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| Summarizing the best elements of Reiji Matsumoto's
"Space Pirate Captain Harlock" is a tough job: the series was built
around a hard core of extremely well developed ideas
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As a crash course in pulp-era space opera, Captain Harlock is hard to beat, and even harder to forget. The tight storyline and haunting simphonic score more than make up for the somewhat willingly uneven graphic style.
There's plenty of melodrama, too, but it's so cunningly offset by the scenario and the premises, that we can just go with the flow, and enjoy the ride to its sardonic, melancholy end.
Follow us for a brief tour of our memories....
| Captain Harlock is the first, and possibly the only animation heir to the long tradition of space opera tough and taciturn, competent heroes with a sketchy past that gave us the likes of Northwest Smith and Eric John Stark. | |
| Lean, scarred, melancholy, with a penchant for strong drinks
and solitude, looking like he's just been kicked out of somewhere, Harlock
is still such a strong character that not even his taking care of the token
orphan
(a '70s anime mainstay) throughout the series ruins the athmosphere.
And the fact that for a change we are travelling with someone that actually stops and asks himself how the heck did he end up into this apparently hopeless situation is also pleasantly refreshing. | 
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| In a world with a minimum of sense, we'd have a live-action Harlock movie starring Clint Eastwood. | |
| .... has a classic big dumb object from outer
space slamming into
planet Earth, as an announcement that things are bound for a change. Not
bad, as a wake up call.
But Earth in 2976 - despite scientific advance or maybe because of it - is a a place where not even a city destroyed by an alien artefact can sheke the population from its apathy. |
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| While scientists rally to discuss the event, the majority switches
to
another channel, and the city is simply rebuilt, incorporating the mystery
sphere.
Strange shadows stalk the night streets, researchers get killed and the space pirates take the blame. And yet, they are the only ones around with a lead on what's happening. |
| The future urban landscape of Captain Harlock combines the high, lofty buildings of so many science fiction paintings with deserted, noir-style mean streets on which air-cushion cars leave behind lone passer-bys without stopping and shadows lurk menacingly round corners. | 
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| Mazonians, the mistery invaders menacing
Earth, are one of the best aliens ever portrayed in anime (and in TV science
fiction shows in general), being at the same time appealing and repulsive,
a devious enemy with more than a trace of tragic dignity.
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| Let's face it - Earth had to deal with much less sexy enemies than
Mazonians.
Their biology is slowly discovered and explained to and by the series protagonists, so that if a few obscure points remain, still the picture looks complete and feels right. |
| Vegetal life forms (echoing "The Thing from Outer Space"), the mazonians appear as slender, long-necked young women (a Matsumoto standard), and as such they are already present on the planet - occupying key positions as wives and lovers of VIPs. |
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| Hidden colonies of aliens are also scattered through the planet, leading to some highly climatic - and appropriately creepy confrontations. |
With its "the enemy among us" feeling and spacefaring hordes of invaders, Captain Harlock succeeds in portraying both the classic space-battles of classic space opera and the hidden invasion/conspiracy theme that hit the big time only recently in mainstream entertainment.
| The series succeeds also in giving to the
protagonist an enemy that's more than his match.
Despite her somewhat peculiar tastes in fashion and make-up, the Mazonian Queen is a fully developed character, with a psichology and a set of loyalties that do influence significantly the development of the storyline. |
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| Fans have long argued that the spaceship Alkadia is as much a protagonist in the series as ate the humans and the aliens manning its decks or trying to blow it away. | |
| With a plot twist of some audacity, the ship is revealed midway through the series to be, actually, a character, its computer housing the brain of the long dead designer of the ship. In this sense, Alkadia is a cyborg ship along the lines of Anne McCaffrey's "The Ship Who Sang". |
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| Equipped with no end of technical gimmicks - including a ramming blade snapping out switchblade-style from its hull - and loaded with a small fleet of support vessels, Alkadia is acustically characterized by a number of stupendously out of place sounds, including the wooden creaking of the hull and the flapping of its Jolly Roger. The simphonic thunder that accompanied the ship's appearence on the screen was another distinctive sound bit of our youth. |
| Displaying an astute designing intuition, the interior of the ship is decidedly larger than life and extremely dark, thus increasing the sense of loneliness of the characters confronted with the vastity of space. |
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| Honestly, you can keep the Enterprise any day, thank you. |
Further developing the alien conspiracy background, the series timeline has the mazonians visiting Earth in the remote past.
| This enables the author to justify the aliens' knowledge of the planet and their presence among us, and also causes the whole astroarchaeological folklore popularized in the '70s by the likes of Erik Von Daniken and Peter Kolosimo to be co-opted, with the purpose of further enriching the background. |
| A laser gun is hidden in the Sphinx at Giza, a lone alien warrior lies in suspended animation inside a piramid in the Bermuda Triangle, the pictures of Nazca are just a signal for space travellers and the thick athmosphere of Venus hides a Mayan citadel, while the trees of the Amazon hide hordes of dryad-like aliens. |
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The storyline acquires therefore a strong internal coherence - that the creators are careful never to abuse - while the sense of mystery and menace is heightened without the need to introduce any artificial gimmick.
| So, in the end, was it any good?
If you followed us to this point, probably you can guess our answer. Despite the many weaknesses endemic of the genre and of the anime scene in general - silly comedy relief characters, melodrama, pink starships - the level of the whole was such that the lack of more products in the same vein is sorely felt.
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Established may 29th 1999
Will be updated soon.
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