A 1977 mecha film where practical scale modeling and hand-drawn animation collide in ways that feel less like cinema and more like watching a child's fevered dream of robot warfare made concrete. The insect robots are genuinely unsettling, not cute, not sleek, but chittering, asymmetrical, wrong in a way that '70s anime design could nail without trying. What you're really watching is the last gasp of the golden age of super robot films before the genre calcified into formula, and it moves like it knows the clock is running out.

Planetary Robot Danguard Ace vs. the Army of Insect Robots is a 1977 mecha and science fiction film tied to the Danguard Ace series, in which Japan builds a giant robot to help explore the newly found planet Promethe. Here the robot faces a new insect foe that draws its sustenance from the energy of every living creature and has turned its attention toward Earth.