Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

Space Battleship Yamato Blu-ray Movie Review

Don't count on any red shirts to give away who's going to die.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman May 1, 2014

It would have to be one heck of a franchise to best both Star Wars and Harry Potter at the box office, but that’s evidently precisely what various releases in the long running Space Battleship Yamato series have done through the years. Even some diehard anime fans are perhaps surprisingly uninformed or at least under informed about Space Battleship Yamato, despite the fact that the original anime is rightly or wrongly seen as a precursor to all sorts of later anime outings featuring mecha and/or science fiction elements. Space Battleship Yamato originally aired in the “Dark Ages” of the mid-seventies, but in a move that indeed presaged developments that would become de rigeur in the world of anime in subsequent years, the television version soon gave birth to a series of feature (animated) films, as well as a couple of follow up television entries. Despite this glut of offerings, American fans typically are only widely conversant with the heavily redacted and dubbed version of the original series which made it to syndicated broadcast form on this side of the pond as Space Cruiser Yamato. Some 35 years after the original anime started airing a live action version of the tale finally made it to Japanese cinemas and instantly became champ at the box office, trumping a Harry Potter outing as its 1977 predecessor had triumphed over Star Wars.

Space Battleship Yamato comes blasting out of the (star) gate from virtually the opening moments of the film, in what turns out to be merely the first of several interstellar battles between earthlings and an invading alien race known as Gamilas. It’s obvious that the filmmakers wanted to evoke the retro-seventies ambience of the original anime, and a lot of the sets and costumes have a generally “old school” quality to them, a la Battlestar Galactica (by which I mean this one). And in fact Battlestar Galactica turns out to be a good reference point in any case, for Space Battleship Yamato also offers a ragtag bunch of survivors who are on a cosmic quest for salvation, with the future of the entire human race hinging on their success or failure.

In short order the film introduces all of the main characters, most of whom are drawn from the original series. There’s firebrand female pilot Yuki Mori (Meisa Kuroki), who harbors both bitterness and affection for former top gun Susumi Kodai (Takuya Kimura), who in turn harbors a grudge against ancient Captain Okita (Tsutomo Yamakazi), whose stiff demeanor makes him look for all the world like a puppet ported in from a nearby Thunderbirds episode. Kodai is angry because he feels Okita forsook Kodai’s brother in the battle which opened the film, but he’s become something of a scientific enigma when he is able to survive the highly irradiated surface of earth with nary a sunburn.

This is the sort of hilariously portentous outing where lines as disparate as “That’s my jacket” and “It could be the end of the human race” are proffered with the same ultra serious, almost deadly, tone. It turns out that Kodai’s adventure on the planet’s surface inadvertently may have pointed the way to the Earth’s salvation, courtesy of a top secret place called Iskandar which evidently has the requisite technology to scrub the Earth’s ruined atmosphere clean and make it habitable for humans again. The long dormant Space Battleship Yamato is resurrected on a quest to get to Iskandar and, hopefully, save mankind.

Space Battleship Yamato’s nearly 24 million dollar budget may seem like a lot of money, but it is of course a mere pittance to the amounts spent on the typical American science fiction spectacular. Perhaps surprisingly, the special effects in the film are quite well managed, with some nice looking CGI that ably brings the kind of half bug half bird looking craft of the Gamilas ably to life, if perhaps not quite hitting the same degree of verisimilitude with the film’s titular “space battleship”, something that often seems to be Photoshopped into various environments. The battle scenes come fast and furiously and feature some impressively staged sequences that may be derivative but which still deliver the requisite adrenaline boost.

What’s ultimately kind of interesting with regard to Space Battleship Yamato is how cavalier it is with its coterie of major characters. All sorts of people who in any given American outing would somehow manage to cling to life are simply jettisoned without much fanfare as the film careens from bloody battle to bloody battle. It’s a fatalistic take on a vaunted science fiction genre, but it gives the film a decidedly serious demeanor that oddly doesn’t grate at all with some of the sillier aspects. There’s always been a certain sacrificial spirit at work in Japanese culture, and the real heroes here are not in fact the survivors, but the ones who give up their own lives to better the way for those left behind.

Space Battleship Yamato Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Space Battleship Yamato is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Giant Ape Media (distributed by anime giant FUNimation Entertainment) with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. This is a very crisp and sharp looking presentation, with generally well composited green screen and CGI elements that bring the film's outer space locations nicely to life. Blacks are beautifully solid, adding a lot of depth to the interstellar sequences. Quite a bit of the interior work on the Yamato has been skewed more than a bit toward the yellow side of the spectrum, but contrast remains strong and fine detail is quite commendable, especially in close-ups. Occasionally the CGI, and notably the exterior of the Yamato itself, look rather soft, at least in comparison to the bulk of the rest of the film. There are no traces of artificial sharpening or denoising in the image.

Space Battleship Yamato Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Space Battleship Yamato features Dolby TrueHD 5.1 mixes in the original Japanese as well as an English dub. As seems to be the case with these dual language offerings, the music and some effects seem to be slightly boosted in the English language version. Otherwise, both tracks offer a glut of surround activity as well as some nicely boisterous LFE in the battle sequences. The sounds of both the zinging spacecraft as well as various types of weaponry firing all provide ample opportunities for nice panning effects and percussive low frequency effects. Dialogue is presented very cleanly, and the entire track boasts excellent fidelity and dynamic range.

Space Battleship Yamato Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Space Battleship Yamamoto Pre-Visualization (1080i; 25:21) is a surprisingly in depth look at how pre-viz morphed into the final film.


• VFX "Making Of" (1080i; 12:17) looks at things like digital compositing.


• Local Yamamoto (1080i; 1:22) is a brief piece where the film's visual effects crew stick the battleship into real life locations around Japan.


• News Flashes (1080i; 1:10) look a lot like trailers to me.


• Premiere Announcements (1080i; 00:49)


• Original Trailer #1 (1080i; 1:34)


• Original Trailer #2 (1080i; 1:36)

Space Battleship Yamato Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Space Battleship Yamato is an odd concatenation of an old time "popcorn" space opera with attempts at some more serious subtexts, including references to sacrifice, pollution and the duality of existence (and, no, that's not a typo), but it delivers its messages easily enough to overcome any potential stumbles. While the film suffers from taking itself way too seriously 100% of the time (despite some wisecracks given to Kodai), the story moves briskly enough to keep things moving and not invite too many sighs and musings about when the end title card is finally going to show up. Special effects are surprisingly good throughout the film, especially considering its relatively paltry budget. With strong technical merits and decent supplemental material, Space Battleship Yamato comes Recommended.