Five Star Stories

This is one of those movies that is so gorgeous, you will immediately want to "plan to watch" everything made by every staff member involved. At this point I've watched almost only anime from before 1989, so I have to say I was a bit overwhelmed by the innovative and experimental art and animation. Some of you normal people, used to more recent stuff, might not share the same experience. I'm not saying it's a milestone of cel animation like Akira or any Studio Ghibli movie. This has more of a still frame style, but also terrific animation when it's needed. Anyway, it excels at ... both.

The character designs seem influenced by Leiji Matsumoto and shoujo manga. Which is an interesting choice for a mecha. In fact the whole movie seems to have a hard time figuring out whether it wants to be a mecha or a shoujo fantasy romance. It's even complete with an androgynous lead character, which is normal for shoujo manga, but a first in scifi/mecha. And I'll just let you know, in case you're still waiting for the mecha battle after 45 minutes. Don't worry: it pays off.

You could add "difficulty to label genre" to a list of flaws, next to the essentially simple storyline. You could say it's just a hero, a helpless girl and a cliché villain. You could say the setting, background and big cast of characters are kind of an overkill without reading the manga. You could say they used too much deus ex machina to move the plot forward. You could say there was too much stuff like "Mirage Knights" and "Fatima" or that they randomly tossed the Renaissance, some Arabic stuff (credits go to Hagio Moto's Marginal) and the Crusades into a mixer and then gave you a plate of scifi, and your cat farted a rainbow and you're wondering why they went through all this effort just to make an hour-long love story.

I don't really give a crap. It looks insanely good, the music is great, I liked every character, I enjoyed every character interaction, I was engaged the entire time, and I had at least five or six scifi/fantasy boners. I've only checked out one chapter of the manga, and it looks like the wordbuilding and characters will be more of use in a longer format. Maybe the movie serves a kind of a prequel or a simplified summary of the series? No idea. But I will definitely read the pants off of that manga that's for sure.

OVA's and movies from the 80's range from cheap to innovative animation, and in general settle for an easy storyline to serve their actual purpose: experimenting with animation to make a feast for the eyes, whether it's tentacles, demons, showering women or duelling mecha's. So compared to it's contemporaries, Five Star Stories is at the top of the list, when it comes to story (better than most) and art (the best in it's style so far and pioneering new ideas).

I'd place this as one of my favourite movies from the 80's next to Mamuro Oshii's Tenshi no Tamago. Coincidentally, Kazuo Yamazaki, who directed this, also directed the second half of Urusei Yatsura, following Oshii, who directed the first half, both of them raising the medium to a new level with that series and doing it again in their other work. Which goes to show you how URUSEI YATSURA is the MOTHER OF ALL ANIME cough geesh be cool.

It's a beautiful show, with distinctive character designs and richly drawn backgrounds. And the prettiest of pretty-boy main characters to boot. And yet...

The thing is, Five Star Stories is a very long-running and popular manga series. In fact, so long running is that it started in 1986, and is still coming out three decades later. It's a massive exercise in world building (or, rather in this case, multi-solar-system building), with a back-story that stretches past a thousand years, far too many characters to count, and intertwining machinations that would take hours to explain. Think Dune. Think ... Legend of Galactic Heroes. It's a massive amount of material.

And here, you have a single, one-hour OVA, to cover it all. Or, to be more succinct, to introduce it all.

An almost impossible task, and unfortunately it shows. There's a ton of exposition that has to take place, all sorts of explaining of concepts and people, and it's a whole lot to take in at once. You spend half the time just trying to suss out who is doing what and why, and it never really sinks in.

I guess if this whets your appetite, this is to entice you to check out the manga. Which, was probably half the intention of this one-shot OVA in the first place.

Came here from
[1988] Maria Kawamura - The Five Star Stories (CD Mini Single) - MartyMcflies v2 • 1.6K views • 87 likes
Found none of that soundtrack in the movie.

Stunning imagery, yet utterly lazy composition. Kinda sad such animation effort has been wasted on this generic kind of story about ~true love overcoming your superiors' will and even the mind control~ which, if you think about it, also would make no sense, had characters been driven by at least a smidgen of rational thinking.
This is even more stupid a loss if this was initially intended to just promote manga/game/whatever is was based ... on; i.e. if they knew from the start it's bound to become an unfinished stub.

A bit of every 80s cliche in here. It's as though they have been randomly picking the pieces of papers with overused cool tropes of the era from a hat, then glued it all together into one big hotchpotch in a fancy big-shouldered cauldron.
Because of the douchey introduction, very painful to watch if you pay attention to the story. For starters, the universe is introduced through several minutes long spoken summary. Not only that, the said summary is overly convoluted, cumbersome and confusing. I think I had to rewind every line 3 times or so to make sure I'm up to the lore. The Byzantine-Engrish names, titles, concepts, etc. All that is ultimately redundant for the purposes of that simple a story and only serves to somehow tie together all those cool things the animators wanted to show off, without caring much for a consistent storyline.

The entire fatima idea though... I have no words for how blissfully stupid it is. It has no rational seed in it whatsoever and, again, only serves to put together the motley crew of characters who would be seen acting utterly weird otherwise.