地球へ…/ Toward The Terra

One of the best OVA from the 80's.

Today's entry is about a mildly obscure, yet influential OVA from 38 years ago (1980) that is probably one of the best Anime from the 80's due to its vision of a distant future where humanity has survived poisoning planet earth and become star trekkers while evolving into a very special kind of human that is not welcomed by a super computer controlled-society of clone slaves.

Toward the Terra (Japanese: 地球(テラ)へ… Hepburn: Tera e...) is a Japanese science fiction manga series by Keiko Takemiya. It was originally serialized in Asahi Sonorama's Gekkan Manga Shōnen magazine, between January 1977 and May 1980. In 1978, it won the very first Seiun Award for manga, and in 1980 also won the Shogakukan Manga Award for shōnen/shōjo manga (along with Takemiya's Kaze to Ki no Uta).

 

In 1980, Toward the Terra was adapted into an animated movie, produced by Toei Animation and directed by Hideo Onchi. The music score was written by Masaru Sato. The only two actual songs featured are "Terra e... Coming Home To Terra" and "Ai no Wakusei All We Need Is Love" both performed by Da Capo.  

Overseas, Rightstuf released a hard-subbed version of the movie in North America. It was titled Toward the Terra, and appeared on VHS in 1994 and on laser-disc in 1995, almost 15 years after its original release! Later, at Anime Expo 2008, The Right Stuf International announced that its Nozomi Entertainment division had licensed the Toward the Terra film for the North American market meaning you can still buy it on DVD and Blu Ray in the official market. In 2007, the manga was once again adapted, this time into a 24 episode anime television series. However, our review is about the original 1980 film. 

Clones made to serve.

Clones made to destroy the Mü and protect their sterile society.

Toward The Terra, has a great dystopic setting where people don’t give birth naturally anymore but are born from test tubes, where couples are randomly assigned babies to rear, where another breed of being, telepathic people called Mu, are persecuted and hunted down by esper interrogators.

Basically it’s a fascinating mix of contemporary literature classics in the likes of Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, 1984 and even Star Wars. Moreover, Anime connoisseurs will notice the main story arch is somehow similar to that of Mobile Suit Gundam: Two human factions escape to space to secure survival of one another while fighting a war against each other. In addition, you can tell that some of the artistic ideas from Toward The Terra were used in other Animé from the same decade. For instance, there's a character that plays a harp in a room that's very similar to that of the Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross (1984, but made widely popular as "The Robotech Masters", the second generation from Robotech). Also, humans in TTT are basically clones "programmed" to follow instructions and incapable of displaying personal emotions, while the Mü are naturally born and live freely loving one another, just like what we see causing trouble in  the aforementioned Anime.

Violence in times of war.

The military aren't happy about the Mü.

The story takes place in the distant future sometime after the 31st millennium where humanity exists under the rule of the political order controlled by supercomputers known as Superior Dominance (Hence the SD logo you'll see in many scenes) and the carefully selected humans known as the Members Elite. Centuries before the story begins, the human race came to the conclusion that war and pollution rendered life on Earth unsustainable. Using warp travel the decision was made to leave a supercomputer Artificial Intelligence and caretaker humans behind and colonize distant stars. Under the rule of Superior Dominance all humans are born in vitro and given to carefully selected parents. At the age of 14, all children are put through brainwashing where their memories are wiped by Superior Dominance and overwritten to produce functional adults. A race of advanced humans with psionic abilities called Mu (pronounced myuu, μ) has evolved, and the supercomputers that control Superior Dominance make every effort to exterminate them. Led by Soldier Blue and then Soldier Shin, the Mu make every effort to locate and rescue as many Mu children as possible before the children are discovered and eliminated. The Mu have only one wish, to return to what they see as their promised land, Terra. 

The movie spans a large number of years, jumping back and forth multiple times, from Soldier Shin's life on Ataraxia, the various events on Station E-1077, Soldier Shin's founding of a Mu colony on a habitable planet, Neska, the Superior Dominance war of extermination on the Mu, and finally to the Mu's return to Terra. 

The power that rules.

The people that power fears.

The Mu themselves are a fantastic concept, not merely generic super-humans, their telepathic powers are actually a method of balance and compensation to make up for a variety of deficiencies they suffer from ranging from deformities, asthma, blindness, etc.

Well, not that the movie remembers this plot point after a while, forgetful as it is with many details. We see a dude hilariously drop his arm on the ground to prove a point, and a few coughs here and there but for the most part the Mu look ready to roll and you realize the movie isn't going to bother to stick to its own rules.

It’s a movie of two halves, lots of meaty ideas, but speedy execution. Conflicts are brought up, but then are resolved quickly; and thus unrealistically. Though expecting realism in this story is moot, the ideas are totally out there into fringe-science territory, but the realism I'm talking about is narrative-based, the suspend-disbelief-o-meter. It’s off the charts with Terra e.., unless of course you know how to enjoy yourself with this movie and just accept it for what it is.

It’s a cliffs notes of dystopic literature animated for kids and teens. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s brilliant. There are also some classic Gundam-level slaps, as well as unintentional hilarity due to the animation limitations, but it’s not enough to detract from the core message of the story.

Soldier Blue.

Jomy Marquis Shin.

So yeah, there are plot holes galore and liberties are taken because of animation limitations, and also to condense the story into a two hour movie, but at the end of the day this is great food for thought for kids and teens. I'll take this hole-ridden cheese over modern day flashy anime that are more concerned with fan-service and panty shots than communicating worthwhile ideas to their audience.

No matter how many holes it has, it remains consistent throughout, whether in entertaining the viewer with backhands to kids' faces, or with character relationships and conflicts, which again should be commended, because there are far too many po-faced anime out there with pretensions of being seen as smart or deep but are actually made up of nothing but clichés, coincidences and deus ex machinas, preferring pointless cliff-hangers over carefully structured story development.

TTT seems to revel in its throw-everything-into-the-sink nature with near glee. About an hour and ten minutes into the movie things go crazy with unrestrained violence and mayhem that makes you wonder how many kids got scarred for life watching it when it was released in 1980, especially during one particular sequence involving a woman screaming like a banshee while running into a fire.

The mu are monsters!

No, we are not.

TTT goes bonkers as if someone wrote it while on crack, and after filming it all, leant on the fast forward button on his remote and fell asleep. With people flying around space, babies evolving into fleet commanders and ships that look like they came out of the backside of a farm animal, Terra e... spirals into a tornado of insane and random stuff happening on screen just for the hell of it.
Overall, Toward the Terra is a Space Opera of epic proportions, covering approximately five decades worth of events. It's an old school sci-fi series with complex Character Development, starting slow but gradually building its story to an extremely emotional ride through the galaxy. Recommended for everyone.

here's the movie trailer:

The opening & ending themes:

And a selection of "hot clips" from Manga Entertainment: