Coincidence can be a very strange thing… I started watching Space Battleship Yamato, and only five episodes later, this piece of news pops up. I mean, what are the odds of that happening? It doesn’t look like a remake, but more of a new movie, but still, based on the first television series of a franchise that spread three series and countless movies, it’s got its work cut out for it.

Space Battleship Yamato is the classic among classics, and Matsumoto Leiji’s debut into animation. Aired in 1974, after Lupin Sansei and Alps no Shoujo Heidi it was the very first television anime to get any significant popularity and it single-handedly defined the space opera genre for anime for many decades to come. Heck, even Mobile Suit Gundam has borrowed a lot of inspiration from the simple storyline of Space Battleship Yamato (executed much better and more interesting, of course).

After watching this series, I can see why it caught on so much. The story is simple but effective, and the crew of the Yamato is adequately developed in order to prevent the series to get dull after its halfway-point. Topics such as honour, love and manliness often pass the screen when pepole aren’t fighting, and the manliness seems enforced by the downright epic soundtrack. It’s of the kind that keeps sticking to your head like glue, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up being the best soundtrack of the seventies and early eighties.

But of course, this series was developed when anime was in such a young stage, and still needed to mature a lot. For starters, the storyline is incredibly simple: Earth is in danger and Yamato sets out to save it. It’s well told (and the main characters actually don’t get involved with the storyline by accident, and are instead trained officers), but I can’t help but think that it could have used something to spice everything up more. It’s like eating a salad without any dressing whatsoever. Sure, the lettuce is nice and all, but does taste rather plain. The ending does try to spice things up at least a bit with a number of plot-twists, but the problem is that this actually works against them and creates a Disney Ending (seriously, haven’t these people ever heard of checking a person’s heart pulse?!).

Then there’s the ton of technical errors that can be spotted in this series. The director and animators weren’t the most careful, and it’s clear that the production of Yamato was hurried a lot. Sometimes, there are odd leaps in logic (for example, one frame the Yamato is heavily damaged, full of holes, the next it’s magically fixed), the animation can be inconsistent (the bad guys suddenly go Vegeta and change skin-colour in the middle of the series), the animators have clearly trouble to synchronize the characters’ mouths to the voices properly, but the most grating is the huge amount of scientific inaccuracies that would make Gurren Lagann jealous.

Overall, Space Battleship Yamato is an average anime: it doesn’t stand up against most of the better series that we have today, but it’s certainly not bad. The art style has matured in quite an interesting way and you can see the typical manliness of the action scenes from the early days of anime, and today’s anime would definitely be something different if it wasn’t for this series.

Short Synopsis: Birdy goes after the terrorists that were behind the explosion of the previous episode.
Highlights: Pretty much pointless story, but very nice art.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10
Well, this episode seems to conclude the outer space-arc of Birdy. The villains in this episode weren’t much special, and seemed a bit hastily thrown together. They hardly had any background and just weren’t interesting at all, but for now I’ll just see this arc as a means of giving Birdy her background, and showing a bit of the world where she came from. If that were the case, then the rest of the series had better be significantly better than what was shown here.

One thing that did impress me in this episode was the excellent art. The budget is still nowhere the high levels of the first episode, but I like the amount of imagination that was put into the character-designs and especially the background art. The creators made great use of the fact that the episode was set in an unknown alien environment to make a number of pretty unique art setting.

I think the only really interesting thing about the story in this episode was that it showed how the police-system on Birdy’s planet is pretty much one big mess, where multiple divisions are working on the same case without cooperating with each other. In this episode, Birdy ended up tailing someone who was already been tailed by another guy.

But please, can we finally move to villains who don’t look like some sort of street-punks? The villains in this episode who looked at least a bit attractive turned out to be either spies or betraying their boss. I mean, it’s getting pretty predictable if you can just recognize the real villain, just by the way they’re drawn…