Saraba Uchuu Senkan Yamato: Ai no Senshi-tachi

Contains spoiler.
English is not my language and may contain errors.

This movie was better than I thought it would be.

I watched only a few episodes of Uchuu Senkan Yamato, but I dropped it. I decided to watch this movie because it is the only one from 1978 that I have left, since I am watching one movie from each year starting in 1960. I went to see this movie thinking it was going to be pretty average, but in the end it was very good.

I know that this movie takes place after Uchuu Senkan Yamato (Movie) which I have not watched, but since it is an ... event after the Yamato patrol saves the earth, I thought it would not be a problem to watch this movie. Well, it's not totally a problem, the most was that I don't know who exactly some of the characters are, even though they are introduced very quickly, long enough for the movie. So, it is possible to watch this movie without seeing anything of Yamato, only some very small things can get a little vague.

When it comes to the story, there is almost nothing to complain about. The story is very simple and executed in a very good way.
It starts with Kodai, who is the new leader of the Yamato, seeing a white comet that destroys everything in its path, and soon after receiving a distress message. So he and a bunch of other people leave Earth to go after this message and stop this white comet from colliding with Earth. When they decide to run away with the Yamato, they are seen as traitors to Earth, up to a certain point, but there are little twists and turns. As for the villains, they went through a planet of some beings called antimatter, where the only survivor was Teresa, a character who is essential to the grand finale. This is basically the introduction, I am not going to describe the whole movie, I will go straight to the point.
At one point, the Yamato members encounter Desler, a survivor of the first battle against Yamato. He only wanted revenge against Yamato, but since he is defeated, he saw that he won't be able to get revenge and tells Kodai Yamato's weak point. As I quoted before: The fact that I haven't seen Uchuu Senkan Yamato before makes some things a bit vague, and this villain is one of those things, however that's not a problem.
Basically after all that, comes the final stretch, which is the best thing about this movie. They manage to stop the white comet, but the comet is actually a large civilization of the villains, and then the big battle begins, where a lot of people die, including Yuki who was going to marry Kodai.
The ending itself is fantastic, as Kodai decides to sacrifice himself and fight alone. He makes everyone leave the Yamato and decides to go fight, even though he doesn't know how he's going to do that, because the Yamato is basically out of power (plus Yuki's body was left in the Yamato, and Kodai leaves her sitting like he's in control of his post). I mentioned that Teresa was going to be an important character towards the end, so she explains in one part of the movie that because she is of the 'antimatter' race, if she touches any other being, it will cause a big explosion and destroy everything around. Well, in the end she appears and she and Kodai sacrifice themselves to destroy the enemy. It may seem simple, but the execution is very good.

As I said before, it is a somewhat simple movie, but executed in a very good and well thought out way. You can see that they wanted to make a very good film.
The technical parts are really good. The animation is fluid in the battles, and there is a lot of Sakuga. The OST I'm not one to pay much attention to, but it had some really cool songs.

As a whole it is a very good film, which for the time breaks clichés, even more with a tragic ending to bring happiness to the Earth.
Even though the film has 02:32:00, I didn't find it extended and much less boring. It makes a beginning, middle, and end without being boring to follow.
Anyway, this movie surprised me, because I thought it was going to be just an average movie, but the movie only gets better as the story goes on. And the ending is epic.

Farewell to Space Battleship is a weird movie. Rather than being made to summarize a full season the way the first movie was, it's instead a sequel movie that was afterwards reworked into an actual series. And in a lot of ways it does feel like a too much story has been squished into too little time. I haven't watched the second season as of writing this review.

From it's start, Farewell is very much occupied with trying to recreate what worked in the original show. The additions to the cast are minor, Dessler is back from the dead once again to take a significant chunk ... of screentime away from the real antagonists, and there's even a new Iscandar- and a new Starsha. And it's perhaps most telling that only when a lot of these elements are dropped that Farewell actually starts working in it's third act.

And when it gets going, it gets going good. The original show was always a little too hesitant with using the Yamato as the military vessel it is, instead relying on a whole bunch of weird tricks and systems that are only used once. It's great to see the ship and it's crew truly bear their fangs without losing sight of the ingenuity and quick thinking that was emphasised before. Everything works because the first season gives the viewer insight into the characters, and gives every sacrifice and achievement worth.

The honest truth is that it doesn't save the movie. The build-up is simply weak, and some of the melodramatic twists just don't work because of how much they are forced onto the plot. It's worth watching for the finale, but other than that Farewell to Battleship Yamato doesn't live up to it's predecessor.