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5th Yamato 2199 Anime Film's 1st 9 Minutes Streamed
posted on by Egan Loo
On Friday, the Hikari TV and Bandai Channel services began streaming the first nine minutes from the fifth installment of the Space Battleship Yamato 2199 television anime series and film project. Hikari TV's stream can be viewed outside Japan, but both streams will expire on April 12.
The film Bōkyō no Gingakan Kūkan (Nostalgic Intergalactic Space) covers episodes 15-18 and will open in 12 theaters in Japan on April 13. The Blu-ray Disc and DVD volume for the fifth film will then ship on May 28. The first episode will also air on Japanese television on April 7.
Tokyo's Shinjuku Piccadilly theater, Osaka's Namba Parks Cinema, and Nagoya's Midland Square Cinema will hold premium advance screenings for the film on April 12. Tickets that include a bonus set of three B2-size key visual posters were available to Yamato Crew fan club members till Tuesday. Limited-edition Blu-ray Discs and other items will be sold at the special screenings.
Yutaka Izubuchi (RahXephon), the 53-year-old animator who worked on mechanical designs and science-fiction concepts on some of the earlier projects in the Yamato franchise, is serving as chief director of this remake of the first series. Nobuteru Yūki (Escaflowne, Record of Lodoss War) is designing the characters, and the anime studios XEBEC and AIC are producing the anime.
In a related development, award-winning science-fiction and anime illustrator Naoyuki Katō is once again streaming his painting process live. This time, he is drawing a 5.1-meter-long (about 17-foot-long) painting of the space battleship Yamato on Ustream and Niconico on March 30 and 31.
