Cine Ludens: ‘The Flying Luna Clipper’
(This is a quick translation of the entry dedicated to The Flying Luna Clipper in my last book, Cine Ludens: 50 diálogos entre el juego y el cine. That entry is an expansion/continuation of a text I wrote before for O Magazine, The Flying Luna Clipper: The Chiptune Film That Could Have Been.)
The Flying Luna Clipper is a 55-minute animated feature with mutant fruits, living snowmen and zero gravity dances produced by Sony in the late 80s and distributed exclusively on LaserDisc in Japan. And that is not even the strangest thing about it. What makes it truly unique, and what should grant it a position of honour in the history of film and games interbreeding, is that it was created entirely with the 8-bit microcomputer MSX, a technical limitation comparable to composing an opera for GameBoy. With pixelated and somewhat arthritic graphics, TFLC tells the story of a group of “dreamers” who embark on the inaugural flight of a seaplane, the namesake Flying Luna Clipper, across the Pacific. With an unbashful honesty and self-conscious sense of kitsch, this is a forgotten relative of the unclassifiable hallucinations of Kawasaki Minoru — The Calamari Wrestler (2004), Executive Koala (2005) or Crab Goalkeeper (2006) — and the first Toriyama, made even more eccentric because of its unique origin.
This oddity among oddities was ahead of machinima — fiction pieces created with videogame software — and the installations of filmmaker and visual artist Harun Farocki, who explored the ontology of the videogame image in series such as Serious Games I-IV (2009–2010) or Parallel I-IV (2012–2014) . It also brings to mind music videos with pixel art aesthetics such as ‘The Name of the Game’ (Ural 13 Diktators, 2000) and ‘Move Your Feet’ (Junior Senior, 2002) or the sketches of Dorkly and 8-Bit Cinema. In other words, TFLC points directly to an abandoned branch of popular culture, to a cinema that could have been and never was: one created directly with the aesthetics and technology of videogames.
The film reappeared in 2015 on YouTube, uploaded by journalist Matt Hawkins of Attract Mode. According to him, one of his contacts found the disc in a second-hand Japanese store and sent it to him, but he had no more information. The trail ended there. No one seemed to know more about this production and its entry in the LaserDisc Database has a lot of “ no data available” . Only one name is repeated: Ikko Ono. So, on to do some investigation: with the help of a colleague specialised in retro videogames and collecting, Marçal Mora Cantallops (and our respective Japanese teachers), we located Mr. Ono and verified that the origin of the film (Japan, 1987, MSX) is real. TFLC is not a hoax. We asked for an interview and Mr. Ono accepted, surprised; months later, he sent us pages and pages of answers and scanned work materials — magazine covers, press texts, storyboards. And the story exceeds what we expected.
Mr. Ono worked in the early 1980s for the pioneering New York studio Digital Effects, which participated in Tron’s special effects , and when he retorned to Japan he joined JCGL, the country’s first computer graphics company. At that time he became friends with Mr. Nishi Kazuhiko, founder of ASCII Corporation and promoter of the MSX, and was in charge of the covers of its official magazine between 1984 and 1987, as well as a section, “You can also be an illustrator”, in which he gave advice on how to use that microcomputer as an artistic tool. Nishi wanted the MSX to cause an “information revolution” and for young people to create art with it, and Mr. Ono became his perfect ally for that enterprise. During 1986 he had a regular section, “Ikko’s Gallery”, where he used the anthropomorphic fruits and vegetables from his covers for the Big Comic Spirits magazine, and this gave way to another section dedicated to short videos, “Ikko’s Theater”. This shorts were published in one piece at the request of Sony, which needed content to promote the LaserDisc, and hence TFLC was born.
Mr. Ono’s work is a mix of influences as pop and eclectic as itself. On the one hand, it is inspired by two Beatles films, Magical Mystery Tour (Bernard Knowles, The Beatles, 1967) — a road trip by bus with eccentric characters — and Yellow Submarine (George Dunning, 1968), and the adventure film Tiko and the shark (Folco Quilici, 1962), set in Polynesia. On the other hand, it uses the true story of the disappearance of the Hawaii Clipper, a PanAm plane that covered the world’s first transoceanic route in 1935, in a five-day trip from San Francisco to Manila, and that Mr. Ono had known when he illustrated the cover of the documentary novel Kieta Hikousen, “the missing planes”, published by Mainichi Shinbun in 1976. There is also much of his personal travel to Honolulu and his interest in Polynesian culture, as well as the landscapes of the Kochi prefrecture where he grew up. Finally, Mr. Ono wanted to capture the feeling he had when he first watched Hollywood cinema in his childhood, when the encounter with a different culture invited him to enter a world of universal dreams. Because of this, and despite it never having left Japan officially, the original language of the film is English. So, after all, there is order in TFLC madness.
TFLC was the first and last time that a technology made for videogames was used for a movie of this size. Mr. Ono was its director, character designer, animator, screenwriter, editor, and sound designer — the music was composed by Fumitaka Anzai, composer of the Urusei Yatsura anime (1981–1986) — , and had almost forgotten it until 2003, when, with the excuse of the MSX anniversary, a special edition of the magazine was published and he made the cover. After that, Mr. Ono made a calendar in 2004 in which he imagined different scenes of a potential TFLC 2 , but the project was never carried out. Another missed opportunity for chiptune cinema (chipcinema), one that once more makes us fantasize with a whole filmography created with Ataris and Super Nintendos, with movies that exploit the aesthetics of Nanaon-Sha or Takahashi Keita, or star Kirby and the sprites of Parodius (Konami, 1988). Well, all the more reasons to pay respects to this very, very weird missing link of the intersection of cinema and videogames.
You can watch TFLC here:
