a review of 王立宇宙军：欧尼亚米斯之翼

2024 CULT MOVIE CHALLENGE WEEK 1: ANIME WEEK Revisiting this one after about 25+ years; I first saw it at a student-run anime festival in college ca. 1997-98ish. It was one of maybe the first couple dozen or so full-length anime features that I'd seen up to that point, my consumption being limited to whatever was available at our campus video store (which had a decent selection for the time, but being a broke-ish college student, I had to pick my rentals wisely) or whatever my dorm-mates might have picked up at an comics convention. I remember liking this one a LOT better back then, although on rewatch I'm wondering if I might have just been responding to the cool mechanical designs and alternate world-building (which are still cool) rather than the actual plot, which on this watch came across as equal parts extremely corny and sociopolitically worrisome. I see a bunch of reviews here on LB pointing out the badly-handled scene of sexual assault/attempted rape, and want to boost the signal on that as well. It wasn't my only issue with the movie, but it does make me want to take another look at how often this particular theme comes up in Hideaki Anno's earlier films/series, and whether the more restrained content of the Rebuild of Evangelion films represents him (and by extension, anime as a medium) finally making progress on this stuff.