Leiji Matsumoto and the Anime Space Opera That Launched a Industry

In 1974, the Japanese animation industry was in a worse state than it would be again until the late 1990s. Television broadcasters were reducing animation budgets; major studios were losing money; the creative ambition of the OVA era had not yet arrived. Into this context came "Space Battleship Yamato" — a series conceived by producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki and designed by Leiji Matsumoto, about the crew of a reconstructed World War II battleship launched into space on a mission to save a dying Earth. The series aired poorly in its initial broadcast, was cancelled after 26 episodes instead of the planned 52, and then something unusual happened: reruns attracted much larger audiences than the original broadcast had, and a theatrical compilation film in 1977 became one of the highest-grossing Japanese films of that year. The series that had failed became the franchise that revived an industry.

Matsumoto's contribution to "Yamato" was the visual and emotional architecture: the character designs, the visual language of interstellar space as a place of specific beauty and specific terror, and the tonal seriousness that separated the series from the robot action that had dominated Japanese animation. "Yamato" treated its premise — that the Earth had one year before it would be rendered uninhabitable by radiation — with a gravity that previous space anime had not attempted. Characters died and did not come back. The mission carried genuine cost. The emotional register was closer to war drama than adventure.

"Galaxy Express 999," which Matsumoto serialized in manga beginning in 1977 and which became a television anime series in 1978, extended the emotional range further. The story follows a boy named Tetsuro who boards a steam-powered space train bound for a planet where humans can receive mechanical bodies and live forever — the train's route touching various worlds, each a short story about a different aspect of human experience. The series' underlying theme — whether immortality is worth the loss of the fragility and impermanence that make human experience meaningful — is handled with the directness of a fable and the patience of a long-form literary work. The theatrical films, particularly "Galaxy Express 999" (1979) and "Adieu Galaxy Express 999" (1981), are among the finest animated films produced in Japan before Studio Ghibli's period of dominance.

Matsumoto's aesthetic — elongated figures in elaborate uniforms, women who combine fragility with iron will, men defined by romantic melancholy and stoic heroism, the cosmos depicted as a place of immense beauty populated by human-scale dramas — was enormously influential on subsequent anime space opera and science fiction. The visual conventions of "Mobile Suit Gundam," "Macross," and a dozen other mecha and space opera series owe debts to the template Matsumoto established. He is not the only architect of anime science fiction, but he is among the most foundational, and the emotional seriousness he insisted on for his stories — the sense that animation was a medium capable of genuine feeling rather than merely excitement — helped establish the possibility space within which subsequent artists worked.