Space Battleship Yamato

• 1. Introduction

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  Space Battleship Yamato is a Japanese science fiction anime that first aired on Yomiuri TV on the 6th of October 1974. Its last episode of that run was broadcast on the 30th of March 1975. The story opens in the year 2199, and Earth is dying. For around five years, an alien race called the Gamilons has been bombing the planet. Humanity's last hope is a warship rebuilt from a World War II battleship that carried the name Yamato. The series was written by Yoshinobu Nishizaki, directed by the manga artist Leiji Matsumoto, and produced by Academy Productions. Yet its real drama played out away from the screen. Why did the idea begin as something far darker? How did a show that struggled to find viewers go on to shape generations of anime and even video games? And how did a quarrel over who owned it nearly bury it?

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• 2. Asteroid Ship Icarus

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  Nishizaki's first ideas for the project date to 1973, and they looked almost nothing like the finished series. The working title was Asteroid Ship Icarus. Its crew came from all over the world and travelled inside a hollowed-out asteroid, searching for a planet called Iscandar. The model was Lord of the Flies in outer space. Crew members were meant to quarrel constantly, and many would act purely out of self-interest and personal gain.

  The enemy had a different name too. The Rajendorians were robots whose exact form was never settled. Near the end, the story would reveal that they, and every other living thing on their home planet, had died more than a hundred years earlier.

  Four people formed the creative team: Nishizaki, Keisuke Fujikawa, Eiichi Yamamoto and Aritsune Toyota. The project was first planned as a tokusatsu, a live-action effects production. Nishizaki was drawn toward space after reading Methuselah's Children. Toyota then offered his 1970 novel Desecrated Earth as a further source of inspiration.

  Eiichi Yamamoto read the mood of 1973 closely. The Poseidon Adventure and Japan Sinks were both enjoying considerable success. He believed audiences loved them because they showed people surviving in extreme circumstances. He also felt that industrialisation was making people more miserable, so Yamato was designed to show the triumph of humanity and love.

  The first rough draft arrived toward the end of summer 1973. Nishizaki gave the ship its name, but it was an ordinary spaceship that used a large rock as a shell. The story was notably darker. The characters had heavier flaws and were more misanthropic, and only one of them would live to the end. Everything in that draft, from the rock-shelled ship to the quarrelsome crew, was about to be rebuilt by a manga artist.

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• 3. Matsumoto Takes Command

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  In 1974, Eiichi Yamamoto left to work on a documentary film, ending his oversight of the conceptual stage. Toshio Masuda, who had worked on Tora! Tora! Tora!, was considered as a replacement. He had to decline because of projects of his own, though he would later help produce the 1977 film. The job went to Leiji Matsumoto, who had turned down an earlier offer because he wanted complete creative control.

  Matsumoto overhauled the story. He designed the ship after the IJN Yamato, and he designed its crew as well. He also designed the Wave Motion Gun, which came from Sexaroid, an erotic comedy manga he had written in 1968.

  The first draft was completed on the 21st of May 1974. In August, the team made a ten-minute pilot episode and sent at least nine copies to the relevant organisations. After the pilot succeeded, pre-production on the anime began.

  The length of the series shrank more than once. In the earliest plans it would have run for 52 episodes, then 39, and finally 26. Most of the lost material concerned Gamilas, which had more characters and more complex motivations and goals. Early versions also tied the ship's battles closely to World War II. The battle near Neptune in the first episode, for example, stood for Germany getting around the Maginot Line.

  In a speech at the 1995 Anime Expo, episode director Noboru Ishiguro explained the final cut. Low ratings and high production costs forced Nishizaki to trim the order from 39 episodes to 26. The cancelled episodes would have introduced Captain Harlock as a new character.

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• 4. Voyage to Iscandar

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  At Pluto, Captain Juzo Okita and Mamoru Kodai command the last ships of the Earth Defense Force. The Gamilon fleet demands surrender. In the English version, called Star Blazers, Okita tells them they are "idiots". The Gamilons destroy everything except two ships, the Yukikaze under Mamoru and the Kongou under Okita. Mamoru chooses to stay behind so that Okita can retreat to Earth.

  During that battle, the Kongou detects a spacecraft that is neither Terran nor Gamilon. It reaches Mars, releases a capsule and crashes. Two space cadets at the Mars center, Susumu Kodai and Daisuke Shima, are sent to investigate. Susumu is Mamoru's younger brother. They find a humanoid alien who apparently died after leaving the smaller capsule, and they carry a second small capsule back to the Earth Defense Force.

  Inside is a message from Queen Starsha of Iscandar, a distant planet. She says she can restore Earth using something called Cosmo DNA, but she cannot send it herself. The capsule also holds plans for the Wave Motion Engine, which can push a ship faster than light. The same technology can fire heated energy from the front of the ship, a weapon called the Wave Motion Cannon.

  Time is short. Radiation is already seeping underground, and within a year it will wipe out the underground cities where everyone now lives. So the Earth Defense Force and the whole world begin a plan to turn an old battleship into the last hope of the human race.

  As the Yamato is rebuilt underground, a Gamilon scout jet from the Pluto base circles the battleship's "wreckage". Alarms sound, and Kodai and Shima fly off without orders. The scout plane is faster and more agile than their fighter, and they crash near the Yamato. Crossing a hill, they see the wreck of the old ship hiding the space battleship beneath the rocks.

  In episode three, the rebuilt Yamato must make an emergency launch. The Pluto base has fired a missile that Star Blazers calls the Ultra Menace Missile. Kodai, now chief of the tactical unit, fires the shock cannons at it. The Yamato appears destroyed, then flies out of the explosion unscathed, to the surprise of the Defense Force. At that point the crew has 364 days left before the radiation kills the human population. Each episode takes roughly between one and ten days off that deadline.

  At the Moon, the ship attempts its first space warp. The timing has to be perfect, landing in the middle of the passage between the third and fourth dimensions. The warp works almost perfectly and brings the Yamato out near Mars.

  Jupiter is next, with its huge magnetic field. The planet's gravity drags the ship down into a methane sea beneath bands of gas and cloud. Infrared sensors detect a floating continent that the video panel cannot yet show through the dense atmosphere. A Gamilon fighter pilot attacks Kodai as he goes to investigate it. The crew then fires the Wave Motion Gun for the first time and destroys the floating continent entirely, killing the Gamilons on its base.

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• 5. Honor, Enemies, and Names

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  In the second episode of the first season, sailors and pilots from both sides salute as the original battleship Yamato sinks. The scene was cut from the English dub, though it later appeared on the Star Blazers DVD release. It sets the tone for a series about brave sacrifice, noble enemies, and respect for heroes lost in the line of duty. The later movies spend long stretches on the crew visiting monuments and remembering fallen comrades.

  Dessler, the enemy leader defeated in the first season, carries that theme furthest. He is left without a home or a people. He comes to see that his foes are fighting for the same things he once fought for. Eventually he becomes an important and loyal ally to Earth.

  The human story runs through the declining health of Captain Okita, called Avatar in the Star Blazers dub. It also follows the change in Susumu Kodai, known as Derek Wildstar in English, from a brash young orphan into a mature officer. Alongside this comes his budding romance with the crew member Yuki Mori, who is Nova Forrester in the dub. The foreign edits tend to play up the individual characters, while the Japanese original is more often focused on the ship itself.

  The American version, Star Blazers, appeared in 1979 as a heavily edited dub produced by Westchester Film Corporation. Voyager Entertainment later released DVD volumes and comic adaptations.

  For many years, English-language releases carried the title Space Cruiser Yamato instead. Nishizaki, a sailing enthusiast who owned a cruiser yacht, ordered that translation out of love for his boat. It is technically wrong, since senkan means battleship, while the Japanese word for cruiser is jun'yōkan. Matsumoto's manga adaptation was usually called Cosmoship Yamato.

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• 6. A Franchise Without End

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  The 6th of August 1977 brought the Yamato film to Japanese cinemas. It condensed the first season into 130 minutes by combining elements from a few key episodes. New animation was added, such as the scenes on Iscandar, and the opening sequence was recycled from the series' test footage. A shorter English version followed in 1978 as Space Cruiser Yamato. It had only a limited theatrical release in Europe and Latin America, where it was called Patrulha Estelar and Astronave Intrepido.

  The film's success in Japan led to Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato in 1978, also known as Arrivederci Yamato. Set in 2201, it pits the crew against the White Comet Empire, a mobile city fortress called Gatlantis from the Andromeda Galaxy. The crew ends up on a suicide mission to save humanity.

  Viewers disliked that ending, and the response was a second television season, Space Battleship Yamato II, also from 1978. It retconned the film and faced a different enemy, Zōdah, called Prince Zordar in the Star Blazers dub, and his Comet Empire. The ship and its main characters survive. Over 26 episodes it added a love story between Teresa and Daisuke Shima and an onboard clash between Kodai and Saito, leader of a group of space marines. Footage from Arrivederci Yamato was reused, especially in the opening titles.

  Yamato: The New Voyage followed in 1979 with a new enemy, the Black Nebula Empire. Dessler watches his home world, Gamilas, destroyed, and the Yamato becomes his ally. Be Forever Yamato arrived in 1980 with a hyperon bomb aimed at Earth. In it appears Sasha, the daughter of Queen Starsha and Mamoru Kodai.

  A third television season, Space Battleship Yamato III, was broadcast in 1980. A stray proton missile from a battle between the Galman Empire and the Bolar Federation hits the Sun and speeds up its nuclear fusion. Humanity must flee or prevent a supernova. The people of Galman turn out to be the ancestors of Dessler's Gamilas race. Planned as 52 episodes, it was cut to 25 after funding cuts, and fans were unhappy that the English version used new voice actors.

  Final Yamato premiered in Japanese theaters on the 19th of March 1983. Captain Okita, discovered to have been in cryogenic sleep since the first season, returns and sacrifices himself to stop the plan of the Denguilu to flood Earth. Kodai and Yuki also marry. Yamato: Resurrection followed in 2009, set 17 years after Final Yamato. Legal conflicts had stalled it until August 2008, when Nishizaki announced a release date of the 12th of December 2009.

  The chronology is full of knots. Final Yamato is set in 2203, yet Yamato III was widely believed to take place in 2205, a date that was never stated in the broadcast. The opening narration of Final Yamato mentions the Bolar and Galman conflict, which squeezes Yamato III into a compressed timeline between 2202 and 2203.

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• 7. Courtrooms and Remakes

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  In the mid-1990s, Nishizaki tried to continue the story with Yamato 2520, set hundreds of years later. It followed the eighteenth starship to carry the name and its fight against the Seiren Federation. In place of Leiji Matsumoto, the American artist Syd Mead, known for Blade Runner, supplied the concept art. Nishizaki's company, West Cape Corp, the former Academy Productions, went bankrupt amid legal disputes with Matsumoto over the Yamato copyrights. Only three of the planned ten episodes ever reached home video.

  Matsumoto, meanwhile, held the copyright himself from 1998 to 2002. Between February 2000 and October 2001 he published Great Yamato in Shogakukan's Gotta Comics magazine. It was set in the year 3199 and followed the distant descendants of the crew in a far bigger ship. In March 2002, a Tokyo court ruled that Nishizaki legally owned the Yamato copyrights, and Matsumoto could no longer use them. He then redesigned the ship and its crew for Great Yamato No. Zero, released in five episodes from 2004 to 2007.

  Nishizaki and Matsumoto eventually settled, and in early 2004 project proposals were drawn up for a 26-episode series called New Space Battleship Yamato. Tohoku Shinsha did not back it, and it was never made. In April 2014, the American series expert Tim Eldred won a complete package of its art, mecha designs and story outline at an auction on the Japanese store Mandarake. It would have been set 20 years after Final Yamato, with Kodai leading a salvage operation for the old ship and a new Yamato facing the Balbard Empire.

  The remakes began on the 1st of December 2010 with the first live-action Yamato film, directed by Takashi Yamazaki. Takuya Kimura played Susumu Kodai and Meisa Kuroki played Yuki. The budget was over ¥2 billion, and it became the fourth highest grossing Japanese live-action film of that year.

  Yamato 2199 reached Japanese cinemas on the 7th of April 2012 as a remake of the 1974 series, with Yutaka Izubuchi as supervising director. Hideaki Anno designed its opening sequence. Yamato 2202 followed on the 25th of February 2017, directed by Nobuyoshi Habara with Harutoshi Fukui as writer. Yamato 2205 debuted on the 8th of October 2021, the first Yamato work animated by Satelight. Rebel 3199 was announced in January 2022 and was to premiere as seven films, beginning on the 19th of July 2024, with Naomichi Yamato directing.

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• 8. Legacy and Impact

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  Two or three months after the broadcast began, fans started turning up at the studio. Some girls even flew in from Kyushu, and the staff handed them cels and background paintings as souvenirs. Those cels are now valuable, though back then they were just taking up space. Matsumoto also received a "very surprising" amount of fan mail from women, since he had meant the show mostly for a male audience.

  The 1977 film brought a surge of popularity and a cult following after a broadcast that few had noticed. Before Yamato, anime was called terebi manga, meaning TV manga. The series was ambitious in tone and themes and was an original work, which helped push Japan toward the word anime.

  Yamato's turn toward serious themes and complex storylines influenced Gundam, Macross and Evangelion. Hideaki Anno has named it his favorite anime and credits it with sparking his interest in the medium. It was the first anime series or movie to win the Seiun Award, a feat not repeated until Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind in 1984. Later works such as Sgt. Frog, Haruhi Suzumiya and Space Battleship Tiramisu parodied or referenced it.

  The film Star Wars, from 1977, shares several similarities with the original series. Both are space operas with militant empires and starship battles. R2D2 resembles Analyzer in design and narrative function, and in both works a female lead delivers the ship's blueprints. Several critics suggest Yamato may have influenced Star Wars, though George Lucas did not list it among his Japanese influences, such as Akira Kurosawa's samurai films.

  Games carry its mark too. Yamato is cited as an inspiration for the influential shoot 'em up Space Invaders. Designer Takashi Nishiyama credits the Wave Motion Gun as the origin of the Hadouken move in Street Fighter. The 1980 kaiju film Gamera: Super Monster used stock footage of the series. Taito also made a Yamato Laserdisc arcade game in 1985.

  Bandai took on most of the merchandising, and its early decision to sponsor Yamato is considered influential in the company's financial success. Starting in 1974, clothing, tableware, stationery and models appeared. Models of Dessler's fleet were sold, which was uncommon for a villain's ships at the time. The most elaborate Bandai model, released in 2007, measures 70 cm. It comes with a remote control shaped like the Wave Motion Gun's pistol grip and sold for ¥47,250, about $450.

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