When the calendar ticked over to the new year, the stakes went up for Final Yamato. The number of production weeks left could now be counted on two hands. When it was learned that three anime movies would premiere on the same day (March 12), the press had an instant story to tell and they ran with it. Here’s how it all went down…
The last months of 1982, animation on Final Yamato was going at full speed while the outside world saw a big upswing in merchandising, especially in book and music publishing. For diehard fans who had seen everything else in real time, it must have felt like a surge of Yamato Fever all over again.
Complete storyboards from a Yamato production are surprisingly elusive for a series with such a rich publishing history, but only a few have emerged in print media over the decades. Final Yamato is not one of them, which makes this collection unique indeed. Last parts added October 15.
When September arrived, the premiere of Final Yamato was six months away. All the meters that measured its progress ticked forward with production milestones, media coverage, a historic live event, and more. Here’s what dropped along with the autumn leaves…
As the second half of 1982 began, Final Yamato preproduction went into its next stage with the completion of the script and the first delivery of storyboards. Meanwhile, media coverage amped up anticipation as the summer anime season reached its peak. Here’s the timeline for these two eventful months…
During this three-month period, Final Yamato preproduction took a huge leap forward when all the story concepts were finally woven into a script, the first round of the “music assault” arrived, and media coverage went into full swing. Here’s what happened from April to June…
When the new year began, all the strategizing for this phase of Yamato history was in full effect. While new music was being written, the story draft for Final Yamato was dusted off and returned to development. In this report, we examine the first three months of 1982.
Your guide to everything seen in Final Yamato on the Yamato and Dengil sides, originally released as bonus features on the Voyager Entertainment Final Yamato DVD.
The end of the long road comes with the 70mm encore release of the film, followed by the ultimate Final Yamato book to rule them all. When the clock ticks over to 1984, Producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki takes Final Yamato to the international stage and lays out a new future for the fans. See it all here.
From December 2012 to July 2015, the making of Final Yamato was examined in detail through a series of articles that followed every stage of the film and its unprecedented media coverage. This index provides a broad overview with links to each article, from early preproduction in 1981 through the last echoes in 1984.
To casual viewers, the Yamato saga was over when Final Yamato closed in theaters. but for the fans there was still the forthcoming 70mm upgrade which turned their summer into a waiting game. Fortunately, there were plenty of things to make the wait easier.
Some serious book publishing began just after Final Yamato closed in theaters, which happened to coincide with the last of the monthly magazine coverage. This was the month when fans had their say about the film, and opinions ranged as widely then as they do now.
Now that the movie was released into the world, everyone had something to say about it both pro and con. The conversation was just beginning as this month’s wave of magazine, book, and music publishing hit the stores – and the very first arrival of Yamato on home video was right behind it.
March 15, 1983, was the last big day for fans before Final Yamato premiered on the 19th. “Big day” in this case refers to several things happening at once, so that’s where this Time Machine visit begins. Here we cover publications that filled the latter half of the month, including unique magazine coverage from Kinejun.
As the wait for Final Yamato came down to the last two weeks, the anime magazines hit newsstands just over a week before the premiere, which put them in a real sweet spot. Anticipation would never be higher, and spoilers would never be thicker. It would be the last Yamato coverage for some, so they left nothing out.
With the Final Yamato trailer in theaters, this was the last full month everyone got to enjoy the anticipation of what they would see in the film – despite Yoshinobu Nishizaki’s best attempts to spoil it by revealing the biggest surprises. He always did enjoy setting traditions more than following them.
This month, the first big chunk of the Final Yamato storyline was fully revealed up to the ship’s launch, and the monthly anime magazines dug in deep. It’s unthinkable in today’s entertainment world for so much be known in advance, but Exec Producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki always played by his own rulebook.
Stories have since come out about how frantic the final months were on the Final Yamato production side, but fans knew little of this at the time. All they had to go on was what they read in the media, and January had a record-setting amount, starting with the publications covered in this installment.
This was the first month finished color designs could be released for Final Yamato, resulted in a wave of publishing that demonstrated the specific visual tone of the movie. Between the anime magazines and the first novelizations, here’s everything that got a loyal fan through the month of December…
Coverage in Japan’s monthly anime magazines took an important turn when movie production reached a point where cel animation existed to generate publicity stills. Thus, after many months of nothing but design and development art, fans could finally get a preview of what would actually be projected onto the big screen.
This was was a good month for SF anime, seeing the debut of both Macross and Endless Road SSX, both of which were covered in anime magazines along with news of Final Yamato‘s mecha and music. Plus, the Yamato fan club magazine published a first-hand account of the momentous ten-year celebration party.
The 6-month countdown to Final Yamato‘s premiere began in September ’82, and the four major anime magazines each did their part to make the wait a little easier. Check out vintage news and interviews from Animedia, The Anime, My Anime, and Animage with its mighty Yamato Dictionary!
Beginning this month, Japanese fans had no less than four anime magazines feeding them Final Yamato news, and this particular crop had some of the best Yamato coverage of any kind with one interesting feature after another, plus exclusive event reports from issue 30 of the official fan club magazine.
Here, we continue our look back at how Final Yamato media coverage in Japan progressed month by month up to the premiere in March 1983. This Time Machine includes articles from The Anime, My Anime, and Animage magazines published in July, 1982.
In April 1982, Yoshinobu Nishizaki conducted a press conference that officially broke the news of Final Yamato‘s production. He gave editors plenty to sink their teeth into, and beginning with their July issues (published in June), they kicked off what would become almost a year of non-stop Yamato coverage.
With Final Yamato, everyone had the chance to track a Yamato project from its first moment of development. Nishizaki welcomed it, wanting the fans to have an active role in deciding the course of Yamato‘s last journey. The result of this openness was more media coverage than any other film to date, and it all starts here.
Brainstorming Sessions, May-July 1981
For the first time in anime history, the conception of a film was made part of the public record while it was still in progress. We begin with this segment, which reproduces the major talking points of all six Final Yamato brainstorming sessions.
Story Drafts, May-August 1981
Here we track which ideas planted the seeds for the final product and which were blown away on the wind. Some would have lead to a variant of the film while others would have created different stories altogether.
July 1981 Story Draft
After all the brainstorming sessions concluded, Eiichi Yamamoto was assigned with the task of weaving the strongest concepts into a single narrative to establish story structure before further work was suspended until the beginning of 1982…
Story Notes, January 1982
As the engine warmed up again, a three-day story summit with the entire preproduction team was set for the end of January, and materials had to be refreshed beforehand. Writer Aritsune Toyota took the lead with the text shown here.
