Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise, written and directed by Hiroyuki Yamaga, was the 1987 debut work of anime studio Gainax. While in creative terms the film was described by its executive producer, president of Bandai Makoto Yamashina, as "pure moviemaking" and having been made "without compromise", its marketing and release plans, under the advertising department of its distributor Toho-Towa, were outside the control of Gainax, and both Gainax and Yamashina acknowledged continuing clashes over these aspects; approximately half of the 800 million yen spent on the film was allocated to advertising and distribution rather than on direct production expenses.
Investor wishes and uncertainty about Royal Space Force financial prospects prompted a protracted conflict over the film's name that led to it eventually being rebranded as The Wings of Honnêamise for its theatrical release. Gainax successfully argued against the film being cut substantially in length; however the movie itself was then advertised in a deceptive manner that misrepresented its actual content and attempted to suggest it was reminiscent of Hayao Miyazaki's 1984 film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind despite both Gainax and Bandai stating its difference. A lavish publicity campaign culminated in a one-night "world premiere" showing of the film on February 19, 1987, at Mann's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood; the event was organized for the benefit of promoting the movie in Japan, yet showed not the Japanese version of the film but an English-dubbed version localized under the name Star Quest, recalled in 2021 by a Bandai executive as "hated".
Upon its release to Japanese theaters on March 14, 1987, Royal Space Force failed to make back its costs at the box office, but eventually became profitable in Japan through home video sales. The film was not officially released to the English-language market until 1994, when a new dubbed version, closer to the original Japanese script but itself controversial, toured art house movie theaters and film festivals before being released to home video in 1995. In the years since the film has been re-issued in various formats including DVD, Blu-ray, HD DVD, and 4K.
Marketing and release Marketing Changing the film title "Royal Space Force was put into production at the very height of the first surge in [anime] video sales, when a studio's ownership of an all-new product, deeply ingrained in the newfound market of adult fans and active fandom, made 'by fans for fans', was immensely tempting. One imagines that investors hoped to bootstrap a new Gundam or a new Yamato out of nothing, which might have explained the enthusiasm during production for a possible movie sequel or television spin-off. However, as the footage of Royal Space Force neared completion in late 1986, and was found to be inconveniently free of many merchandising spin-off opportunities, there were signs among the investors and sponsors of cold feet." In a 2013 survey of the last century of the anime industry, Jonathan Clements devotes three pages to a case study of the distribution and exhibition issues surrounding Royal Space Force, describing "outrageous attempts" by the film's financial backers "to 'fix' the ailing film project", not by changing the film itself, but through a deceptive marketing campaign that began with "prolonged arguments over a sudden perceived need to rename it". The project had been pitched, developed, and approved for production under the name Royal Space Force; Okada remarked that, to Gainax, it was "its one and only title". All Nippon Airways, one of the film's sponsors, however desired that the title include the word "wings", while Bandai favored that the title should use the form "Something of Something," on the reasoning that the last big anime hit had been called Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Over the course of 1986, more than 20 other titles for the film had been suggested to Gainax by outside parties, including Space • Love • Story, Myth of Passion, Young Morning Star Shirotsugh, Spirits of Fire, Song of Icarus, Parallel Zone 1987, and Zero Vertex. As Royal Space Force "was 'not sexy enough and Riquinni was "conveniently female," the initial push was to use the title (The) Wings of Riquinni.
Although the plan to make Royal Space Force had been known around the anime industry since mid-1985, the official announcement of the film was not made until June 4, 1986 in a press conference held at the prestigious Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Ryuichi Sakamoto, who was the only member of Royal Space Force main staff known to the general public spoke at the event, remarking that Royal Space Force would be his third film soundtrack and that its details reminded him of one of his favorite movies, Blade Runner. The announcement at the Imperial Hotel used Royal Space Force as the main title of the film, with (The) Wings of Riquinni as a smaller subtitle; privately, Yamaga objected strongly to the subtitle, pointing out the purpose of the film was to expand the audience's view of the world, and that he did not want a title that focused on one character; therefore, if a second title was absolutely required, he suggested it use Honnêamise after the name of the kingdom in which most of the film's events takes place. As 1986 drew to a close, the battle over the film's final name could be traced through updates on the project in the anime press; in the October 1986 issue of The Anime, just half a year before the film's release to Japanese theaters, the movie logo was still listed as it had appeared at the June announcement, with a large Royal Space Force above a smaller (The) Wings of Riquinni. In the following month's issue, the logo no longer contained (The) Wings of Riquinni, and now read The Wings of Honnêamise~Royal Space Force, with Royal Space Force moved to the bottom, but both titles at equal size. By the December 1986 issue, the logo had assumed its final theatrical release form, with Royal Space Force now smaller than The Wings of Honnêamise.
Conflict over film length
In a 2010 memoir, Okada reflected on the conflict, asserting that it had involved not only the title, but that at one point Bandai had also requested Gainax cut the film's length from two hours to 80 minutes. Okada considered that it had been a "natural" request from a sponsor's perspective, as a movie theater would give four daily showings to a two-hour film, but six if it were only 80 minutes, opening the possibility of 50% more ticket sales. At the time, however, Okada refused, arguing that the box office performance was not part of his job, and telling the theatrical distributor and Bandai in a meeting that if they wanted to cut the film by even 20 minutes, they might as well cut off Okada's arm. In retrospect, Okada felt that he had acted like a child, but that "creators are all children," and if they were making something new and interesting, then in the end everyone involved should profit; he acknowledged, however, that in the meantime it was the "grown-ups" who had to deal with the risks and problems along the way, yet to him, acting like such a "responsible adult" would have meant going along with a deceptive compromise and being just a chouseiyaku (fixer). Bandai company president Makoto Yamashina affirmed shortly before the film's release that he had indeed thought of cutting 20 minutes from the film: "There were about three weeks during which we considered cutting it. Toho-Towa was going through the same thing, but the process of deciding what [scenes] to cut began with conversations about why they shouldn't be cut. And afterwards, I thought, 'Ah, I get it now' and felt that I couldn't cut it. And with apologies toward Toho-Towa, to please go along with this ... For the sake of the box office, it could have worked at around 100 minutes, but if we cut the film at this stage, the whole objective of the movie flies out the window, and the hundreds of millions of yen spent on it have no meaning. So I apologized—I'll be responsible if it's not a hit, so please let me do it as it is."
Okada wrote of having later heard how "emotions were running high" on the Bandai side as well, to the extent of considering taking the project away from Gainax and giving it to another studio to finish, or even cancelling the film's release, despite the 360 million yen already spent on producing it. However, this would have required someone's "head to roll" at Bandai to take responsibility for the loss, which could mean Makoto Yamashina himself, who had announced Royal Space Force as his personal project durung the official press conference in June. Okada noted that the person caught in the middle was Shigeru Watanabe, who had supported the project from the beginning and had secured Bandai's funding for Gainax, but now found himself "forced into a very difficult position," becoming so depressed by the conflict that following the film's release, he took a year's leave of absence. Okada expressed great regret for what he described as his lack of kindness at the time toward Watanabe, on whom he had taken out his anger and sense of betrayal, but nevertheless did not regret his lack of compromise, believing that if he had given any ground, the film might have not been completed.
Misleading advertising campaign
Clements remarked, "the promotions unit did everything in their power to make Honnêamise appeal to precisely the same audience as Nausicaä, even if that meant misleading advertising," citing one example recalled by Okada as "the 'insect incident', in which the artist [Yoshiyuki] Sadamoto was commissioned to draw an image of a giant spider-beetle attacking the city from the film. The insect in question only appeared in the film as a finger-length child's pet, although the advert gave the impression that it would grow into a house-sized behemoth equivalent to the giant ohmu in Nausicaä. Okada was incensed, not only at the apparent conspiracy to mislead audiences about his film, but that the producers would assent to wasting the time of Sadamoto, who spent three days on the commission. Okada felt ... that, if he had three days to spare, he [as one of the film's animation directors] could have better utilised the time by correcting several problematic scenes in the film itself." Okada had earlier affirmed the deceptive marketing push in a 1995 interview: "Toho-Towa was the distributor of The Wings of Honnêamise, and they didn't have any know-how, or sense of strategy to deal with the film ... And they were thinking that this film must be another Nausicaä, because Nausicaä was the last 'big anime hit.' But when they finally saw Wings, they realized it was not another Nausicaä [PANICKED SCREAM] and they thought, 'Okay, okay ... we'll make it Nausicaä in the publicity campaign!"
Yamashina had himself acknowledged that although Bandai's plan to sell one million tickets for the film at the box office was based on that having been the sales performance for Nausicaä, "the content of this work isn't like Nausicaä ... No one's ever done something like this before, so it's a great risk in that respect." In 2000, Akai recalled, "The PR department didn't really seem to understand the film. They have a tendency to make a new release interesting by making it appear similar to a film that was previously a hit." Yamaga remarked that, "There was no precedent in advertising a film like ours at the time. When they are asked what type of a film it is, they can only compare it to something like Nausicaä. It's actually completely different. But Nausicaä at least served as a reference when we were asked to describe our film. If it wasn't for that precedent, there would have been no reference point at all. We could never have explained why it was animated or why it was a theatrical release, or much of anything about it."