The Cockpit

1994. OAV. (3 X 30 min.) War drama. org Leiji Matsumoto (manga). dir Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Takashi Imanishi, Ryosuke Takahashi. mus Akira Inoue, Masahiro Kawasaki, Kaoru Wada. des Toshihiro Kawamoto, Hajime Katoki. -bc

The Cockpit adapts three short World War II stories by Leiji Matsumoto, each directed with great care by a different animator. War buffs will be utterly fascinated by the meticulously designed air battles, while a larger audience will respond to the stories’ unmistakable antiwar sentiments.

In volume 1, “The Stratospheric Currents,” Lieutenant Leinders, an ace fighter pilot for the German Luftwaffe, is given an assignment to escort a plane headed for Peenemünde, the Nazis’ famous research facility for V2 rockets. The plane, a refurbished B-17, carries a scientist and his beautiful daughter, Marlene, Leinders’ ex-girlfriend, and their cargo is a lethal new weapon they’ve been forced to create for the Nazis. When the pilot learns it’s an atomic warhead, he suffers a crisis of conscience.

Volume 2, “Sonic Thunder Attack Team,” takes place on August 5–6, 1945, and focuses on a Japanese flyer named Nogami, whose job is to pilot the rocket-powered ohka, or “human bomb,” as it’s called, on a suicide mission to blow up an American aircraft carrier en route to invade Japan.

Volume 3, “Steel Dragoon,” takes place on Leyte Island in the Philippines during the final days of Japanese occupation and focuses on two Japanese soldiers separated from their units, one of whom is an ex-motorcycle racer who fixes up a younger soldier’s cycle and proceeds to take him on a mad race back to the airstrip where he’d been based even though it’s now in American hands.

Since each episode was done by a different director, the design of the characters is different in each. In the first, director and character designer Kawajiri takes certain Matsumoto character types and adopts a more realistic, straightforward look for each of them. Lieutenant Leinders resembles Captain Harlock with his long hair, trim uniform, and fatalistic demeanor. Marlene, his ex-girlfriend, is a tall willowy blond with long hair who is clearly meant to resemble both Galaxy Express 999’s Maetel and Harlock’s Emeraldas. In the second episode, the main character, fighter pilot Nogami, is rendered quite realistically while all of his crewmates are the typical squat cartoon-style soldiers found in Matsumoto’s war comics, displaying round faces and very simple features, including two little beads for the eyes. The Americans are also rendered quite realistically. In the final episode, the two Japanese characters are the usual Matsumoto cartoon types, while the one American shown is drawn realistically.

All of the episodes boast theatrical-quality animation and design in their scenes of aerial and ground combat and the fluid movements of the intricately detailed planes and, in the third episode, motorcycles. Kawajiri’s episode deserves singling out for the thick, painstaking linework, bold colors, and cinematic compositions that recall the vivid illustration style found in classic American war comics of the 1950s and ’60s.

As with so many works by Leiji Matsumoto (Captain Harlock, Space Battleship Yamato, Galaxy Express 999), there is an air of overwhelming tragedy pervading this piece, more obvious here because these stories are set during actual historical events (which occurred when Matsumoto was a boy) and because many of the major characters we meet die violent, sometimes pointless deaths. For American viewers, the fact that these stories are told from the points of view of our wartime enemies, the Germans and the Japanese, should not outweigh the empathetic feelings for all sides expressed here. There are sympathetic Americans depicted in two of the stories, which is not always the case in anime stories with a wartime theme. Above all, the futility of war and its waste of bright young lives is the persistent theme of these three stories.

Ironically, much of the appeal of the series will be to war and mecha buffs interested in the animation of the military hardware featured, particularly in the first two episodes. In episode 1, we see fighter jets in action, mostly German Fokker Wolves vs. English Spitfires, in a couple of breathtaking aerial battles. In episode 2, we not only see fighter jets, both Japanese and American, but also Japanese bombers and American ships, as well as the launching of the ohka, a rocket-powered bomb designed in the last days of the war for more destructive kamikaze missions. The Pacific battle depicted is much larger in scale than anything in the other episodes. The final episode offers a single fighter plane (a Japanese Zero) strafing a Japanese military motorcycle with sidecar, which is also used in a last mad dash towards enemy lines and in a duel with an American soldier on a motorcycle.

While this is a spectacular production overall with great attention to the look and feel of its wartime setting and trappings, it is also involving and touching on an emotional level, not unusual for Matsumoto’s work, but done here without romanticizing the conflict or ennobling the lone warrior, as so many of his works do.

The stories contained in The Cockpit were written and drawn by Leiji Matsumoto (Space Pirate Captain Harlock, Galaxy Express 999) and originally appeared as part of the Senjo (Battlefield) manga series which ran in Shonen Sunday Comics, 1974–80.

Yoshiaki Kawajiri (Wicked City, Ninja Scroll) directed the first volume, wrote the script, and designed the characters. Takashi Imanishi directed the second story and is known primarily for Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory. Ryosuke Takahashi, director of the third story, also directed Armored Trooper Votoms, Silent Service, and Gasaraki.

In volume 1, Leinders must protect a B-17 from British fighter jets, and the aerial combat is as good as anything of its type created for anime, with intricate detailing of the vintage planes and their movements in battle.

In volume 3, there’s a furious motorcycle duel at night between a former Japanese racer on one cycle (with his gunner in the sidecar) and a lone American scout who steers with one hand and uses the other to shoot his machine gun. The racing moves employed are exciting to watch and the combatants wind up expressing respect for each other.

Director Ryosuke Takahashi has had a longstanding preoccupation with military themes and mecha and a certain Japanese nationalist sensibility, yet Takahashi’s episode here has the strongest focus on character and the least emphasis on mecha. Also, given the anti-American sentiments Takahashi displayed in both Silent Service and Gasaraki, Takahashi’s episode, “Steel Dragoon,” offers the most respect for the enemy (an American). In fact, it concludes with the surviving American narrating a tribute to his fallen opponents.

The ohka, or “human bomb” seen in volume 2, did indeed appear near the end of the war and was used in a few attacks on American naval craft, although never on an aircraft carrier as seen here. The ohka was last used on June 22, 1945, and certainly not on August 6, the day of the Hiroshima blast, as depicted here.

The titles of the three episodes in The Cockpit are identified differently in some web sources (such as Anime News Network). The alternate titles of volumes 1–3 are “Slipstream,” “Sonic Boom Squadron,” and “Knight of the Iron Dragon.”

violence There are quick scenes of violent death and bloodshed in the combat scenes.