Legacy Years Bibliography, Part 2

Yamato Resurrection

2010 Calendars

October and December, 2009

The first Yamato Resurrection calendar was published by the Etoile Company. Measuring about 18″ x 25″, it features six pages of CG-rendered spaceships with three devoted to Yamato, one to the Cosmo Pulsar fighter, one to Earth ships, and one for enemy vessels. See the entire calendar front to back here.

The second calendar was larger, about 20″ x 30″ and offered plenty of stills from the movie. See it from cover to cover here.

Hyperweapon 2009

64 pages, Model Art, November 2009

The first Resurrection tie-in book was this large-format magazine. Published by Model Art Co., it is the brainchild of mecha designer Makoto Kobayashi, who uses it as a showcase for his work. This issue concentrated on Space Battleships and devoted the lion’s share of its pages to Kobayashi’s prolific work for Resurrection.

Kobayashi’s history as a modeler, manga artist, and designer goes back to the early 1980s. He originally joined the Yamato production unit to work on Yamato 2520 and stayed on for the first attempt to make Resurrection (see details here). Rare examples of this early work were included in Hyperweapon 2009, including designs for the abandoned Dessler’s War project (shown below).

Later issues of Hyperweapon documented Kobayashi’s work on Yamato 2199, and can be found in the 2199 bibliography.

Movie program book

40 pages, December 2009

Movie program books are a continuing staple of Japanese cinema, and Resurrection‘s program was a real beauty, 40 glossy full-color pages including the centerspread shown above. See it from cover to cover here

Director’s Cut program book

20 pages, January 2012

The Director’s Cut for Resurrection was shown in only one Tokyo theater for only one week in late January/early February 2012 (after which it went to home video), but even this short run warranted a program book of its own. See it from cover to cover here

Model Sheets Collection

64 pages, December 2009

500mm Yamato Papercraft

December, 2009

These publications came out with the movie premiere in December 2009, exclusive to souvenir shops in the Toho Cinema chain. Both followed Yamato traditions established many years ago. The Model Sheet Collection (above left) was a 64-page collection of animation designs direct from the studio, featuring characters and mecha. The papercraft set (above right) allowed you to build a 20″ paper model of the ship. It was co-produced by two companies, Fujitsu Zero Taro Store and Office Prion. Another edition was released in 2010, scaled up to twice this size.

Rocks magazine No. 5

Shibuya Publishing, December 2009

This magazine was the first to carry a Resurrection cover story. It’s a real oddball, a wide-ranging publication covering pop culture, travel, fashion, music, and whatever else seems to interest the hipsters at Shibuya Publishing. In this case, they lovingly devoted 34 pages to a feature called “The World of SF Animation” that focused almost exclusively on Yamato and contained some very unique coverage.

See a gallery of selected pages here.

Yamato Resurrection Complete Box

Yamato Books, October 2010

The ultimate Resurrection collectible finally arrived when this set began shipping from Yamato Books in the fall of 2010. Sold exclusively through the Yamato Crew website and limited to 5,000 copies, it was a direct callback to the Yamato production years when Office Academy (later Westcape Corporation) set the standard for high-end publishing with its deluxe hardcover art books. This set picks up where those left off and adds some pretty amazing artifacts to the package.

Read a detailed review here.

Hyperweapon 2011

64 pages, Model Art, June 2011

This issue picked up where the 2009 edition left off with 21 pages on the Yamato Resurrection Director’s Cut and an artistic exploration of EDF ships in the post-Resurrection timeframe, including the sister ship Musashi. Kobayashi’s designs for the Last Exile movie provide the other major feature.

2012 Art Calendar

Yamato Crew, January 2012

This calendar was sold through the Yamato Crew website with new artwork by mecha designer Makoto Kobayashi. Those who placed pre-orders were offered a special page (above) for download November 2011.

The calendar contained the six pages shown above, and was received just before the Resurrection Director’s Cut began its one-week theatrical run.


The Live-Action Movie

Promotional tabloid

4 pages, April 2010

A teaser commercial had been released on January 1 for the live-action movie, creating worldwide excitement. That excitement was renewed when a one-shot Yamato News flyer was distributed to Japanese theatres. This large, double-sided foldout gave us our first look at the cast in costume and a few other intriguing photos as well. See it up close (and translated) in our first movie report here.

Novelization

by Manabu Wakui
LENGTH, Shogakukan, October 2010

The publication date of this novel coincided with the October 6 anniversary of the first Yamato TV series, which is usually commemorated by one product release or another (consult our various History Timelines to see how it has been marked in the past). It fits into the Japanese “light novel” category, pocket-size with no interior images. Full translations of both the prologue and the epilogue are included in our synopsis of the movie, which can be found here.

Junior novelization

by Shima Mizuki
200 pages, Shogakukan, November 2010

Shogakukan later published a shorter novelization in their “Junior Cinema Library” line. It was released a week before the movie premiere with a few pages of color stills and completely different text from the first novel.

CG World + Digital Video #149

Works Corporation, November 2010

Published for special effects buffs, this became one of the few magazine tie-ins that didn’t put an actor on the cover. It contained a full-color 12-page article that examined the entire VFX process used by Director Takashi Yamazaki and Shirogumi [White Group] to make the film. As of this writing, it is still the only publication (other than the program book) to do so.

Movie program book

54 pages, December 2010

This full-color program book was sold in theaters, generously filled with stills and FX shots. See it from cover to cover here.

Magazine coverage

The first magazines with substantial live-action movie coverage started to appear in October 2010, beginning with Screen Plus, a spinoff of Screen magazine. With pop/film megastar Takuya Kimura as the “face” of the film, it was a natural choice for him to get one cover shoot after another – putting Yamato back in the spotlight of mainstream media for the first time since the 1980s.

Kimura interviews were the main feature of each magazine, often coupling him with Director Takashi Yamazaki, along with shorter features on the rest of the cast and retrospectives of the anime. Interestingly, one of these magazines was the bi-weekly KinemaJunpo [Cinema 10-Day Report] above left, which was known in previous decades as Kinejun. It had the distinction of being the first mainstream magazine to feature a Yamato cover story in 1978 (then again in 1980), and this was noted with pride in their new coverage. To its right is the December issue of Big Comic with a cartoon Kimura on the cover.

Continue to bibliography Part 3: Hobby and Game books

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