efore the Illumidus occupational forces took over Earth, Captain
Harlock was a Solar Federation officer, fighting the enemy invaders in his
spaceship The Deathshadow. But once Earth finally lost, he became a
spare wheel, a useless throwback. When he's captured while trying to evacuate a group
of Terran refugees to a non-occupied planet, Harlock deliberately
crash-lands his ship to render it useless, then refuses a position as a
collaborator. With his defiant attitude, he has no proper place on a
subjugated Earth. Without a ship, he has no way to leave.
He grimly looks for his old love, Maya, but she's constantly on the move.
As the Voice of Free Arcadia, broadcasting radio messages of hope and
strength, she's barely a step ahead of Illumidus' soldiers. Harlock's luck
changes when he meets Tochiro, another grounded and defiant rebel. Oddly,
an Illumidus operative captures them both, scans their DNA, points out that
they have genetic memories in common stemming from a WWII encounter
between their ancestors, and then lets them go.
Eventually Illumidus' forces again approach Harlock, proffering a job
transporting troops to Tokarga, an Illumidus-occupied planet scheduled for
demolition. Harlock furiously refuses. When an old acquaintance, a free
space trader named Emeraldas, shows up on Earth to get her ship repaired,
Harlock asks if he can "steal" it and escape. A contingent of Tokargan
collaborators also claim the ship. They've planned a doomed effort to
defend their planet, although they know they'll be caught and executed, and
their planet may actually be demolished sooner as a result. Instead,
Tochiro suggests a compromise. Emeraldas should keep her ship, the
Tokargans should stay on Earth to work against the Illumidus forces from
the inside, and Harlock should set out for Tokarga in a ship built by
Tochiro himself--the Arcadia. So begins the career of a legendary
space pirate...
How Harlock lost an eye
There's a lot to this bleak and highly melodramatic theatrical
feature. The episodic story line takes Harlock on and off Earth several
times, leading to battles in all kinds of places, from a restaurant to interplanetary
space. The tone is so starkly low-key that it's sometimes hard to detect a
singular plotline. And to some degree there isn't one. It's just a series
of events explaining how Star Blazers creator Leiji Matsumoto's most
famous character first lost his eye, gained his ship, developed his
philosophy of piracy and honed his dire attitude toward life. Harlock had
his own manga, his own TV show, and his own worldwide reputation before
this movie, and he crops up often in seemingly unrelated Matsumoto works,
not to mention in innumerable parodies. But this is his origin story, the
sequence of events that pulls it all together.
And it's also the definitive Matsumoto work, the one that links together
decades of scattered pro-humanity stories into a dry but impassioned
treatise on freedom, self-determination and every man's right and
obligation to follow his own dreams. The themes are as familiar as the
distinctive anime style, which taught a generation of viewers to expect big
eyes and big hair on anime women, and spiky, eye-concealing moptops on
lanky anime men.
Admittedly, Matsumoto's style runs to the bathetic, with characters
talking about manly emotions that only men would understand, then
breaking down weeping in each others' arms--when they aren't just being
stoic. At times the scripting may raise a snicker or two. But Matsumoto's
in-depth plotting, his philosophizing, and his concentration on human
endeavor are all admirable in a genre that too often veers toward eye-candy
visuals with no thought behind the eyes.
