Space Pirate Captain Harlock (2013)

Space Pirate Captain Harlock arrived in 2013 as the most expensive Japanese CG anime feature ever assembled, a thirty-million-dollar monument to a franchise older than much of its audience, and it promptly lost money. The film concerns dwindling resources, a Homecoming War, and an authoritarian regime called the Gaia Sanction that declares Earth sacred and forbidden in order to keep power. These are old anxieties wearing new polygons. A crew of pirates steals warheads to reset the timestream. A young man named Yama infiltrates the ship to kill its captain and instead inherits his myth.

For the purposes of cultural classification, the film offers almost nothing to seize upon. The cast is entirely Japanese, which reflects the production's origin and not a diversity initiative. Women appear, Nami and Miime and Kei, and are granted interior lives, though the story never organizes itself around their grievances. Nami's death is a private act of love and expiation, not a thesis. The antagonist is a theocratic state apparatus, so the rebellion has no quarrel with capital. Earth is uninhabitable because of war and resource conflict, and no character pauses to deliver a sermon about the environment. There is no racial reckoning, no queer subtext, no disability politics, no gesture toward any of the contemporary categories we are obliged to track. The whole affair is stubbornly mythological.

What remains is a story about atonement and the usefulness of legends. Harlock wants to end the universe; a meadow of flowers changes his mind. The film closes by handing the detonator, and the title, to a younger man. It muses on war and home without instructing anyone. Every marker sits at zero, and the film seems content there.