Yoshio Shirai’s Film Challenge Course
The fun of Yamato
The animation film Space Battleship Yamato has been a big hit with the young generation. Anyway, there were long and endless lines in front of theaters where the movie was being shown, and people who could not get in were waiting for the next three screenings.
Space Battleship Yamato was, of course, originally an anime series for TV. It is currently being rerun again, and I am actually a fan of the TV version. This is a Japan sci-fi anime film with a rather grand vision. Most Japanese TV anime films of this type are usually about superheroes with supernatural powers who shout loud noises while they fight with monsters, like in a children’s picture book. However, Space Battleship Yamato is modern like America’s hit sci-fi movie Star Wars, and it’s nice to have a Japanese science-fiction space opera.
The idea that the Yamato, a huge battleship of the Imperial Japanese Navy that sank during World War II, will be revived as a new space battleship in the year 2199 is also good. The captain of Yamato, Juzo Okita, is a charming character with a Japanese personality. The technique used to depict infinite space and the huge body of Yamato on the small screen of a TV cathode-ray tube was also quite ingenious. Each episode of the TV series builds up into a Taiga-style sci-fi drama, a very effective method.
However, unfortunately, my above impression only applies to the TV version of Space Battleship Yamato. The full-length anime film, which is being shown in theaters this time, is quite poorly done in my opinion. The way the story was put together from the TV version, which is a great science fiction drama, was like a basic digest. First of all, I don’t think it is good. It is a busy compilation of a very long story. The story is so rough and jumpy that I never really got into it.
It would be better to create a completely new episode for the big screen and then put a whole story together around it, or to concentrate on a few episodes from the TV version and rework them for the big screen. I think that’s the form it should have taken.
From what I have seen, most of the scenes seem to have been taken from the TV version. On the big theater screen, we can clearly see the scratches and glints of the original celluloid, which we could not see on the small TV screen. Yamato‘s body, which looked quite huge on TV, looked strangely small when enlarged on the movie screen. The roughness of the drawing is also noticeable. The human movements created by the abbreviated drawing method also look rough in detail.
In other words, for the avid fans of the TV version, the film is a disappointment. Why is this movie version of the anime Space Battleship Yamato so popular among young people? I really don’t know.
I understand that this is an interesting subject that appeals to young people in modern Japan. The TV version has been steadily cultivating Yamato fans, and I can understand why those fans rushed to the theaters. It was like a Yamato convention at the movies. It’s also interesting that you could obtain programs, posters, stills, and theme song records at the theater. Instead of watching it at home with your family in your living room, you can now watch it in a big theater with your like-minded friends.
But even so, I didn’t think it would be such a record-breaking hit. That’s one thing I don’t quite understand. As someone who watches movies and writes about them as a profession, I would like to hear about it.
I hope you will read this text and say, “No, that’s not it!” If you have any opinions or criticisms about this, please feel free to write to me. I will introduce them in the next few issues of the magazine and I’d like to write my opinions and rebuttals. I would like to make this page a series of such articles.