Recommended
"Let the superior man never fail reverentially to order his own conduct, and let him be respectful to others and observant of propriety – then all within the four seas will be his brothers." – Analects 12.5 Often, when trying to interpret anime, explaining it through the framework of pre-existing -isms or specific artistic styles is something that may be useful as an immediately understandable way to explain the feeling of a work, but rarely does it facilitate the sort of in-depth thought that would make that work interesting and worth thinking about critically. Space Pirate Captain Harlock marks an exception to this rule, it indisputablyand comprehensively carries the DNA of the Romanticist movement in every aspect of its design, tonally and ideologically. Popular thought may have moved past Romanticism and many of its underlying ideas, but Captain Harlock manages to firstly demonstrate their relevance into a modern context, while also expounding upon them with an originality that leaves it incomparable to even the most ideologically and philosophically minded of anime.
Especially for something to have come from the 1970s, Captain Harlock is unprecedentedly evocative and audacious in its editing. Being mindful of Osamu Tezuka’s comments that he disliked the ‘aesthetic of stillness’ created through the cost-saving techniques he personally introduced, Captain Harlock demonstrates that, while making use of these techniques due to inevitable budgetary constraints, the presence of stillness does not have any currency when it comes to making an immersive and emotionally powerful work that uses every point of visual characterisation and metaphor to convey its ideas. In fact, the reason Tezuka’s aesthetic of stillness works is for the specific reason that the editing process, not the number of keyframes in animation, is the defining element in making a work engaging and visually memorable.
As concerns the editing process, Captain Harlock’s is its own unique specimen, one that grows in response to its own environment, accepting and embracing warmth, and retreating when it sees the cold. The real schwerpunkt that comes through in this stylised form of editing is that it manages to be ingrained into psychedelia and its heightened sensations, but not to a distortive effect. In terms of visual direction, it is deeply unlike Tetsuya Nakashima, whose method appears vaguely similar on a surface level, but Nakashima sets out to produce an extra layer of hyperreality on the visual plane to create a further degree of separation between character, viewer, and narrative. Captain Harlock’s editing engages with different motives, creating a coalescent sense of poetics that comes from experience, using the hyperrealised form of editing that brings attention to itself, to remove alienation and disparity between character and setting, rather than to enhance it. This also extends to smaller scenes, even the opening episode titles are put against an episode-specific background of movement and music that ensures it is kept interesting. Even in the most celebrated of anime, the opening title cards are almost always put onto a simple black background, but Captain Harlock moves beyond this arbitrary simplicity, which is representative of its editing process as a whole – they could have gone for a more standard ‘invisible’ continuity editing, but as they have demonstrated, it creates a far more poignant experience when they choose not to. Even still, it is not an overbearing part of the visual production, but it is always there, and each episode manages to make itself distinct by ensuring the editing maintains a field of visual layering and poetics that prevent it from feeling formulaic.
Likewise, the sound design in the series manages to be of the utmost quality, whether through the ambient soundscapes, or the layered tones of screams and deoxygenated flames that appear when the Mazone are killed (which is itself complemented by a dissociative and hyperrealised visual accompaniment of sharp, coloured lighting), creating a pronounced and poignant effect on the viewer. The same is true of the orchestral soundtrack, which appear both in diegetic and non-diegetic forms on a regular basis, conveying the operatic scale of action. Rather than using straightforwardly bombastic and high-energy tracks, its action sequences use music evocative of Samuel Barber, conveying the sense of danger and scale, but also the underlying sadness that permeates it. That is really the point that makes Captain Harlock exemplary, it may nominally be a space opera series about fighting alien invaders, but it retains an emotional core that is uncharacteristic of the genre – one episode ends with Harlock sitting at the oceanside as Kei plays the shamisen, a moment that carries distinct feelings to Harlock, Kei, and the viewer alike, but all of whom manage to recognise the sublimity in the distinctiveness and individuality from that one moment and experience.
As a character himself, Harlock is deeply elusive. A melancholic and Byronic hero, at least only in certain respects, he doesn’t adhere to the standard template of the Byronic hero, nor the more classical image of a hero (he may be on a nautical odyssey, but there is nothing Homeric in his character), and he has perhaps even less commonality with the more modern concept of a morally ambiguous anti-hero one may expect from his outlaw status. Ideologically, the series chooses to invoke nostalgia, taking place in a future in which “the impostume of wealth and peace that inward breaks” (as was once conveyed by an earlier writer) has prevailed, leading to an Earth which has been gripped by a Hobbesian conception of all the ills and insecurities of a pre-societal state, doubled with all the worst elements of corporate and government control that characterise a more contemporary life experience. Put up against this background, Harlock is questioned on why he would even choose to fight for an Earth that is so corrupt and hostile to his own existence, and though he gives various answers at intermittent periods, none of them are ever comprehensive. To return to the earlier conception of Romanticism, that is what Harlock is, as a series, and as a character. Harlock fights against modernity and technology, his ship carries a mixture of features of vintage, ancient, and new. It has all the futuristic radar and laser missiles necessary for its own survival, but no more, with other parts of the ship being made from wood, and carrying a similar triple turret formation to the IJN Yamato. Further, seeing as his enemy, the Mazone, is an alien race that may be characterised by two major traits, being an invading foreign force, and consisting entirely of women (tall women with hime cuts, to be exact), it can be extrapolated that the series also stands as an affirmation of pre-Showa social attitudes in this respect. Harlock is ultimately concerned with the sentimentality of Romanticism, in all its forms, fighting for one’s self, purely for its own sake, there is reference to his crew “fighting under the flag of freedom”, but the ship’s flag is a Jolly Roger, a symbol of death, not freedom. As a sort of ronin, Harlock is compelled to fight, not for an allegiance to Earth, but for an inherent Romanticist notion of fighting for its own sake, and for the love of the poignancy that being freed of all obligation and allegiance manages to carry, on its own terms. In its very structure, Harlock manages to show the impact of the loss of the grand narrative found in a deeply corrupt humanity, in which only the self may remain, and the series manages to demonstrate both the great sublimity that comes from a space-faring outlaw life, and the implicit melancholy, and longing sadness that comes from that very situation.
