasing the original Animeigo remaster under their own label but I don't know if it's still around or not. I believe that they used the footage to create a remastered Macross for Robotech but while the visuals are gorgeous they completely redid all of the sound effects. Obviously whoever was in charge of redoing the sound effects had no idea that the gun pods on the Valkryies housed a rotary cannon and that rotary cannons sound nothing like a conventional machine gun and that the original sound effect was it's supposed to sound like.

Anyhow, I agree that in the hands of Sony white washing is the least of our concerns although there's really only once character that could possibly be white washed with the rest of the cast being white, one black woman, and the Zentraedi that could be played by anyone of any ethnicity. If what I've seen of the new FF4 that they're working is any indicator of their respect to source material then Robotech is going to be seriously butchered.

DaddyfromNaboo said:

While I am totally giddy about seeing giant transforming mecha in a live action movie again where Michael Bay has no connection to, I do not really care for the story. I was kind of disappointed when I first saw the Macross movie a few years ago.

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There was a Macross movie? Why am I just now hearing of this??

Riceball said:

here's really only one character that can really be white-washed and that's Min-Mei.

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You mean can't, right? Since she's Chinese?

LrdSatyr8 said:

There was a Macross movie? Why am I just now hearing of this??

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It came out years ago, back in 80 something. There's been no legitimate US release, at least not one that's worth talking about, but it's available on the web and eBay. It's definitely worth checking out if you're a Macross fan, the animation is absolutely gorgeous even if the story is different from the series. The movie starts after the SF-1 has already jumped into space and goes forward from there while at the same time cutting a lot of stuff.

The weird thing about the movie is that it's canon without being canon, it's canon in that it's officially part of the Macross franchise but it's not canon in that it never actually happened. By that I mean that the Macross movie (Do you Remember Love is the official name) is meant to be an actual movie in the Macross universe and tells the story of the First Space War, basically a war movie about the events of the Macross TV series. As I understand it its in universe release was during the Macross Plus timeline.

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Treadwell said:

You mean can't, right? Since she's Chinese?

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I meant can in the respect that Min-Mei is on the only ethnic Asian main character in all of Macross, not can in that they should.

LrdSatyr8 said:

There was a Macross movie? Why am I just now hearing of this??

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The Macross movie isn't really news. *chuckle* Nor is it really... in continuity, I suppose, as far as the main narrative. It is presented with the conceit that it is an in-universe dramatization of the events of the events of the Macross TV series.

Riceball said:

As I understand it its in universe release was during the Macross Plus timeline.

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Here's the full timeline:

Macross Zero (AD 2008)
The Super Dimension Fortress Macross (AD 1999-2012)
The Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Flashback 2012 (AD 2012)
Macross M3 (AD 2014-2030)
The Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love? (AD 2031)
Macross Plus (AD 2040)
Macross 7 (AD 2045-2046)
Macross 7: The Galay's Calling Me! (AD January 2046)
Macross Dynamite 7 (AD 2047)
Macross Digital Mission VF-X (AD 2047)
Macross Digital Mission VF-X2 (AD 2050)
Macross Frontier (AD 2059)
Macross II: Lovers Again (AD 2092)

Actually, since this is about Robotech, I'll throw that timeline in for relevance:

The Macross Saga (1999-2014)
The Sentinels (2020-unfinished)
The Masters (2031-2032)
New Generation/Love Live Alive!/Shadow Chronicles (2033-2035) [lumped together due to much overlap]
Shadow Rising (2035-?) [in production, bumped from earlier in the pipeline to do Love Live Alive!, possibly to be delayed pending release of live-action Robotech film]

Comics and novels fill in a lot of the holes left unfilled by the unfinished state of the Sentinels animated series.

On the subject of the ethnicities of the characters... While Hikaru -- the main character -- had a Japanese name in the original version, he (and most of the supporting cast) are depicted as utterly caucasian. He's from America, his dad's from America, etc. The most I could justify would be Japanese-American several generations removed -- and probably only part-Japanese, at that. I'll agree the only ones who are clearly of a non-Western and non-Westernized culture are the Lynn family, as their family name has always come first, in the original anime, in the English translation, in the re-imagined Robotech story... I would even go so far as to revise the family name to "Lin" to be more in keeping with how it tends to be depicted in English.

In the original anime and in Robotech, Macross Island wasn't really much of anything. If there was anyone living there at all, they were probably killed by the space-fortress crashing. Everyone we saw over the following decade, on Launch Day, and in the new Macross City built aboard the space-fortress were all folks who had moved there for the big reconstruction project -- workers, military, scientists, and all the services to support same. There are plenty of analyses out there -- for both Macross and Robotech -- of the two big post-Cold War political entities, the United Nations (UNDF -- Captain Global and Lieutenant Fokker are part of this group) and the Anti-Unification League. Both factions issue a cease-fire and send personnel to work on studying and rebuilding the space-fortress. So just because it's a Pacific island, that doesn't have much bearing on who "should" be there, nor the fact that it's a Japanese-produced story. Look to the story itself. Incidentally, I am one of those who prefer the non-Japanese names of most of the Star Blazers characters over the Japanese names of Space Battleship Yamato, since most of them are even more blatantly non-Asian.

--Jonah

And here I thought the movie you're talking about was a live Action one... getting my hopes all up and them dashing them on the ground like that... bad man! I do know that they did a live action Battleship Yamoto movie awhile back... was really good!

LrdSatyr8 said:

And here I thought the movie you're talking about was a live Action one... getting my hopes all up and them dashing them on the ground like that... bad man! I do know that they did a live action Battleship Yamoto movie awhile back... was really good!

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That really explains your comment; reading that you were surprised at their being a Macross movie really surprised me since I didn't think that there's a Macross fan on Earth that wasn't aware of DYRL.

Riceball said:

That really explains your comment; reading that you were surprised at their being a Macross movie really surprised me since I didn't think that there's a Macross fan on Earth that wasn't aware of DYRL.

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Yeah I remember that movie... to me it just seemed like they took the episodes that were aired originally and then pasted them together into a movie. Wasn't that impressed... althou I was quite impressed with the Starblazers live action movie.

LrdSatyr8 said:

Yeah I remember that movie... to me it just seemed like they took the episodes that were aired originally and then pasted them together into a movie. Wasn't that impressed... althou I was quite impressed with the Starblazers live action movie.

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It think that you're thinking of some other anime movie, while that was common practice for most anime movie based on a tv show DYRL was definitely not one of those. While DYRL did essentially re-tell the story of Macross it was a truncated version with some changes and featured completely new animation, they did not reuse a single cel of SDF Macross in the making of DYRL. The character designs were slightly changed although they were still done by Mikimoto, the same with the Valkyries which were still done by Kawamori.

Since you don't seem to remember it very well I highly recommend tracking down a copy of find it streaming somewhere, it's well worth it. Despite its age the animation still holds up very well and does not look dated at all, the opening scenes are still a thing of beauty to me, especially when you consider that it was all hand animated.

Sent from my KFTT using Tapatalk 2

Here's a pretty good direct comparison...

Macross:



DYRL:



Frankly, I prefer the uniforms and flight suits of the series over the movie. By, like, lots.

--Jonah