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.
Yamato had always been made with music at its heart. Most other movies and TV shows basically treated music as an afterthought, something to be added at the end of the process. Yamato went the other way, making music an integral part of the process from the earliest stage. And no film generated more music than Final Yamato
Final Yamato set a new record when its first video release arrived before the film itself finished its first run in theaters, and that was only the beginning. When a revised 70mm director’s cut followed in late 1983, it kicked off a long sequence of video releases accompanied by increasingly unique packaging.
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.
Plenty of new products were readied for Final Yamato, but the enormous amount of competition from other anime was consuming a lot of resources. The experience of Yamato III had shown that children were pretty much out of the picture by this time, so all the products were oriented toward older fans.
Merchandising for Final Yamato was light for two basic reasons. First, the fans were getting older and second, many of the previous items were still available. This allowed the new product line to aim for a higher degree of sophistication since they would most likely appeal to older teens and adults.
Part 8: Finishing Touches Final Yamato gave Bandai and its Yamato customers one last spin on the dance floor. Of the kits that concluded a very successful ten years, only one was new, but now that Bandai had become an industry leader, there was plenty more to come.
In 1985, previously-unseen Yamato animation appeared exclusively at Taito game centers in Japan, in a now-extinct Laserdisc game based on Final Yamato. It’s no longer possible to play it, but enough pieces survive for us to examine this amazing artifact from beginning to end. [2 pages]
These documents from deep within the archives of West Cape Corporation lay out a TV series we never saw. The working title was Space Battleship Yamato IV: The Final Chapter, and it was envisioned as a 26 (potentially 39) episode TV series. The 1982 promotional package is presented here in full.
Final Yamato was the last chance for a publishing bandwagon, and everyone was determined not to be left behind. It was the culmination of everything that had come before with each major publisher pushing for the highest quality they could achieve. In other words, it was a good time to be a fan.
In 1983, West Cape was still head and shoulders above all others in terms of its publishing quality. Other publishers bent over backward to flood the market with their best work, but they simply couldn’t compete with the home office. Here, are the last of the high-end Yamato publications from the production years.
This mini-documentary was produced for a series of fan gatherings in the summer of 1982. Until it is finally released from the vault of history, we have a complete transcript of this rarest-of-all Yamato productions as it was published in issue #30 of the fan club magazine (August, 1982).
Akira Hio was early out of the starting gate since his first manga volume would come out before the movie, so it was adapted from a script that was still somewhat volatile. Fittingly, it helped the Final Yamato manga to follow Hio’s well-established tradition of preserving scenes that would later be cut from the film. See them here.
A collection of the many novelizations of the film published by Asahi Sonorama, Shueisha, and Tokuma Shoten, 1982-83. Also featuring an examination of the story and unique artwork in the Tokuma Shoten edition.
In 1981 and ’83, Bandai released two Yamato games unlike any that had come before. Between them, both games gave players the opportunity to recreate all the saga’s major space battles using cardboard chips, a space backdrop, a set of rules, and a pair of dice. See these games in all their boxed-up glory here.
Cosmo DNA is dedicated to learning about how the saga developed and the effect it had on anime in the years that followed. That’s also the topic of this essay by producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki. It was originally published in 1983 when Yamato was just shy of 10 years old, but time has done nothing to dull its message.
Final Yamato was the last opportunity for the production staff to pour their creative passion into the saga that propelled them to anime stardom. Here, then, are their own words to describe the experience. These interviews were originally published in 1983, a few months after the release of the film. [2 pages]
In any manner of film or TV production, the visible staff members rely on the invisible ones to bring their vision to life. This essay was written by a member of Final Yamato‘s invisible army, Assistant Producer Yasuhito Yamaki. The invisible staff often has the best stories to tell, and Yasuhito is no exception.
Final Yamato was met with more media coverage than any of its predecessors. Ever the marketeer, Producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki put as much energy into publicity as he did into the film itself. His devotion to both should be evident in this 1983 essay, originally published in the Final Yamato Roman Album.
