Space Battleship Yamato (宇宙戰艦大和號, 1974)

Space Battleship Yamato arrives as sweeping space opera. Set in 2199, it opens with the alien Gamilas Empire raining radioactive "planet bombs" on Earth, driving survivors underground with barely a year left to live. Its "unidentified flying objects" are not ambiguous specks of light but vivid, massed alien fleets — the space-opera version of the UFO, in which the flying saucer is scaled up into a civilization-ending armada. Humanity's only hope is to raise the battleship Yamato, sunk in the final months of WWII, and rebuild it as a starship powered by the "Wave Motion Engine," sending it 148,000 light-years to the planet Iscandar to retrieve a device that can cleanse the irradiated Earth. The work stands as a milestone in anime's turn toward serious science-fiction storytelling.^[1]