[wao]

Meh, I personally enjoyed this episode enough to come here and post about it - taking out the usual fun cheese you expect from Macross (heart formations synchronizing with the song... the expected PUSH-GIRL-INTO-BOY bit...) I thought it actually felt a bit more coherent and smooth than usual. For example the cutting and timing of scenes felt nice and there weren't any strange camera movements that annoyed me.
I even giggled a bit during the restaurant scene when Luka quietly zipped off when Ranka and Alto started talking. Nice one there

Spoiler for rambling on teh animation:

As for the animation, again the usual "consistency" vs "movement" argument is likely to crop up... I guess I don't need to mention that I felt the animation in this episode was an improvement; the movement greatly added to the drama and effectiveness of the episode. And some of it takes a lot more skill than your typical pretty-face "animation"; even small bits like
-Alto getting the paper and foldign it into a plane
-Michel running and then bumping into everyone (I like the way the camera follows the movement)
-Alto getting his ass kicked by Ozma
-the individual ladies in the ladies room (it would've been 100x easier to just keep them static)
-Alto fixing his hair
-the guy in the green suit (okay, so Cassie looks a bit off)
-the movement of the models
But hey, you all should know that this is how Satelight works; they're not your usual studio that values pretty static draftsmanship over actual movement.

Anyway, it's not like it was bad enough to distract me IMO, I'd say a lot of the characters were on-model for the most part, particularly the males. (On the other hand does this mean they were pandering more to the female fans this episode? I guess I can see why people would prefer the on-model effort be focused on the key event of the episode rather than little details, but...)
It's definitely little compared to Noein (even I couldn't stomach the mutation that occured in episode 2 and 7, what sort of design devolution was that...) I don't think they'd go that far in a Macross show, even if they're the studio that gave Utsunomiya almost an entire episode of Aquarion.

I do have a problem with the concert scene though, and it isn't the "off-model animation" but the colours and application of special effects to her hair. It doesn't fit the animation style that much. And while the movement is great (I think the best part was that slightly long shot where she's singing "jibun no hikouki") I wish some movements were a bit slower. I guess it wouldn't have worked out in terms of frames, or time taken to animate...

For anyone who's interested this episode's storyboard was done by Kazuki Akane (Escaflowne, Heat Guy J, Noein etc) and most of the key animation was not outsourced to other countries, it seems more full of young people, the only two I clearly recognize are yama (Shingo Yamashita, apparently he did the concert scene; I'm pretty sure some insider would've denied it on 2ch by now if it was otherwise) and coosun (Kenichi Kusuna, originally a GIF animator)

And it seems like a good part of the in-between animation was done in Japan too (I can only imagine Madhouse and Nara Animation using mostly non-Japanese) so... Right I'm done.