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.
Writer’s Summit Day 2
The story of Final Yamato was definitely taking shape, but was still far from script-ready. The presence of writer Aritsune Toyota on day 2 brought an extra dimension to the proceedings, thanks to his extensive knowledge of both science and science-fiction.
Writer’s Summit Day 3
On this day, the writers talked through the entire story to see if it held together. Though it differed in a few key points from the movie that would eventually emerge from their efforts, the outline was essentially in place.
Preproduction, February 1982
In the wake of writer’s summit, there was an enormous amount of story information to be processed. The next step was to wrangle and streamline all the ideas into a single narrative with all the dots connected. See all the dots here.
Preproduction, March 1982
Four drafts of the manuscript were written throughout March. The individual drafts were never published, but the changes from one to the next were documented, and this is where we see many concepts jettisoned while others were refined.
Preproduction, April and May 1982
The last story outline by Yoshinobu Nishizaki sets up the beginning of scriptwriting and a flurry of SF concepts, battle strategies, and a script plan by Toshio Masuda. But even now, there were still ideas that would have taken a different direction…
Fan Club magazine #28
Published in April 1982, this issue delivered an extensive inside look at the film as it entered production with special announcements, staff interviews, and a particularly candid conversation between Yoshinobu Nishizaki and his fans.
The Final Act
The core writing team came together for the last time on June 28, 1982 to tie up all the loose ends and put every concept to rest for good. This is the script that came from that meeting, the entire final act of the movie all the way to the end.
