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.
