I finished watching Space Battleship Yamato, an original space opera anime from 1974. Originally I was planning on writing some kind of elaborate ‘farewell’ review to the Escape This Planet website by covering an anime that involves ‘escaping a planet’, so to speak. But sometimes I gotta accept that, at this point, I need to focus less on saying goodbye, and more on moving forward.
I suppose it’s ultimately a bit pointless to say ‘goodbye’ to a website if I’m still going to be rewriting old reviews from it, but the point stands that my ‘Escape This Planet’ project is finished. It was a productive way for a few of us to feel like we were adding something meaningful to an internet that is becoming more difficult to speak genuinely and honestly within. I don’t want to put an end to that feeling, of having something to say, of feeling like I have something to share with others. And so, my writings will continue.
I could continue going through my memories of Escape This Planet and Danganronpa Escape Plan and all that junk but… The long and short of it is that these projects might not end up meaning anything to anyone else at the end of the day, but they mean something to ME, damn it! And if it’s a crime for me to believe in something in the year 2024, then throw me in the god dang slammer… I reject the idea that the only way for us to relate to each other is through our own miseries and frustrations. The future is paved through creation, and I want to have something to show for it instead of having to look back on a void of nothingness filling my past. Even if all I have are these little reviews.
That being said, Yamato is an anime that coincidentally resonates with the feelings of anxiety I was dealing with over the past year or so. This story is centered around having a ticking clock looming over your head, a seemingly inescapable situation, with no way to deal with it short of a miracle. The Earth is on its last legs, and only the Yamato ship can sail to the other side of the galaxy to find the cure that will clean the Earth of its radiation poisoning.
If we’re looking at this story realistically, there’s no way a literal space ship would be able to travel 100 thousand light years across the galaxy and back within only a year, but the Yamato defies reality in many cases, so long as this ship keeps sailing. Yamato is a story with continuity, a rarity for an anime released only a decade after Astro Boy. However, even if these overarching story elements function as a strong glue keeping everything together, its strongest moments happen within the conflicts of each episode.
The galaxy is mainly being controlled by the space super-nazis known as the Gamilas, and they want to destroy all of humanity so they can move in and make Earth their new home. Their evil has seemingly no bounds as the Yamato lays witness to their crimes from planet to planet. As the Yamato approaches their destination of Iscandar, they are ruthlessly attacked by the Gamilas over and over again, who have endless amounts of military power at their disposal. Most of the drama during this story happens during the many battles between the Yamato ship and their Gamlilas pursuers.
The Yamato story tries to keep these battles and tense situations unpredictable across 26 episodes. At its best, these conflicts are exciting and clever. More than once, you’ll have battles that involve the Yamato plunging itself underwater in order to evade enemy attacks, or situations where the crew members have to leave the ship and deal with the problem by hand. In other scenarios, however, it can feel like Yoshinobu Nishizaki, the author of this story, has written himself into a corner and has to use a ridiculous change in plot to get the Yamato spaceship out of a jam. One of the funnier narrow escapes is when Starsha, the leader of Iskandar, intercepts a battle at convenient timing to essentially teleport the Yamato away from enemy fire at the last second. Let’s not forget that the Yamato apparently has the greatest repairmen in the entire universe! These dudes can fix god dang anything! Either way though, I’d say Nishizaki knows what he’s doing for most of this story.
I should note that Nishizaki is old enough to have experienced World War II from up close. He was born during the 1930s right in the heart of Tokyo, and it’s because of this perspective that you get this fixation of the Yamato battleship as the savior of mankind. After all, if Kancolle hasn’t taught you anything about it, Yamato was historically a battleship sent out on a suicide mission at the tail end of the war vs. the US. The WWII references don’t end there, either. The ‘meteor bombs’ that strike Earth bear strong resemblance to real nuclear blasts, radioactive fallout included. It’s clear that real anxiety over the outcome of nuclear war was factored into the current state of the dried up Earth in this story.
One of the strongest aspects of the Yamato story is how well Nishizaki knows how to express the mental effects of this wartime stress throughout these episodes. These are by far the most realistic moments of this story, where crew members end up lashing out at each other, or making hasty decisions while panicking. The captain isn’t exempt from lacking judgment either. His worsening condition leaves the crew to depend on themselves more and more as the story progresses. Though, despite all this, rarely do any of the crew members make mistakes behind the controls of the ship. There just isn’t enough room to be making mistakes in this timeline!
Furthermore, the characters in this story are solid. Kodai is the kind of protagonist you would NEVER EVER see in a modern anime, one that is hot headed and often lacking a sense of humor. He takes his anger out on the other crew members various times, nearly getting himself killed more than once from making rash decisions against better judgment. The other characters are respectable as well, although they tend to undergo a juggling process of who gets to live and who doesn’t that leads to some dumb fakeout deaths.
Besides our protagonist and the captain, other standout characters include the one female on the crew Yuki, the one robot of the crew Analyzer, and the comic relief doctor Sado. Yuki’s role as being The Female is about as hit or miss as you’d expect. She gets captured by enemies, the robot likes to flip her skirt up for the lols, and often when she gets a moment to express her thoughts outside of the story drama, it will center around her wanting to find a partner (that being the protagonist Kodai of course). Nevertheless, she has to endure the same level of intense action that the other characters deal with, so you can’t say that Nishizaki didn’t try to make her into something meaningful. The other side characters also get their shining moments here and there.
Ironically, Yamato has so much of its time soaked up by action and drama that it doesn’t convey its view on why humanity should be saved in the first place. It’s a given that we need to keep ourselves from going extinct, but I want to see exactly what our crew thinks they’re fighting for. They actively choose not to communicate with Earth past a certain point due to the hopelessness they feel from seeing the despair-ridden state of it. The people are rioting, the population is dwindling, and it’s because of a Gamilus transmitter that they’re able to communicate with Earth beyond their normal limits. So the Yamato crew destroys it! In fairness, from their perspective, it’s possible the Gamilus could be sending them fake messages from the Earth to ruin their morale. Even so, their inability to cope with reality overpowers their own memories of life on Earth and everything the remaining population has to stand for.
However, It’s difficult to have complex feelings about the state of humanity and everything it represents for you when you’re a cartoon character. We leave that part to the viewer. Yamato might not be much more than popcorn entertainment, though you can’t help but feel that through all the explosions and infighting drama, you’re looking at somebody’s optimistic projection of a future threatened by nuclear war. Yes, despite everything wrong with it, the Earth is something worth going through hell and back to try saving, and if you can’t see at least that much, then why the hell should you ever be in charge of things?
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