Yamato launch!! The destination is…!!

Heroism of love and fantasy

Introduction by Harutoshi Fukui

*Spoiler alert. Please read after watching.

Well, it’s been a while since I used the phrase “spoiler alert” like this. A lot of mysteries are revealed in this chapter, so please be careful not to read this before watching.

First of all, we’ve been waiting to find out the true identity of Dezarium, which has been around since 2205. In the original work, they were fake humans from the future, but this time…no matter how you portray a timeslip story, there are always contradictions, so all the famous works develop their own theories and confuse the audience by saying “this is the rule here.” But Yamato is a story about peoples’ lives and deaths. If you try to push through with brute force like Back to the Future or Star Trek, the world of the work itself may become stale. “They say they’re revising history, but isn’t history already changed when Dezarium comes from the future to the present?” This kind of time-slip question will be answered in the following chapters, so I hope you will take Skaldart’s words at face value for now.

More serious than that is the position of the protagonist, Susumu Kodai. He’s been through a lot in the remake series, but this time is the worst. He loses Yuki, Sasha, and the job he bet his life on. Especially his relationship with Yuki. His dependency on her is even greater than in the original, so the mental damage is immeasurable.

At the beginning, his actions on Asuka show this. He leaves his room, knowing that he can’t continue like this, but before he can take even three steps he is caught up in a dark sense of anxiety and loss, and everyone he passes is worried about him. As Captain Kitano says, the right thing to do is to shut himself up in his room and face his emotions, but that would mean facing the most likely reality of Yuki’s death, so it’s not that easy. I’m sure it’ll be fine, but…he goes around in circles, and his anxiety only grows. As soon as he joins Yamato, Kodai attacks Yamazaki, saying, “We know how to fight, let’s get to Earth quickly.” He seems to have completely lost his usual self. Since it turns out that the Dezarium are Earthlings from the future, Kodai should first think of a way to talk things out and try to stop the conflict, but that’s not what he’s doing.

Caught up in a state of mental turmoil, he gets anxious for no reason, and ends up spinning his wheels and losing the trust of those around him. He is a truly tragic hero. But when I opened the pamphlet manuscript for 2202 for the first time in several years to copy and paste the “Spoiler Alert” sentence at the beginning of this one, I unexpectedly found this sentence written there:

“You have all, in some way, experienced the suffering, conflict, and loss that Kodai experiences.”

This was in the pamphlet of 2202‘s final chapter, so it has been more than five years since I wrote it. For Yamato fans, it is not uncommon for them to be in their 50s or 60s, so I’m sure many of you have witnessed “life-changing moments” during this time. I will repeat once again that Kodai is a mirror image of us. From the moment Yamato set sail fifty years ago, he was destined to face cruel reality as a mirror image of the audience.

Having lost his family, he hates his enemies, but when he finds out that they are also human, he forgets that he was trying to kill them a moment ago and shouts, “If you’re human, you should know the importance of life!” When he finds out that Gamilas has been destroyed after an all-out war, he sheds tears of regret, thinking that they should have loved each other instead of fighting, and simply stands in front of the planet he destroyed. Although he was a physically strong elite officer, Kodai was always powerless, which allowed him to be a mirror image for the audience. He was not a complete hero, but rather an immature figure still in development and lacking definite answers, which is why he was able to gain the sympathy of young people at the time.

However, as the sequels continued, this sensitivity was lost, and coupled with the fact that the audience expanded, Kodai became a conventional hero. As the protagonist of a TV show, he had to compete with many other heroes, so this was perhaps inevitable (although it was ironic that a boy who seemed to have inherited Kodai’s original sensitivity got into a Mobile Suit and achieved enough success to overthrow Yamato).

However, the young Kodai depicted in Episode 13 of the first TV series is an introvert who doesn’t like the adults being excited about his brother’s send-off party, and doesn’t know what to do with himself as he holds a butterfly specimen. He is not a hero by any means, but he grows a little at a time as he struggles to pull the Yamato along under the guidance of the ailing Captain Okita. This is the core of the Yamato story, and it was the way of the hero that supported the original work up to the point of Farewell to Yamato.

Using the original Be Forever story as our subject matter, 3199 is spun around the Kodai from the remakes, who has been exposed to even more upheaval than the original, instead of the Kodai depicted as a hero. Rather than seeing a strong and perfect hero overcome a crisis and dispel the worries of an unmanageable reality, we want you to see Kodai as a mirror image facing similar hardships and losses. I believe this is the kind of hero we need, and it will be a way of passing on the original spirit of Yamato. Both for young people who are just starting to learn what life is all about, and for our generation, who are now starting to look beyond the horizon at the end of the journey.

However, it is also true that the state of Kodai in this film, where he seems to have hit rock bottom, is too painful to be the end of a movie. Despite what is served up in the trailer, I was secretly worried about whether it would end properly. But the ending song Reach for the Star sung by Kodai (Daisuke Ono) perfectly dispelled that.

Even though we didn’t have any detailed discussions, the lyrics and music for the song came together almost immediately, and I think this was the result of the accumulated experience of Ono-san, who has been playing Kodai for over ten years. I think that it pushed Kodai forward and made 3199 itself move forward. It affirmed the path we, the staff, are on.

Mr. Ono says that he deliberately avoids watching the original work. But, or perhaps because of this, there are times when he hits the nail on the head in our exchanges during the voice recording. The lyrics, which contain the feelings of more than ten years walking with Susumu Kodai, function as a signpost for us staff members. Encouraged by this miracle – or perhaps inevitability – the journey of 3199 is about to set sail on the open sea; aiming for greater heights, together with ordinary people who are burdened with hardships and loss.

Chapter 1 recap

Episode synopses

Episode synopses

Character guide

Mecha guide

World guide

The History of Dezarium

The history of Dezarium as told by Holy Leader Skaldart has a sense of déjà vu. Their history is the history of humanity itself.