Following two decades toiling away as a mangaka and gaining widespread recognition for his craft, Leiji Matsumoto took the reins on directing an anime called Space Battleship Yamato. The series broadcast simultaneously to Matsumoto’s responsibilities working on its manga serialization in Boken O magazine, the culmination of years toiling away at the idea with producers and scrambling together a pilot that helped to secure funding for its production. In an anime medium still in its infancy and otherwise seen as only worthy of rendering colorful images for young children, there was nothing quite like Yamato: complex and morally gray, the series had far more in line with disaster stories, stuffed with allegories to World War II and the cycles of violence.
And it was a failure.
No one has defined Japanese science fiction quite like Leiji Matsumoto, but that doesn’t mean his now-legendary status was a foregone conclusion following the release of what is now considered the director’s seminal work. The series was mostly ignored by TV audiences upon its initial broadcast, to the point that a 39-episode series already trimmed from an ambitious and expansive 52-episode outline had to be further cut down to just 26 episodes.
Just as the series looked set to be forgotten, an experiment that simply didn’t connect with audiences of the time, successful TV reruns, a film adaptation, and a legion of female fans akin to those who revived the Gundam series kept the Yamato spirit alive and ensured it could continue. As the world of the franchise grew, so did the number and range of stories inspired by its at-the-time unusual exploration of the human condition through animation, works that would motivate the creator's of some of the medium's most beloved hits in the decades that followed.
The Space Battleship Yamato in the anime was built in the remains of the sunken World War II vessel during the last days of a dying planet ravaged by war. It powers off into space possessing a crew filled with hope more than expectation, seeking something that can rid the planet of the radioactive pollution that was breaking the world apart. If the ship that inspired its namesake went out onto the waters fighting for Japan, never to return whilst continuing a war of untold casualties, the Space Battleship Yamato, a similar feat of engineering and a character in its own right, was fighting for a way home.
The contrast between a world worth saving and the bleakness of the void, wrapped in a message imbued with love and hope for its salvation elevated by the series' evocative rendering of the coldness of space and the pain felt by those involved in its conflict, leave Yamato feeling unique even today. Ruminating on war and whether fighting is even the answer in a ship named after one of Japan’s greatest war-era engineering marvels is a contradiction that speaks to its core message, as we see the hope of its young characters and the scars of its old each holding close the home they wish to save.
The growth of Space Battleship Yamato in the years which followed paralleled the growth of anime as a medium. Fan clubs for the series spawned, movies were box office hits, its success inspired more anime aimed at older audiences that would go on to be broadcast in prime-time slots.
By comparison, the original Space Battleship Yamato broadcast in 1974 alongside and overshadowed by Heidi, Girl of the Alps, the Isao Takahata-directed anime series based on the Swiss novels about the character squarely targeted at families and younger audiences. Within a decade, as Final Yamato released in cinemas in 1983, the movie was gracing the cover of magazines like Kinema Jumpo while grossing billions of yen at the Japanese box office.
During this same year, anime was in a mecha boom that drew older audiences as well as young, and Golgo 13 was being adapted to the screen. In a full-circle moment, the growth of fan clubs and events brought about events like the Nihon SF Taikai conventions, where a young Hideaki Anno and the rest of Daicon Film referenced this and many other beloved sci-fi works in animating DAICON IV, a short film made to celebrate and open the event.
Anno has been open for his love for Space Battleship Yamato, particularly for how it forwent simplistic portrayals of good versus evil, even crediting the series as one of the first anime he watched that brought him to where he is now. You can see parallels in how its questionable morality on all sides were a core thematic throughline in his most influential work on Evangelion but even in his other anime and live-action work, sci-fi or otherwise.
Leiji Matsumoto’s other work such as Space Pirate Captain Harlock which was in part born from cut elements of the shortened Yamato TV series, the Macross franchise, which shares a similar worldview on love and war through a musical lens, and many more can trace their throughline to this franchise that has come to define a genre. Yet, despite so many contemporaries taking inspiration from its ideas, the story of Yamato still stands apart from its contemporaries. No wonder many cinemas across Japan are spending the month of January marking the 50th anniversary of the franchise by creating various programs of select episodes and moments from the series in curated screenings.
This long history is set to be revived into the mainstream of Japanese pop culture in the biggest work in the series since the original series. From watching the series as a child from the floor in front of the family TV, Hideaki Anno is in line to direct a new film inspired by the series he has referenced in everything from Daicon IV to Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, bringing the Space Battleship Yamato to a new generation.
It’s a sign of true greatness, a testament of Yamato’s depth, constantly able to evolve with the times and move people with its depth and message. More, it's a sign of a legacy whose journey through the stars won’t be ending any time soon.
