Makoto Kobayashi recently confirmed that he will be returning to the classic anime.
Kobayashi (who has worked on Last Exile and Gundam ZZ in addition to the latest Space Battleship Yamato film, Space Battleship Yamato: Resurrection) announced during the closing ceremonies of the Anime Expo that he is working on a reboot of the original Space Battleship Yamato series, first created in 1974.
This announcement comes soon after the apparent success of the Japanese film adaptation. The film saw so much praise that a Hollywood production company, Skydance, is in talks to purchase the American rights to a live-action film based on the story.
Yamato has never been very popular in the US outside of the dense anime circles, and has never seen any mainstream popularity, but if the film comes to the United States, the new anime series will surely get an English dub, and may even end up on a North American cable station, like Cartoon Network.
That Kobayashi is working on the series gives it some additional credibility. His past work, designing machines for anime series and film, has been beautiful and intriguing, especially for Last Exile, one of the best anime series of the last decade.
Space Battleship Yamato is a space opera centered around the crew of the Yamato, a Space Battleship constructed from the parts of the Japanese naval battleship of the same name. The ship is tasked with protecting the earth from various alien threats.
No release date was announced.
