And the epic space voyage comes to an end
…except it wasn’t that epic?
Like every anime fan should once in his lifetime, I sat down and watched the highly influential Space Battleship Yamato. However, I came out rather underwhelmed. For a show that’s been remembered throughout the years as a classic, I expected a bit more. On the whole, the entire production seemed fairly amateur. I’m not talking about animation or audio quality– just the basics like storytelling and character development. It’s all very simple, and that isn’t especially a good thing.
Yamato is old though. Like a friend of mine said yesterday, Yamato is just Yamato. In the same way Pacman is Pacman. You can’t rate Yamato by today’s standards, as things were simply different back then. Obviously animation wasn’t that great, but the medium of Japanese animation was still coming into itself as a means of storytelling. People probably just started with what’s a easy, and monster of the week is pretty damn easy! Yamato wasn’t meant to have the kind of constant “to be continued” found in most anime, it’s just a simple TV show.
What I do find funny is how taken I am with the original Gundam. From roughly the same era, and suffering from the problems, the Gundam TV series is one of my favourites. I think it’s probably because you can tie random events together better in a war setting (as they change the course of war) but Yamato is random events happening along a journey, and everything gets fixed in the next episode.
I am dowloading the movies now, and plan to watch series 2, but all for educational value. I learned a lot through Yamato, surprisingly enough. If I happen to find it really good then I guess that’s a plus.
It’s always like this. Artists nowadays can profit from what other people already tried out before them. Furthermore people several decades ago were different from what they are today. Take old comedy and horror movies for example: What was a great achievement back then is just routine today or just doesn’t work on the contemporary audience anymore (Hitchcocks “The Birds” were supposed to be horribly frightening but I got bored a bit while watching it).
So what exactly did you learn from Yamato? How to do storytelling better? Do you think it would be worth for me to watch that show, too?
I learned where a lot of anime got its influence.
You can watch it if you want. It’s really up to you.