Customer Reviews

Space Battleship Yamato: The Movie

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Space Battleship Yamato is one of the seminal anime films -- arguably, without the Yamato juggernaut launched by the movie (remember, the TV show did poorly, and it was only with the compilation, that Yamato fandom really began to take off), Gundam, Macross, Urusei Yatsura and all of the other greats of anime may not have been made.
The film is OK, good but not great. As a two-hour movie spliced together from 48 or so half-hours of TV, it has a very rushed feel to it, and you don't get a sense of the crew as a unit. It'd probably help viewers to see the Space Battleship Yamato TV series (or failing that, Star Blazers) to get a firm grip on each character and their relationships with one another and the plot as a whole. That being said, the film does hit the highlights (including the spectacular battle in the Seven Color Nebula) and still manages to give a sense of epic, grand adventure.
Where the disc takes a nose-dive is, well, the disc itself. Mine will not play on any of my DVD players -- and I exchanged the disc at least three times (once through Voyager themselves, and a couple of times at Suncoast). On one player, it plays fine until the layer change, and then the picture breaks up dramatically. On all my other players, the disc won't read at all. I am not buying another Voyager disc after this, since the encoding was so shoddy.

i had the same experience as a previous reviewer: the DVD will not play on any machine we have in the house.

Space Battleship Yamato was the source material for the anime that would become known in the U.S. as Star Blazers. This movie takes the twenty-six episode series and whittles it down to a 135 minute film, only using the sections of the series that are absolutely necessary to tell the main story of the series (the Earth being polluted by the Planet Gamilus, the crew of the rebuilt Yamato making the 148,000 light year voyage to Iscandar to get a neutralizer to rid Earth of the pollution... and must accomplish it all within one Earth year).

This isn't bad for what it is, which is an overview film for the first season. The DVD release also includes the original theatrical trailer and alternate animation footage (both of which are subtitled), the original program book (which is translated), a gallery of promotional art, and a history behind the Yamato franchise.