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Yamato 2520

       
                 
                 
 

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Title Info

  • seen: 1-2 of 2
  • type: OAV
  • grade: watchable
  • made: unknown
  • Review created: A while ago, i'll revise it eventually.
  • mod: none

It works like this, if the opposition has a red and black color scheme, an emperor (especially one who wants to be immortal and does evil laughs at odd times) and a taste for spiky architecture and keeping servants in weird bodysuits then you'd best obliterate them...because they're obviously an `evil empire'. Anyway, in this re-telling of the dusty old Yamato saga, the earth federation tried to follow my advice, but after a 100 years of war the best they could do was a truce. As a result, on the planet that was the focus of the war, the Serian military, armed to the teeth, keeps an eye on the federation moonbase (like-wise armed). Strangely we don't care about this politicing, because we are drawn into the story of the non serians living on the planet. Considering that the serian's are obviously evil, and that the place is basically a military base on an uninhabitable planet, they feel their life has little future and limited pleasure. But when a young man, in between some macho posturing and competitiveness, finds the `sunken' battleship Yamato, including all construction blueprints (and a hidden bonus) a way to realise their dreams of leaving the planet suddenly becomes possible.

A bit of a spoiler? well, the title makes it fairly obvious there is going to be a starship involved. And given the `rebellious young men making their future' air of both this and the original material it was pretty obvious the military was not going to be the one to own it. Mind you, you'll still have to put the mind on `tolerant' in order to understand how a bunch of youths have the potential to consider building a starship...but it isn't a bad story basis. The main problem is that, strange as it may sound, it all feels so familiar. The whole `boys own' thing, the overcoming differences in the group, the working together bit, the `energy of youth'...it all feels a little corny, or dated. This combines with the strange pacing of the show, which is not only slow, but oddly without highlights, to give an very interesting and watchable show but not one that feels terribly interesting or novel. This is probably also enhanced by much of the show being dominated with `starship tech' at the expense of too much character work. Although fans of the original will probably love all the detail. Suspense is largely reduced because we know how things are going to happen fairly early. We also have to depend on some story gaps, and the empire's `stupidity' to allow the story to proceed in places. These two episodes are quite long (50 min each) and the time passes pleasantly, but something is missing to make it really special.

The animation is pretty good. Distinctly lacking in flash but very solid and with an insane amount of technical detail both in design and on-screen representation. Although this is a specialist interest. Clearly the ship was re-designed for what is obviously intended to be the seed for a new series. One dodgy choice is that, in the interests of modernisation, the intentionally archaic style of the original `space battleship' (as in water going vessel) has been reduced to make something more like a `standard' battleship. Some of the character work is interesting, and there is a wide cast, although there is only a handful of major characters. The action scenes are large scale, and quite impressive (computer assistance visible in parts) but need to use some `short cuts' to make it work. They're also fairly infrequent, and short, so those hoping for action will almost certainly be disappointed. This is really aimed at those entranced with the whole `romance of space' thing, and don't mind a bit of space opera in getting there.

       
                 
                 
       

Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:27 WST 2009