We will go to Iscandar / Fuck those suckers back on earth / All the women in coldsleep / Yaamaaatooo
Space Battleship Yamato (Star Blazers), 1974. (Wikipedia link)
We've been watching the original series for a little while, and only about halfway through it do I really feel like I have seen enough of the characters to draw any of them. I swear, the first five episodes or so consisted entirely of either lovingly animated explosions or the same four cycles reused for pretty much everything. (I have lots of vague memories from childhood, when I watched the hell out of the american dub (Star Blazers), and I'm amused to find that I still remember people's american names sometimes, but it's not the same as having seen it recently.) Because of this childhood exposure, I was worried that the series wouldn't hold up, but I think I underestimated my ability to enjoy things. Well, maybe not that, but it is actually an interesting series. Our heroes and their ship are at a constant technological disadvantage (er, usually), often getting the crap beaten out of them in skirmishes with the Gamila(n)s. It seems, although I haven't seen it mentioned (I also haven't looked that hard), that the crew is composed entirely of punk kids and marginally qualified adults. Presumably this is due to harsh wartime conditions, but it's really not made much of, for whatever reason.
The series displays a hoary old anime trope, the slow build-up, both in macro and micro ways. The ship makes its way past each planet in the solar system, marking out the time the human race has to survive (as arbitrarily as possible). There's lots of attention paid to process, and journeys within the larger one, as well.
Well, anyhow, here's a couple of characters.
(Side note: I just found out that those Daft Punk videos were actually done by Matsumoto himself; I'd thought they were a pastiche! What a freakout.)
We've been watching the original series for a little while, and only about halfway through it do I really feel like I have seen enough of the characters to draw any of them. I swear, the first five episodes or so consisted entirely of either lovingly animated explosions or the same four cycles reused for pretty much everything. (I have lots of vague memories from childhood, when I watched the hell out of the american dub (Star Blazers), and I'm amused to find that I still remember people's american names sometimes, but it's not the same as having seen it recently.) Because of this childhood exposure, I was worried that the series wouldn't hold up, but I think I underestimated my ability to enjoy things. Well, maybe not that, but it is actually an interesting series. Our heroes and their ship are at a constant technological disadvantage (er, usually), often getting the crap beaten out of them in skirmishes with the Gamila(n)s. It seems, although I haven't seen it mentioned (I also haven't looked that hard), that the crew is composed entirely of punk kids and marginally qualified adults. Presumably this is due to harsh wartime conditions, but it's really not made much of, for whatever reason.
The series displays a hoary old anime trope, the slow build-up, both in macro and micro ways. The ship makes its way past each planet in the solar system, marking out the time the human race has to survive (as arbitrarily as possible). There's lots of attention paid to process, and journeys within the larger one, as well.
Well, anyhow, here's a couple of characters.
(Side note: I just found out that those Daft Punk videos were actually done by Matsumoto himself; I'd thought they were a pastiche! What a freakout.)