So I've been enjoying anime, but haven't really felt energized by it in the last couple of years since for me, the ratio of amazing shows to good/average shows seems to worsened. But once in a while, something will come along that will just smack me in the face and remind me of why anime is special and is capable of doing things that I know I won't see anywhere else. Hell, the opening credits montage that summarizes the entire television series was enough to get me to remember how I felt when I watched Yamato two years ago.
Some spoilers, so applicable warnings apply.
Space Battleship Yamato 2199: Odyssey of the Celestial Ark
So how do you make a movie that is set before the end of the final episode of the series and still have it matter? I really didn't have an answer to that when I first heard about what this movie was about, but given how great the writing for the original series was, I really shouldn't have doubted that they could have pulled this off.
In a way,
Odyssey is one of the most perfect balancing acts that I've seen since perhaps the seemingly unnecessarily
K-On! movie. It sets up any potential future sequel series, it slots itself into the TV storyline in terms of the actual arc of the series, and also manages to wrap up some storylines that you didn't even know needed to be wrapped up. Try to think about any of your favourite shows, anime or not, and see if you could think of a way to put in a 2 hour movie between the penultimate and final episode of the series... it's not an easy job, especially if the show in question is already heavily serialized.
So what's new about the movie?
We're reintroduced to the Gatlantians and the potential threat that they pose to Earth in a post-Gamilan War future, and the face of the enemy that we see is the warmongering Klingon-like Goran Dagam. I'm hoping that the reboot version of the Gatlantians are at least as complicated as the Gamilans, because at the moment all we really know about their culture from this brief glimpse that we get from them is that they are violent expansionists who are more than happy to keep "Science Slaves" to help them develop technology. But if there is ever a sequel series, I have to assume we'll start to peel back the layers and see them in a different light.
And we certainly are able to see former villains in a different light in this movie. Sure, we had Melda and her group to follow as the "good" Gamilans who were ready to help reform their own society, but who remembers this guy?
Fommt Berger, a rather unremarkable officer who served under Dessler, is tapped to basically carry half the film. Although the other times the Yamato crew have encountered "friendly" Gamilans have ended with a mutual respect of sorts, the movie sets up Berger as a bitter, hotheaded, angry man who wants nothing more to take down the Yamato himself given all that he had lost as a result of the previous battles shown in the series. There's even a flashback to a battle where we see the love of his life, Melia, die during one of the battles with the Yamato just in case we needed to understand why he would be so intent on revenge.
So the film sets up two tracks, one setting up a villain that our heroes will face in the future and the other wrapping up the Gamilan storyline once and for all by showing how even the most angry veteran of the Yamato campaign can learn to let go - in very much the same way that the human crew of the Yamato had to learn to let go as well. It shouldn't be much of a surprise then that the coda of the first series would be a final battle where the humans and the Gamilans work together to defeat Dagam, officially burying the hatchet and giving that storyline some closure.
If that was all the movie was, then it'd be perfectly fine. But it draws on a second forgotten storyline from the show to help serve as the big science fiction hook of the film. Remember how there were these telepathic space witches that tried to infiltrate the Yamato? We thought the two that were working with Dessler were the last of their species and there really wasn't anything in the show to lead us to think otherwise.
It turns out that the Jirellans, as a species, had found a place where they could hide themselves from the rest of the galaxy to try to live in peace. It's under this pretext that the science fiction aspect of the film plays its biggest part, as the movie shifts away from starships firing lasers at each other to a more methodical and classic science fiction story (and also perhaps one of the greatest uses of "The Miracle Worker" as an allegorical device ever).
In fact, the movie basically turns into an episode of Star Trek. After a battle with the Gatlantians where the Yamato is forced to make an emergency warp jump, the crew find themselves in an unknown part of space with no way to escape. Through a series of events that I'll leave you to find out for yourselves, some members of the Yamato crew find themselves trapped in what they think is a hotel (reminiscent of the ST:TNG episode "The Royale") with Berger and some other Gamilans.
The movie makes sure the audience knows that both crews are being manipulated, so the half the tension comes from watching the crews try to negotiate an understanding with each other as they also try to figure out how to escape from the hotel. Yes, there was an episode of Yamato where the Yamato and a Gamilan ship find themselves trapped in void space and have to work with each other to escape, but because of the different dynamic between the two groups, you're left waiting to see if the groups start fighting each other when they discover the truth about of their situation (very reminiscent of the TNG episode "Darmok"). The film moves into the psychological, as characters are forced to contend with having their thoughts being manipulated by the Jirellans while also dealing with the immediate problem of slowly starving to death with no real way to escape.
If you've watched any science fiction show, you'll know that the whole "lock people in a room" is a trope that writers often use when they want an excuse to have the characters learn about themselves while trying to solve a problem, so it was amusing to see it being replicated here because it just reminded me that Yamato really is a throwback to a type of science fiction that has long since gone out of style.
But even that's not enough for the people working on this film. They throw in yet another Star Trek episode ("The Chase") to cap it all off by having the Jirellans reveal themselves to both crews, only to have an ancient computer reveal that all the races in the galaxy were seeded by the same creator.
As the three characters representing the three races hold hands and activates the namesake of the film, the Celestial Ark, this classic science fiction trope helps close out the major thematic threads of the series. Although the Gatlantian thread is still there, the three major races of the show have come to an understanding about their place in the universe and have made peace. Berger is able to get over his anger over the losses he suffered at the hands of the Yamato, Kodai is able to get over his anger over the death of his brother and the near extinction of Earth, and the Jirellan representative Loerelai Loer is able to take a chance to try to save her race. We are also given a nice parallel between the end of Yamato's journey, as human crew are able to save Earth, and the beginning of the Celestial Ark's journey, as Kodai helps give Loerelai the push she needs to lead the Jirellan people into the stars.
So it is fitting that the end of the film shows us the three ships in various states of their journey. The Ark is about to go off and find a new home, ridding themselves of the politics of the Milky Way, and are at the start of their odyssey (hey, that film title makes sense!). The Gamilian crew will return home, and while most of the soldiers in the prime died in the battle, we know that the auxiliary crew on the ship was full of both old men and child soldiers. While we don't really know what a post-Dessler society will be like, we can assume that Berger will join Melda and her group to help rebuild Gamilan society. The old veterans can finally retire and build a new life for the next generation, while the child soldier who salutes with a "Hail Dessler" can have a life free of blind devotion and military service. And of course, the human crew will finish its own odyssey when they arrive on Earth with the magical device that will save their planet from extinction. It's a nice way to just wrap the series up, even though the film itself takes place before the final episode of the series.
That's not to say there aren't any space battles, because the film opens and ends with one. But I just appreciated how the film was able to take one more journey into science fiction land, and even if these stories are so familiar, I'm fine with that because they're being used in a way that isn't mere replication or reference. They are definitely telling their own story with these very basic plot templates, and doing so in a wonderfully exciting manner.
With all that said, there are still a few things that bother me about the Yamato reboot. It's not that big, but it sort of belies the fact that there are some facts about producing anime that leads to the inevitable pandering.
For example, part of me can't stop thinking that these two characters were introduced just for the sake of figma:
Mikage Kiryu being all moe~
Neridia Rikke being all smexy.
She even leaves lipstick on her glass!
I also found it silly that they brought back the Yamamoto love triangle for a brief moment, even though we know that ship has long since sailed:
Dere dere!
And hell, the less said about the ridiculous nature of the skin tight uniforms that only the women seem to wear, complete with high heel boots, the better.
I also forgot that, perhaps like LOGH, this show's origins were basically "WW2 in space":
Why would the carriers need flight decks when the Yamato basically proves that you don't need flight decks to launch/retrieve ships? It seems unnecessary, but I guess they couldn't stray too far from the original designs.
But these are ultimately minor complaints and nitpicks about something that, for me, is pretty much flawless. It also makes me hopeful of a genre that I've considered long dead. Yeah, they'll keep churning out terrible Star Trek moves, and I'm sure the Star Wars movies will be equally terrible (or at least just bland like the Marvel movies), but in a small corner of the Japanese anime industry, there are still a group of people who know how to make an awesome science fiction space opera film in 2015. Here's hoping the sequel series becomes a reality and we get more Yamato soon.
One thing to note - make sure you watch the extra scene after the first set of credits (with the black text on a white background). There's a nice little coda to the movie that fits in with the opening scene that not only ties up the movie nicely, but also the series. In a small way, it reminded me of the Gunbuster to Diebuster tie-in, so it was a nice surprised when I saw the scene accidentally after skipping the credits.
