Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko

Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko (それゆけ!宇宙戦艦ヤマモト・ヨーコ) is a Japanese light novel series written by Takashi Shōji and illustrated by Takashi Akaishizawa from 1993 to 2013. The series received three adaptations by J.C.Staff and Akiyuki Shinbo consisting of two 3-episode OVAs and a 26-episode television series.[1] The anime series was released in the United States by The Right Stuf International on DVD in 2003.

Synopsis

The series is set in 2999 AD, where two factions—TERRA and NESS—are engaged in a space war game to control planets. They fight with spaceships, which have been made to teleport their pilots back to the mother ship upon destruction. This results in the battles having no true casualties. Since the reflexes of people in the 30th century have greatly deteriorated, a TERRA engineer, Curtis Lawson, uses a time machine to go back 1000 years in time. There, he recruits four girls to fight for TERRA.

Characters

Yohko is an active, sporty but cocky girl. She is a hardcore gamer, preferring space fight simulations, and is occasionally bribed using games.

Media

Anime

The first OVA series was directed by Akiyuki Shinbo with character designs by Kazuto Nakazawa and music by Tomoki Hasegawa, and produced at J.C.Staff. Each episode was written by a different writer.

The second OVA series featured most of the same returning staff, but with music by Takeo Suzuki and Kazuhiko Toyama; and with screenwriter Mayori Sekijima from the first series acting as series composition writer.

The TV series featured much of the same staff as the second series, but with Akio Watanabe replacing Nakazawa as character designer, and with Shuuichi Kaneko joining as assistant director and Toshiaki Tetsura joining as visual director, the latter of whom director Shinbo described as indispensable to the development of the series. The series was the first collaboration between Shinbo and Watanabe, a relationship that has carried on through the 2020s. For the series, Shinbo wanted to have a more "realistic" approach to the characters while still keeping their "cute" qualities and had found out about Watanabe's work while doing research. He asked J.C.Staff animation producer Yuuji Matsukura to offer the role of character designer to Watanabe; and Watanabe, who knew about Shinbo and was a fan of his directorial debut Metal Fighter Miku (also produced by J.C.Staff), accepted the job. Discussing the narrative aspects of the work, Shinbo discussed the initial story with Sekijima and decided to make a narrative similar to Osamu Dezaki's TV adaptation of Space Cobra. As pre-production started, Shinbo gave up his New Years' vacation in order to storyboard the first episode. Watanabe noted difficulty as both a first-time character designer and chief animation director in-part due to the fact that he had trouble understanding different lenses and perspectives that Shinbo liked to use (such as wide angles, bird's eye views, and worm's eye views). In recommendation, assistant director Kaneko suggested that Watanabe watch the works of Akio Jissoji to better understand the concepts.

type	ova
title	Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko II
director	Akiyuki Shinbo
producer	Hiroyuki Yonemasu Michihisa Abe Hiroshi Naitō
writer	Mayori Sekijima
music	Kazuhiko Toyama Takeo Suzuki
studio	J.C.Staff T-Up
first	August 6, 1997
last	December 22, 1997
runtime	30 minutes
episodes	3

Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko

Synopsis

Characters

Media

Anime

Episodes

Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko I (1996)

Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko II (1997)

Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko TV (1999)

External links

References