Space opera anime series#

He doesn’t hold lofty ambitions of freedom or honor he joined the Space Force because he thought it would be easy. Our protagonist, Captain Tylor, is in a word irresponsible.

Space opera anime series#

This ’90s series is more of a comedy than a sci-fi tale of romance, heroism, and tragedy, but it still belongs on this list because Captain Tylor finds most of its comedic beats by aping the tropes established in many of the other series listed in this article. 9 The Irresponsible Captain TylorĬaptain Tylor is not very operatic for a space opera, but that’s kind of the point. With Earth’s surface reduced to rubble by unrelenting alien bombardment, the surviving governments of the planet place their last hopes aboard the battleship Yamato and her crew, sending them to the far reaches of space to break through enemy lines and recover a legendary device that may be the key to keeping humanity alive. Arguably the masterwork of mangaka Leiji Matsumoto, the artist often credited with creating the anime space opera as we know it, 1974’s Space Battleship Yamato tells the story of a lone ship on an impossible quest, but one that also represents the last hope of mankind. Space Battleship Yamato is the prototypical anime space opera, bar none. Space seems an appropriate setting for big stories with big themes, after all. These are stories of great melodrama, tragedy, romance, and action, with the added bonus of all of that taking place in space. One of the tentpoles of anime science fiction is the space opera: a venerable genre that many all-time classics like Space Battleship Yamato and Legend of Galactic Heroes find themselves in. The freedom of artistic expression inherent in the medium of animation has allowed some of the industry’s most prominent creators to draw together imaginative otherworldly settings, speculating as to what life might look like for humans thousands of years into the future.

Science fiction is, and always has been, one of the bedrock genres of anime and manga.