Gall Force: the Engrish Fascist Garage Kit Diorama world of “Star Front”

I was reading a review of the original “Gall Force” film and remembered one of my Yahoo! Auctions Japan binges where I bought a ton of Gall Force merchandise. If you know me that means old ancient artbooks, even older and more ancient anime magazines and dead video formats like laserdiscs. Years ago I’d heard that Gall Force was based upon a manga by Kenichi Sonoda which ran in a hobby magazine. That was kind of partly right. Sodona was working at Artmic in the mid 1980’s and was commissioned to create character designs for Model Graphix magazine. The idea was to scratch build figures and mecha for the monthly magazine as part of a “photo serial”. It’s a pretty cool idea. Similar stuff has run in other Japanese hobby magazines like Hobby Japan, but this idea was truly an anime fan garage kit maker’s dream come true. The Gall Force Star Front feature ran in the magazine on a monthly basis from March 1985 to July 1986 when the feature film came out.

So, getting back to my original point, I bought the compilation mook (magazine/book) a few years back and decided to flick though it again a couple of days ago. So it’s been for than a quarter of a century since these photos were first published. They still look quite good;


Prior to the creation of the film, the cast was only made up of Rabby, Patty and Rumy, and the story pretty much follows the latter half of the film (see this site for a better run down of Star Front than what I can give). The mecha is pretty darn good too;




Love the powered suits and that all-terrain vehicle. But the highlight of this mook is the photo story. For some reason instead of Japanese, the story is in English. Really, really bad English;

Yup. Surprisingly there’s practically no “how to” or behind the scenes stuff related to the making of the models. Odd for a product from modelling magazine. It’s kind of clear with the sections that follow that the mook is aimed at the anime fan rather modellers. There’s a section promoting the movie as well as rather ugly looking 1/8 scale figures of the cast from the film and tons of conceptual drawings and model sheets mostly done by Sonoda. But of course the bulk of Sodona’s designs have to with Star Front. Naturally Sonoda has model sheets of the cast in their undies, despite the fact none of the garage kits depict them that way;


One can only wonder why the Solonoid army would supply their soldiers with pantyhose and lacy undies. Naturally there’s also a fair bit of fan related material including a very wonky Catty figure;


Even English speaking fans got into the book. Well OK, one did;

Alexander Rivers from Los Angeles who sent the magazine a typed up letter (long before the internet or even word processor programmes kids!) who loved the series quite a bit. Gee, that work bench looks way too clean. I made such a mess when I was into garage kits and models.

There’s also some additional promotional stuff with somebody in scary kigurumi cosplay mode attacking the voice actresses (or something);



It seems that Sonoda designed another character called Nekomimi (above), which seems to be specifically designed for garage kit maker Mono Craft. However there are no photos of any type kit produced for her in the mook. However, as always, undies are what Sodona likes;


Yeah, on the far left, that’s Swastika undies. Uh huh. But even better is to come;
Mein Führer, I am a bunny girl! I think that’s the problem with anime, we need more fascist bunny girls. Seriously Japan, what is up with your underlying fascination with Nazis?!! Not only that but Rabby, Patty and Rumy are depicted as super deformed SS in one small drawing. Argg, what the hell?!

But it’s the weird stuff that makes these old artbooks, mooks and Roman Albums so damn fun (and the horrible Engrish and weird Nazi and underwear fetishes). I might visit a few more items in my collection a little down the track.