On
September 9, 1999, at 9:09am (Japan Standard Time), disaster will
strike the Earth! Speeding by on its thousand-year orbit, the giant
planet Lar Metal will miss us by inches, but in its wake comes
destruction on a vast scale. Professor Amamori of the Tsukuba
Observatory struggles with the biggest astronomical news of the
century, along with his orphaned nephew Hajime and Amamori’s
assistant Yukino Yayoi, a mysterious beauty burdened with an awesome
secret and a terrible decision that will affect the destiny of both
planets.
This is the story of Queen Millennia (Japanese title 新竹取物語
1000年女王
or Shin Taketori Monogatari: Sennen Joō, or
"The New Tale of the Bamboo Cutter: Millennium Queen,")
Leiji Matsumoto’s followup to his popular Galaxy Express 999. Queen
Millennia would appear as a manga series, a TV show, a radio drama,
and a 1982 feature film, released just as the TV anime was reaching
its climax. A blizzard of Queen Millennia ballyhoo buried print and
broadcast media in a blanket of thousand-year hype, leading some
wags to describe the property as "The Queen Of Promotions."

Ultimately this millennial juggernaut would have less horsepower than
the 999; merch plans and a 52-episode run were both cut short, and
decades later Queen Millennia is perhaps known more in the West as
part of a confusing Harmony Gold adaptation, or as an LP in the New
Age section of your local record store, a little-seen footnote
alongside more popular Leiji Matsumoto properties like Space Pirate
Captain Harlock and Galaxy Express. Forty years on, what’s the deal
with this 1000-Year Queen’s film? It’s been decades since Yukino
Yayoi & co. first appeared on movie screens, but even though
Japanese animation has enjoyed unprecedented worldwide prominence,
the Queen Millennia movie remains firmly absent from the North
American anime market.
The North American anime fandom of the Club Era (1977-1995) knew
of Queen Millennia thanks to Roman Albums, anime magazines, and the
occasional 5th generation VHS copy. Unlike some other
anime of the period, the Millennia film was mercifully spared an
edited, weirdly-dubbed American release, and even the fan subtitle
crowd hadn’t caught up with it. So it was up to our Atlanta-based Corn Pone Flicks fansub group to get the job done. We had our pal
Sue's script and our pal Shaun's LaserDisc, and soon it was one more
star in the CPF fan subtitle galaxy.
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script and final product
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Expecting rock-em sock-em SF adventure from that Queen Millennia
fansub? This film delivers its struggles on a more spiritual scale,
opening with a closeup of Yayoi’s long-lashed brown eyes slowly
receding into space, advising everyone to get comfortable and settle
in. Queen Millennia spends a lot of its run time showing us
slow-moving planets, leisurely floating continents, and Lar Metal’s
space invasion armada gently manoeuvring into formation, all set to a
Kitarō soundtrack that inspires restful contemplation rather than
cinematic excitement.

The movie covers the major plot points of the Queen Millennia
mythos; Junior high schooler Hajime suffers the sudden loss of his
parents and an uncomfortable new life with astronomer Uncle Amamori,
while crushing hard on his math teacher Yayoi and worrying about, you
know, that whole impending When Worlds Collide thing. Hajime escapes
a meteor-smashed Tokyo to a hollow-Earth survival shelter and learns
not only was his engineer father somehow involved with the Lar Metal,
but that his dream gal is actually cosmic royalty in the final days
of her thousand year term secretly ruling mankind. Yayoi, a space-age
Princess Kaguya (there’s that “Tale Of The Bamboo Cutter”
tagline) now doing business as Queen Millennia, finds herself forced
to reconcile sister Selene’s rebellion with the Earth emigration
plan of her Lar Metalian fiancée Dr. Fara, while at the same time
dealing with the anti-Earthling prejudice and unwanted affections of
her Captain Harlock lookalike subordinate Daisuke Yamori. Ultimately,
Yayoi must choose between her home planet and the Earth she’s
purportedly been in charge of. And I say “purportedly” because
judging by the last thousand years it doesn’t look like anybody’s
been in charge.
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Yayoi in regulation astronomy leotard
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It’s an occupational hazard of adapted media, but sometimes
watching the cinematic Queen Millennia is an exercise in spotting
things the TV show and the manga did better. Yayoi spends much of her
TV time dressed down in denim, chilling with her adopted parents and
her all-purpose Leiji Matsumoto cat in their mom & pop ramen
shop, letting us know she honestly enjoys the low-fi Earthling
lifestyle. TV’s Amamori gets to spend more time hectoring the
military-industrial complex and their takeover of his observatory
(Macek’s script for the Harmony Gold version literally names it
“The Military Industrial Complex” in his version, a Boomer
child’s callback to Eisenhower if ever there was one). Hajime is
allowed time to grieve lost parents and mix with schoolyard friends
and rivals to mix. Selene leans into her resistance fighter persona
and gives the viewer a fun masked mystery character.

The movie version abandons all this in favor of long, lingering
shots of planets, spaceships, floating chunks of Japan, and Lar
Metal’s airbrushed Roger Dean album cover landscape. On the other
hand, the film ditches the manga scene where Yayoi goes to Venus in
an Lar Metal insectoid spaceship controlled by her entire,
jaybird-naked body, Iczer One style, and that’s probably OK.
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Leiji Matsumoto self-insert fanfic
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That’s not to say the Queen Millennia film doesn’t have its
own unique anime charms. There’s a sequence towards the climax
where Prof. Amamori, Hajime, and a parade of creative staff
caricatures loot the No More War Museum and use the suspiciously well
preserved tanks, warplanes, and automatic weapons to counterattack
the Lar Metal assault force in a well animated clash of cultures. The
film regains some momentum again when Yayoi confronts the ultimate
ruler of Lar Metal, Laarela the Holy Queen, who manifests as a
blank-eyed moppet radiating murder power, the creepiest levitating
girl seen in film since Linda Blair defied gravity in The Exorcist.

The film’s distinct visual style is almost a character in its
own right. We think of the 80s as being neon grids, primary colors,
and high-tech hairstyles, but every decade has echoes of its past and
countercultures always flourish in the margins. The occult had spent
the 1940s and 50s strictly for cult religions and professional
Nightmare Alley spook-show grifters, but these and other alternative
worldviews gained new energy from the upheaval of the 1960s, as
disaffected youth sought meaning and purpose away from stupid,
vulgar, greedy ugly American death-suckers. This hunger for
alternative spiritual meaning became known as the New Age Movement in
the 1970s, embracing everything from Tibetan shamanism,
Ayahuasca-fueled mystery ceremonies, the Rev. Moon, the Hare Krishna,
spirit channeling, UFO contactees from countless planets, and the
untapped powers of an entire flea market full of crystals, rainbows,
dream catchers, pewter angels, gazing balls, and incense. The entire
patchouli-scented parade was still marching sandal-clad strong into
and throughout the 1980s.

Queen Millennia is wall to wall carpeted with these baroque,
rainbow-crystal-healing-vibration hallmarks of the New Age, where
there's a seeker born every minute. We’d see this junk science
permeate pulp fiction of the time and Leiji’s was no exception; for
instance, the Erich von Däniken
ancient astronaut underpinnings of his Space Pirate Captain
Harlock. Interviewed before Queen Millennia’s release, Matsumoto
went so far as to describe the film as “occult-like.”
Earth ruled by powerful hidden adepts? This is old-school Hollow
Earth Shaver Mystery stuff crossed with Madame Blavatsky’s Ascended
Masters trip. Unseen Tenth Planets causing Earthly cataclysm and
disaster is the backbone of numerous mid-century kook-science
theories, the granddaddy of which is Worlds In Collision by Immanuel
Velikovsky, a NYT best seller (!!) that suggests the planet Venus
erupted from Jupiter four thousand years ago, and whose wild orbital
journey caused most of the miracles of the Old Testament before it
settled down in its current position. The scene in Queen Millennia
where Lar Metal approaches Earth and we see a giant spark as the
electric potential of the two planets equalizes? Straight outta
Velikovsky. As a wild wild planet bonus, the film even gives us its
version of Von Daniken wannabe Zecharia Sitchin’s "dark star"
Nibiru, the rogue planet that killed the dinosaurs and has us next on
its hit list. Don’t trust those Zeta Reticuli brain implants, kids.
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Queen Millennia Book Club reading list
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Queen Millennia's aesthetic of misty, transparent palaces, hazy
skies, and vast prehistoric underground worlds would make a great
book cover for any number of paperbacks in the new age section of any
Waldenbooks or B.Dalton at any local mall circa 1985, which, by the
way, also had the Record Bar or Sound Warehouse where you could find
Kitarō’s Queen Millennia soundtrack album, released in America as
"Millennia" on Geffen Records (Geffen- GHS 24084).
Kitarō or Masanori Takahashi is, of course, the renowned Japanese
electronic-instrumental composer, blending folk, classical, and
electronic music into what millions of late-night public radio listeners know as New Age music. Coming into prominence with his
score for the 1980 NHK documentary "The Silk Road," his
albums first saw wide American release when he signed with Geffen,
who packaged six earlier and one new LP for the US market. American
anime nerds, their pop culture radar antennae already alert for any
Asian content, were quick to spot Kitarō's records. As with
Harmagedon, this gave us the opportunity to purchase the soundtrack
for a film we couldn't yet see.
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Queen Millennia Record Club selections
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Putting Kitarō on the Millennia soundtrack assignment is a strong signal
that this movie isn't going to be a typical Matsumotoverse
space-warship pass in review; the composer's new-age reputation
amplifies the film's new age themes. Of course, even harmonic
convergences aren’t immune to the power of pop music, and as a
counterpoint to Kitaro's spacey harmonics, American singer Dara
Sedaka, daughter of Neil "Believe In The Sign Of Zeta"
Sedaka, delivers Queen Millennia’s end-title tune "Angel
Queen" (Canyon – 7A0149c).
All these new-agey cultural highlights might make for fascinating
cultural analysis, maybe, but they aren’t enough to elevate Queen
Millennia, a film that dazedly unspools its slow-paced story with
animation that plods and rarely soars. The big secret of who Yayoi is
and what she’s up to is unwrapped in the first ten minutes, leaving
the viewer to glean what excitement they can from duelling space
fleets and potato-head Matsumoto characters firing giant prop
crossbows at alien fighters, only to be confused and bemused when the
retired Millennial Queens rise from their Millennial Tombs and
transform themselves into space ships, Turbo Teen style. By the
film’s end we’re watching an entire rogue galaxy rushing towards
us at Einstein-defying speeds, a deus ex machina climax that feels
less like universal destiny and more like last-minute writer’s room
panic.

On a more concrete level, there are lots of beauty shots of 1999
Tokyo being smashed to bits and raised up in the air like in the end
of five or six Marvel movies. The film definitely delivers disaster
footage worthy of any number of mid-70s earthquake, tidal wave,
volcano, Japan Submersion flicks. And if you're into the whole
connected-Matsumoto-universe Time Is A Flat Circle thing, Queen
Millennia shows us where Queen Promethium and the machine empire come
from. This leads us backwards to Rintaro’s 1979 Galaxy Express 999
movie, a film with a similar assignment (boil down a TV series) but a
more successful final product.
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Voice talent, creatives, and Kitaro at Queen Millennia event
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Queen Millennia shares a lot of staff with a different Toei SF
epic, 1980’s Cyborg 009 Legend Of The Super Galaxy. Character
designer/animation director Yasuhiro Yamaguchi, literal cult director
Masayuki Akehi, mechanical designer Koichi Tsunoda, and DP Tamio
Hosoda worked on both films, each featuring impractical yet stylish
spacecraft, scripts and running times that freely bend the laws of
time and space, and blatant references to the debunked theories of
human history being influenced by ancient astronautics. Queen
Millennia screenwriter Keisuke Fujiwara has written for literally
hundreds of films and TV episodes, including 55 episodes of GE 999
and 53 episodes of Mazinger Z, making him perhaps the hardest working
writer in anime-show business.

The film has seen French, Spanish, Chinese and Italian releases,
but so far North American licensors have yet to give Queen Millennia
any sort of home video outing. I’ve no doubt the questionable
performance of the mid 80s Harmony Gold series influenced decisions
at some point, and the film’s then-groundbreaking production
committee financing might make for complicated licensing rights.
Acquiring rights to the Kitarō soundtrack can’t help but add an
extra layer of licensing-lawyer billable hours to the whole mess.
Even today in North America’s anime-saturated market here aren’t
a lot of companies willing to go that extra Millennia mile, and this
is a shame. Queen Millennia is like no other film inspired by Leiji
Matsumoto works; it is first and foremost a tragedy, the desires and
wishes and struggles of ordinary and even supernaturally advanced
peoples meaningless against the immense, unstoppable power of the
cosmos itself. Will fans of early 80s SF anime and fans of new age
synthesizer soundscapes ever be able to come together in front of the
TV and enjoy a film made just for them? Or will one of those rogue
planets or out of control galaxies stumble out of outer space and
smash us to bits first? I’d say odds are about even. See you in the
underground caverns!
-Dave Merrill