Forum - View topicREVIEW: Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love? 4K Remaster Anime Film Review
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 19175 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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I've seen the original series but never this movie, so I'm now even more eagerly looking forward to a (hopefully soon!) opportunity to see it.
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Martin G.
Posts: 33 Location: Germany |
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Always nice to read when someone experiences a true classic for the first time. I'd argue that Macross DYRL is a good-looking anime movie, true, but not one of the best looking 80s animes like Wings Of Honneamise, Venus Wars or Akira. And its designs aged a bit more obviously than the ones in those classics. Still, a nice review for a great movie. BTW, is there a new blu-ray or UHD available in the States?
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Lord Geo
Posts: 3027 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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Not yet, but the fact that it actually got the be officially shown at AX, which marks the literal first ever official release of the film in North America since the old dubbed "Macross" & "Clash of the Bionoids" VHS tapes in the early 90s, is very promising that a BD &/or 4K release here may finally happen at some point. |
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MarshalBanana
 Posts: 5742 |
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mdo7
 Posts: 8262 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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Yeah, I'm hoping to see this animated film to get a home video release in the US for the first time. I can imagine how many long time Robotech fans will be happy to see this movie finally getting released and they can owned on home video (assuming many of these fans are collectors and completists). I don't expect this animated film to get a new English dub, but nowadays, people in the US are comfortable watching a subtitled foreign films on streaming when a English dub was never made (ie: look at Bong Joon Ho's Parasite from 2019, it didn't have an English dub and yet that film won an Oscar for best picture despite being a foreign film). |
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An Unchosen One
 Posts: 213 |
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I read somewhere that Macross came about because the people behind it really wanted to make their own take on Gundam, and if that's true, I find it pretty fitting that DYRL more or less occupies the same position as the Gundam compilation films in that they offer different experiences (especially in this case due to being an alternate telling of the story as opposed to a compilation with new footage) without being overall better or worse than the original shows. I do think DYRL loses out in more ways than those compilation films (Roy is much better in the original series, for example), but it definitely has its moments in comparison to the show, particularly the climax.
Last edited by An Unchosen One on Wed Jul 22, 2026 7:33 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Silver Kirin
Posts: 1798 |
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Well, those other anime you mentioned came later, and I would argue that Macross: DYRL was among the first theatrical from the early '80s that had an incredible art direction and animation, I'm not an expert, but looking at some major theatrical anime releases from the early '80s like Toward the Terra or Cyborg 009, those looked great, but not like a major improvement over TV animation, which could get amazing sometimes. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind also came out in 1984 and it also looked like nothing that came before, but I'd say that the '80s was the time when anime films got more visually impressive, probably becuase the industry was more experienced and because of Japan's bubble economy.
I always wondered if Do you Remember Love? could have been dubbed with the same cast that dubbed Robotech in all languages, because DYRL was actually dubbed twice into Latin American Spanish, the first version was done in the early '90s based on the Toho dub, and a second one in the late '90s for the TV channel Locomotion, both made in Mexico, but in the first dub Roy was voiced by the same dub VA who voiced his Robotech equivalent. |
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writerpatrick
 Posts: 701 Location: Canada |
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DYRL is probably the best introduction one can have for someone who has never seen Macross before, and for many it was their first Macross story. It was one of those anime movies that appeared on TV back when any anime in NA was rare.
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Silver Kirin
Posts: 1798 |
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There're some good videos and articles explaining the origin of Macross, but if my memory serves me right, I belive Shoji Kawamori was a huge fan of the original Mobile Suit Gundam, I believe he was a member of a fan club devoted to Gundam called Gunsight during college, and back in the early '80s there was an explosion in Real Robot mecha series and the geeneration who grew up watching anime in the '60s and '70s were already young adults who started making their own anime, that's why some of the animators who worked on Macross included people like Hideaki Anno. Speaking about the animation, while the original Macross TV series had some impressive animated sequences done by people like the above mentioned Anno and others like Ichiro Itano, some episodes weren't very impressive, due to the staff still being composed of newcomers and that some overseas studios which worked on the series weren't of the best quality, in fact, there as an episode that was practically aired unfinished and was later corrected. I've heard that Do you remember love? was made in a way to make up for some of the not so impressive animation in some of the most important episodes of the series. Now that I think of it, feature film retellings of a popular anime series are somewhat uncommon, the only others that I can think of are some Dragon Ball films, like Path to the Power, and I think there are some One Piece movies that retell some of the early arcs, like Alabasta. |
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Dumas1
Posts: 121 |
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I think they used to be slightly more common, at least for series with an overarching story that lends itself to that sort of treatment. Most of the examples I can think of are a bit older: Galaxy Express 999, Space Warrior Baldios, and I think Space Battleship Yamato. I'd attribute at least part of the decline down to the rise of home video, and streaming later on. I don't know if Japanese television has or had anything like American-style syndication and reruns, but there is an appeal to being able to watch a favourite story again in some form after it's off the air and 1-3 feature-length films would be infinitely easier to buy and store than a whole series, especially on tape. On the other side, a compilation movie would have a built-in audience and probably be cheaper to make than an all-new film while wringing a few bucks out of existing footage. |
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MarshalBanana
Posts: 5742 |
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Fluwm
Moderator
 Posts: 1657 |
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Very interesting to see the movie reviewed from the perspective of some hone who hasn’t seen SDFM. I’m always a little hesitant about which Macross to recommend to newcomers: the original series is dated enough to be a bit of a hard sell, and while DYRL is one of the most gorgeous pieces of animation ever made, it always seemed like it might be too abbreviated to function well as an entry point, so I typically wind up point to Frontier instead.
As for the story still holding up, I think it’s pretty timeless. If you strip away the details, the original Macross story is fundamentally just a reimagining of The War Of The Worlds, with culture providing a resolution to a hopeless conflict in a much more satisfying and less-likely-to-be-rendered-silly-by-scientific-advancement than hyper advanced aliens somehow being unaware of germ theory.
How exciting! You’re in for a helluva treat. You may want to refresh yourself on the original anime as DYRL makes some interesting retcons that reshape the story a bit — and it’s easy to forget they even are retcons. It also does a better job telling the story of that middle-part of SDFM, I think, and not in the least because the reduced screen time means much less of Minmay being annoying, nd much less of Kaifun being one of the most hateable characters in all of anime. |
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Silver Kirin
Posts: 1798 |
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I don't know about those movies you mention, I thought Galaxy Express 999 the movie was a compilation film with some new animation, though I did hear that Space Battleship Yamato was the series that popularized the idea of compilation films, though I swear the idea of anime compilation films is older. I do remember an old ANN article asking about the reason for compilation films and the answer was also due to the fact that Home Video was not a thing, though I do think reruns were a thing in Japan, shows that weren't that successful in their original run like Lupin III Part 1 and Mobile Suit Gundam gained a new audience in reruns. I do think that compilation films are still a thing because it's kind of neat seeing an anime on the big screen, and modern anime are made in wide-screen, so I guess it's easier to fit episodes on the big screen.
Yeah, I haven't watched Nausicaä as many times as DYRL, but the animation on that movie was incredible. Still, I have to acknowledge some anime movies made in the '60s and '70s, some of them are actually very beautiful, like those made by Toei, though at the same time it feels like the animators were still figuring out how the medium worked. Though in the '70s you also had movies based on TV anime, which were basically the typicial non-canon films, like the Pokémon or Dragon Ball ones, which had better animation that the shows, but still weren't like huge productions. |
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