Terra e... (Toward the Terra)

In the five hundred years since Earth's environment was destroyed and the planet came to be known as Terra, humans have created a society in space that is entirely logical. Supercomputers control the government, babies are grown in artificial wombs and assigned parents randomly, and at age 14, children take an "Adulthood Exam." Humanity's greatest enemy is the "Mu"—humans who have developed into espers.

When Jomy Marquis Shin's birthday arrives and the time comes for him to take his Adulthood Exam, he is shocked to learn that all of his childhood memories are going to be erased. Suddenly, he hears the voice of Soldier Blue, the leader of the Mu, calling out to him to hold onto his memories.

Jomy makes his escape on a Mu ship and is shocked to learn that he himself is an esper and that the government has sentenced him to death. Nearing the end of his life, Soldier Blue transfers his memories to Jomy and names him the next leader of the Mu. Now, Jomy has a choice: keep the Mu in hiding, or declare war on humanity to realize their dream of returning to Terra.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Related Entries

Ginga, Banjou
Japanese

More staff

Staff

Onchi, Hideo

Director

Ryuu, Machiko

Theme Song Lyrics

Takemiya, Keiko

Original Creator

Kanada, Yoshinori

Key Animation

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Opening Theme

"Terra e... Coming Home To Terra" by Da Capo (Sakakibara Masatoshi, Sakakibara Hiroko)

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Ending Theme

"Ai no Wakusei All We Need Is Love" by Da Capo

Episode Videos

Episode 1

Reviews

Apr 8, 2009

Beatnik

Recommended

Terra e... 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 Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, you name it and its influence is all over Terra e... with the groovy aesthetics of 1960's and 70's applied to cityscapes.

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 realise the movie isnt 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.

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.

Terra e 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.

Terra e... 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.

It’s a quirky one for the books and contains very trippy imagery. Most people won’t enjoy it, but some kooky viewers will dig it.

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Sep 13, 2021

SCLFI

Mixed Feelings

If there is one issue with Terra e, it is ambivalence. It’s got a bunch of different narrative concepts, but none of them are really addressed in any significant amount of detail. It’s a classic adage that the best way to please nobody is to try and please everybody, but they were only really trying to please 2 or 3 people, at most, they just didn’t do a particularly good job of it.

To start off with, the general premise and setting, probably one of its strengths, centred around people evacuating Earth due to environmental damage, with only a few elites allowed to stay. The best ... part of Terra e is its visual design, although it’s a 70s/80s sci-fi anime, aka the period when visual design was at its best, but despite the film's other issues, which I’ll get to in a bit, they really didn’t slack off when it came to making some evocative and interesting looking environments. As a furtherance of that, the general dystopic setting looks interesting, not the best I’ve seen, matter of fact it’s probably the least violent dystopia I’ve seen, they talk a lot about “the system” and its problems, but you don’t see any cops enforcing that system, the surveillance isn’t even as bad as it is in an airport. But, I can see why not, they don’t need any cops, not when the two main characters are the only people who are even so much as mildly critical of the system, it’s true that in any social system most people will just go along with it, but there isn’t one person who even is at all critical of it, and since there’s nobody in place to beat them down and make sure they don’t, it kind of makes the characters feel empty, more on that later.

The first problem is the story’s not really sure what it’s trying to be, and once you try and consider the finer details, that’s when it becomes apparent that you’re alone in trying to think about that, the story’s pretty much just making itself up as it goes along. The main conflict revolves around the Mu, people with supernatural powers who are hunted by human society, and introducing supernatural elements into a story usually just becomes a rationale for the writers to stop bothering to care or try, Ghostbusters was good, Groundhog Day was good, that’s about it, so I guess the supernatural genre needs Bill Murray in it to actually be worthwhile. We’re told that the Mu gain their powers from some other sensory condition (e.g. blindness or deafness), with the main character being the singular exception, but once he’s extracted from human society to their spaceship, it basically ceases to be – he’s escorted there by someone who’s mute and has to communicate via telepathy, when he arrives someone shows that he’s got a prosthetic arm, and that’s pretty much it, later on the main character becomes both blind and deaf due to an accident, but it hardly changes his behaviour, there is no actual evidence of frailness in the manner in which he carries himself, he doesn’t even look different, they could’ve at least put burn marks on his eyes or something.

The next issue is that the whole story is so reliant on the two main characters, the aforementioned bloke who has powers and escapes to the Mu, and an android (the only android ever built, as far as we’re told), who’s a commander in the Earth's military, who is sympathetic towards the Mu. That’s the entire character list for all intents and purposes, you’ve got a bunch of other people, some who even engage in action (i.e. people who do stuff), but they aren’t characters, they are basically NPCs. Having a small amount of characters isn’t a bad thing by any means, just ask Eugene Ionesco, but these NPCs just get in the way of telling an interesting story through the central conflict with the two ‘real’ characters, who, after speaking once for about a minute in the opening, don’t even see each other, much less engage in direct conflict, until the film’s final act, which features an action scene, the only one in the film, as if they threw it in at the last minute because they ran out of ideas.

Ultimately, Terra e is something that just kind of bungles everything it does. While the atmosphere is not particularly impressive, it looks good, but it’s got an array of characters you don’t care about, and not enough time spent with the few characters you do care about, an issue exasperated by the fact the plot seems completely thoughtless, it’s got far too many inconsistencies and oversights to be engaging, and while it’s good in places, there isn’t enough substantial content to make it legitimately worthwhile.

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Oct 15, 2023

Urza1234

Not Recommended

Ultimately this is one of those niche concept pieces from the 80s that the japanese were doing.

On the pro side it has 80's animation. Its not the best ever but far from the worst.

Themes are heavy but generic; humans are problematically tribal.

I understand this was adapted from a late 70s manga, so problems with pacing or glossed over plot elements can probably be attributed to this. Overall this didnt make it unwatchable but imo may have led to characters being somewhat unrelatable. Not having read the source material though I cannot confirm, maybe they're just inherently written not to be relatable, its not an unusual ...