Hermes: Winds of Love (ヘルメス～愛は風の如く, Herumesu — Ai wa Kaze no Gotoku, lit. Hermes: "Our Love is like the Winds") is a 1997 anime film directed by Tetsuo Imazawa and distributed by Toei Company. It is the very first feature-length animation produced by the Japanese spiritual movement Happy Science following their short OVA, Shiawasette Naani, and the first of nine anime movies produced by the movement.
The story is set in Ancient Greece, specifically in Sitia, a town in the isle of Crete, where a golden feather falls on an old man, who prophetizes the birth of a great hero in the town, who will become king all over Greece. Said feather enters the royal palace on top of a mountain and heralds the birth of a baby which is announced all over the town, giving him the name of Hermes. However, the prophecy reaches the Palace of Knossos, where the tyrannical King Minos lives. Threatened by the idea that someone from a town as tiny as Sitia would have a strong ruler that can topple him, Minos seeks to destroy Hermes.
The movie can be watched in English here
, if you dare.
Tropes:
- Age-Gap Romance: The 26-year-old Hermes meets, romances, and eventually marries 18-year-old Aphrodite.
- Babies Make Everything Better: When Eros is born, the wet nurses coo all over him. This is justified as the Goddess of Love foretold to Aphrodite that Eros would be full of love, as his name would suggest.
- Bedsheet Ladder: Hermes breaks Aphrodite out of her prison in this way, but the royal guard of Lindos finds out and they cut the bedsheets. However, they survive and proceed to run away before boarding the ship that deployed him.
- Bridal Carry: Hermes carries Aphrodite's blind mother in this way as he rescues her from her imprisonment in Lindos.
- Chase Scene: When Hermes boards with Aphrodite the ship where his captain, Demes, waits for him, King Kaipeia chases them in his fleets. When Hermes' forces fought off the Lindosian archers' arrows, a golden wind hit the sails and helped them escape. However, Kaipeia ordered his fleets to chase Hermes' ship despite it going faster than his own ships until he cans it and notifies Minos of the loss.
- Disney Acid Sequence: Aphrodite engages in a solemn one while singing about her captivity and holding out for a hero before Hermes visits her.
- The Great Fire: Theseus and the other prisoners sold off as a tribute to King Minos set the Knossos Palace on fire after Theseus killed the Minotaur. When Minos' messenger alerts him, he rides back to the flaming ruins of his palace.
- Mercury's Wings: Two thirds of the way through the movie, Pan and Agape reveal their themselves as fairies to Hermes and give him a pair of small winged sandals. However, these instantly adjust to his feet and instead of making him fly like in Greek myth, these only allow him to have an out-of-body experience.
- Our Minotaurs Are Different: Being an epic about Ancient Greece with King Minos as an antagonist, the Minotaur is expected to appear, with its backstory playing out like in classical myth. Later on, after Hermes rescues Aphrodite, he sets out to defeat the Minotaur with the help of Theseus, who was sold off with other prisoners by King Aegeus as a tribute to Minos.
- Protagonist Title: Hermes is the title character of this movie.
- Red String of Fate: Hermes is destined to meet up and marry Aphrodite, a former princess of Delos who was held prisoner in Lindos, a village in the isle of Rhodes after Minos took over her country and killed her father.
- Reincarnation Romance: Hermes and Aphrodite's romance is established to last throughout their next lives, alluding to Ryuho Okawa's relationship with his then-wife, Kyoko Kimura, as their latest reincarnations. In a hilarious twist of irony, Okawa divorced Kimura in 2012 for exposing the cult's real numbers, with their eldest son, Hiroshi Okawa, cutting him from his life.
- Sadly Mythcharacterized: Hermes, Aphrodite, and Eros are both depicted as mortals. The former two are royals destined to marry each other and lead Greece to an age of prosperity. The latter is their baby son, born from a magical arrow from an unnamed Goddess of Love. While this portrayal is a far cry from their depictions in the original Greek myths, it's how they're depicted in Ryuho Okawa's mythos.
- Sadly Mythtaken: Hermes and Aphrodite named their baby son Eros, which is far from accurate to the original source material. While some of the original myths depict Eros as Aphrodite's son or created from the concepts of Dawn and Night, none of them depict Hermes as his father. Moreover, Happy Science probably took this license because they didn't want to deal with any implications that could come from the name of Hermes and Aphrodite's actual son, Hermaphroditus.
- Sea Mine: Hermes' forces create ones from barrels of Greek fire liquid to prepare for King Kaipeia's fleets' attack. When the soldiers swim under the fleets to spring them up, one of the ships breaks it and its torch sets its contents in fire. As they break more barrels, Demis orders the archers to shoot flaming arrows at the pools of Greek fire, causing Kaipeia to fold back and order a retreat.
- Serenade Your Lover: Six months after his first visit to Aphrodite's prison in Lindos and surviving a storm while sailing, Hermes greets her with a serenade. Aphrodite, feeling moved by the song, uses a mirror to beacon him to her cell to give him a message to read back in Sitia.
- Skinny Dipping: Aphrodite's introductory scene shows her swimming naked in the morning as a prisoner in the Palace of Lindos.
