Leiji Matsumoto, manga artist and animation creator, passed away in Japan on February 13, 2023, at the age of 85. He is arguably the most important figure in manga/anime in Japan after Osamu Tezuka, who was ten years older than him and emerged as a major manga artist after the war while Matsumoto was still a boy. (The two would eventually become friends.) Despite Tezuka’s towering achievements in both anime and manga, covered in a tribute here, I would contend that Matsumoto, who outlived Tezuka by 34 years, contributed the most trailblazing work in postwar Japanese animation history, when he co-created and designed the influential franchise, “Space Battleship Yamato” (1974), a saga of a space crew on an intergalactic mission against time to save a devastated Earth from alien invasion. When the initial TV season was compiled into a 135-minute theatrical feature and released in 1977, creating a bigger splash in Japan than STAR WARS, it enabled Matsumoto and the animators to create two subsequent TV seasons, in 1978 and 1980, and four more spin-off theatrical features, 1978-83. (Reboots and sequels followed decades later.)
In the wake of Yamato’s success, Matsumoto created three more innovative manga series that would define his brand of mythic sci-fi and become popular animated movies and TV series: “Galaxy Express 999,” “Space Pirate Captain Harlock,” and “Queen Millennia.”
Matsumoto steered science fiction manga and anime away from the giant robots and Earth-based superhero teams that prevailed in earlier series like “Cyborg 009,” “Mazinger Z,” and “Gatchaman,” and into the vast cosmic realms beyond, with interplanetary voyages and mechanized galactic empires. There was a baroque, romantic and often poetic quality to Matsumoto’s tales as he drew on different time periods for inspiration and pondered questions of humanity and the fate of flesh-and-blood creatures in a machine- and robot-driven age. There are lots of historical references and occasional pieces of classical music. Among the bolder anachronisms Matsumoto revels in are a World War II battleship refitted for long-distance space travel; a vintage passenger train that flies through the galaxy and its boy hero, Tetsuro, adorned with broad-brimmed hat, poncho and holster like something out of an Italian western; and a pirate hero, Captain Harlock, who resembles a dashing swashbuckler from an earlier age. Matsumoto’s tall, willowy heroines with impossibly long, flowing hair were inspired by heroines from French movies of the 1950s.
I’ve written a lot about Matsumoto in reviews I did for various outlets, mostly in the 1990s and early 2000s, long before I tackled this blog, and I’d like to use a few excerpts from them. He did so much significant work in anime and manga that it’s impossible to cover more than a small portion of his career in one piece. I’ve also found a 1996 interview with him from Animerica Magazine and would like to start with excerpts from that, in which he talks about his influences.
These excerpts are from “Riding the Rails with Legendary Leiji: The Definitive Interview,” conducted by Takayuki Karahashi for the American anime magazine Animerica and initially released in the July 1996 issue.
“Since childhood, I liked Disney and Max Fleischer’s American animation. The reasons I got into animation were Disney’s SNOW WHITE and Fleischer’s GULLIVER’S TRAVELS and HOPPITY GOES TO TOWN. Also, during the war, when I was still a child, yet to go to school, we had black-and-white films of Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop–we called her “Betty-san”–and we saw them at home. So even during the war, I was watching MICKEY MOUSE and POPEYE animation at home. They stopped showing them in Japan during the war, but we had plenty of them, so we saw them all the time. And since they were on 35mm film, I could see the film and understand how animation works, how each frame is slightly different from the others in sequence. This was before going to kindergarten, so I was perhaps four or five. So by the age of five or six I was already familiar with the mechanism of animation.”
Betty Boop and Koko the Clown as seen on screen in a scene from the Japanese film, OUR NEIGHBOR MISS YAE (1934)
The audience watches Betty Boop in OUR NEIGHBOR MISS YAE (1934)
The jealous queen from Walt Disney’s SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS (1937)
I discussed Betty Boop’s popularity in Japan in another blog entry, about the film OUR NEIGHBOR MISS YAE (1934).
In the interview, Matsumoto goes on to discuss other cinematic influences:
“As for movies, I am one big movie fan. I’ve seen countless American movies, if they’ve made it to Japan. Among them, I loved Errol Flynn’s buccaneer swashbucklers, westerns, THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD–which was set in England–and others, like knighthood stories. At the same time, I liked the American science fiction movies DESTINATION MOON and “Kasei Tanken” [lit. “Exploration of Mars,” probably referring to the 1950 film ROCKETSHIP X-M- Ed.] and FORBIDDEN PLANET. I loved those space stories, so I’ve had their influences. But when it comes to female characters, I’ve been influenced more by European movies, especially French movies. Those actresses’ looks and characters have been imprinted on me in my childhood, so my characters more or less show their influence. So my women are like a fusion of Japanese and European women.”
Errol Flynn in THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD (1938)
DESTINATION MOON (1950)
FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956)
“I’m most fond of the French movies when they were switching over from black-and-white to color. Thus, I’m familiar with French actresses from that period. I was most influenced by the movie MARIANNE DE MA JEUNESSE–in Japan, it was called “Wa Ga Seishun No Marianne” (“Marianne of My Youth“). MARIANNE DE MA JEUNESSE [1955] was a French-German co-production, and I was strongly influenced by this movie, so my female characters have hints of Marianne Hold, who played the main character in the movie. I was in my adolescence, so I was strongly influenced.”
Marianne Hold, Pierre Vaneck in MARIANNE DE MA JEUNESSE (MARIANNE OF MY YOUTH, 1955)
Maetel from Galaxy Express 999
He also discusses comic books and other art influences:
“As for paintings, I can start with the classics such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci and go onto American comics such as SUPERMAN and SPIDER-MAN and then Disney. My generation has them all jumbled together. The reason why I’ve read so many American comics is that back when I was young, there was a mountain of 10-cent comics that the American soldiers left in town. And they were very cheap, so you could buy as many as you wanted. I have almost all the comics from the 1940s. I have these influences, as well as a Japanese science fiction illustrator named Shigeru Komatsuzaki. I aspired not only for the creations of Tezuka or Disney or Fleischer, but to those kinds of realistic painting and illustrations as well. So when I was a child, I boldly thought of what wonderful creations could be made if all of their good parts were assembled together.”
A World War II flashback from “Space Battleship Yamato”
A page from one of Matsumoto’s war comics.
A page from an American war comic from the 1970s
I did a piece on Shigeru Komatsuzaki here. Komatsuzaki, in fact, painted the robot character from “Space Battleship Yamato” for the cover of a model kit:
The robot can be seen on the left in this image from Yamato:
Excerpts from some of my writings on Matsumoto:
Leiji Matsumoto
Manga artist Leiji Matsumoto had a singular impact on anime in the 1970s, from designing the look of Space Battleship Yamato to creating two ground-breaking series, Galaxy Express 999 and Captain Harlock, both in 1978. The notion of a World War II-era Japanese battleship turned into an intergalactic space vessel may not have originated entirely with Matsumoto [he’s generally acknowledged as the co-creator], but it certainly fit his sensibility. In Galaxy and Harlock, Matsumoto makes great use of 19th century motifs including passenger trains, sailing ships, elaborate pirate costumes, western settings and swordfights. While the presence of such elements in a futuristic space setting may seem completely unrealistic, they serve, in Matsumoto’s romantic concept, as symbols of humanity’s glorious past in an alarmingly oppressive future.
Matsumoto was strongly influenced by American comic books and European movies. His works generally boasted the visual look of the former and the sensibility and mood of the latter. They featured the strong lines, bright colors and technical detail of the American comics, but the mood was very melancholic, with overcast skies on the various planets the characters visited and a general malaise afflicting a universe where humans are rapidly being outranked and outmaneuvered by machine people. The heroines, tall, slender, with long, long hair and sad, serious expressions (and eyelashes that went past their hairlines) were based on actresses Matsumoto had seen in postwar French films.
There’s a fairy tale aspect to stories like Harlock and Galaxy Express, as if tales of space exploration were being told to the children of our descendants thousands of years into the future. There is imagery that reminds me of THE SNOW QUEEN, a Russian animated feature released in America in an English-dubbed version in 1960 that had a great impact on me as a child (and had an even greater impact on a teenaged Hayao Miyazaki and other future animators in Japan).
Maetel and Tetsuro from “Galaxy Express 999”
From Galaxy Express 999
From THE SNOW QUEEN (1957, Russia)
Space Battleship Yamato (1974)
On an ecologically devastated Earth, a full space crew, working underground, refurbishes the sunken Japanese World War II battleship Yamato with a Wave Motion Engine that will enable it to travel 148,000 light years to the planet Iscandar to get a Cosmo DNA machine that promises to clean up the earth’s surface and get it back in a year’s time, all while fending off attacks from Gamilon, an alien empire in another galaxy.
Yamato was the first epic anime sci-fi series. Containing three TV seasons and five movies over nine years (1974-83), it told a story of Earth two hundred years in the future and the saga of a handful of brave men in a venerable old ship that continually saves the world from destruction. The first season of Yamato was quite different from any anime series that had come before it. Consisting of a single, continuing storyline, it required viewers’ rapt attention every week and sought out audiences who were older than the standard cartoon viewer of the time. It told a starker, more dramatic and, in some ways, more realistic story than animation had traditionally been telling. In drawing on World War II motifs, it asked its audience for a different set of associations than they’d bring to, say, Mazinger Z or Gatchaman, to name a couple of other sci-fi series that were popular around that time. As such, it paved the way for a whole wave of serious science fiction anime in the decades ahead, from Gundam to Macross to Legend of the Galactic Heroes to Evangelion and beyond.
Yamato may be better known to American viewers as “Star Blazers,” the title of the English-dubbed, slightly edited version that was syndicated to U.S. television in 1979. Here’s an early ad for the videocassette release of the series, which first became available in 1988, two episodes to a tape: 
Galaxy Express 999 (1978)
Galaxy Express 999 tells a highly fanciful sci-fi fable about a boy who traverses space in a passenger train in search of a machine body so he can live forever. Young Tetsuro escapes an Earth dominated by machine people (who’ve given up their human bodies for machine ones) when he joins the enigmatic Maetel, a tall, mysterious, slender beauty with long blond hair and an elegant Russian-style black winter ensemble for a trip to the end of the galaxy where Tetsuro hopes to obtain a free machine body. The TV series concentrated on the individual stops along the way and the stories that came with them while the two movies (1979 and 1981) focused on Tetsuro’s final destinations and his confrontations with the rulers of the Machine Empire. He visits other planets and asteroids, many of them looking like frontier towns, and meets up with rebel humans and discontented machine people who miss the warmth of their human bodies. He gradually learns the meaning of humanity and joins the rebels against the machines.
Captain Harlock (1978)
Captain Harlock was seen in various TV seasons, an epic movie and made-for-video spin-offs and revivals.
Harlock is an outlaw in the year 2977 A.D. who robs government ships of grain harvested from “star farms,” agricultural colonies established on space stations, moons and asteroids. He continually eludes efforts to capture him while he also combats alien attackers. Harlock is a tall, imposing figure with long hair and a jagged scar on his cheek. He sports a striking black pirate outfit, with red trim, and a long flowing black cloak with red lining. He adorns himself with the skull-and-crossbones insignia of the Jolly Roger and flies it on his ship, the Arcadia, itself a wild mix of futuristic rocket and 18th century sailing ship designs.
He is a doomed, romantic figure who must always travel alone, separate, an outlaw, because he will not fit into the regime on earth, dominated as it is by an alien occupation force. He makes distinct moral choices, but they seem less informed by morality than by fate, destiny, and history, just as those who accompany him are fulfilling what their ordained roles. He is stoic, quiet, deadpan, but he stands tall and true, confronting any and all adversaries.
Queen Emeraldas is a significant supporting character, a lone female pirate captain who once traveled alongside Harlock and has shared adventures with other characters from the universe of Matsumoto, most notably Tetsuro and Maetel from “Galaxy Express 999.” Emeraldas cuts a striking figure with her long blond hair, red pirate outfit, black boots and long black cloak. She got her own made-for-video spin-off, QUEEN EMERALDAS, in 1998, and starred in a Galaxy Express 999 TV Special, “Emeraldas, The Eternal Warrior” (1980) which re-imagined her and Maetel as sisters.
From the Captain Harlock TV series (1978)
With Maya in ARCADIA OF MY YOUTH (1982)
From the 2002 OAV Harlock sequel, “The Endless Odyssey”
Arcadia of My Youth (1982)
This 130-minute feature spin-off of the Captain Harlock TV series is probably the starkest dramatization yet of the tragic romanticism that distinguishes so many of Leiji Matsumoto’s works. The entire film is a stunning, deliberate and dramatic space epic, molded more on character and individual fate and destiny than on spectacular space battles and rash moves. Love, loyalty, resistance, bravery, codes of honor, and betrayal all come into play. There’s a mood of sadness and bitterness in every scene with “bright” spots provided only by those willing to die, to stand alone, to sacrifice everything for a lost cause and a hopeless ideal. Promises are made and kept, but love is never requited.
At times, the film plays as if it were written in the 19th century. There’s a sense of connection to a long history, with flashbacks to Harlock’s ancestors of a thousand years earlier, during World Wars I and II. Underscoring the whole mood is the frequent use of a beautiful piece of classical music from the Baroque era, Albinoni’s Adagio. (Notice the film title’s similarity to the aforementioned French film, MARIANNE OF MY YOUTH.)
Queen Millennia (1981)
“Queen Millennia,” done first as a 42-episode 1981 TV series and then as a two-hour theatrical feature (1982), is more plot-driven and Earth-centered than Harlock and Galaxy Express and didn’t have any subsequent spin-offs that I know of. Millennia is from the Planet La Metal and secretly rules the Earth to guide it to safety when, once every 1000 years, La Metal’s orbit approaches that of the Earth and causes climatic and geological disasters. The next time for that is 1999, when this series takes place, and Millennia is shocked to discover that her fellow La Metallians have secret plans for Earth that involve displacing the planet’s population. She resolves to fight back and defend her beloved adopted planet, with the help of the astronomer, Professor Amamori, and his precocious nephew, Hajime.
The VHS cover for the Japanese release of the 1982 Queen Millennia movie.
The movie version boasts the kind of baroque design touches that so often distinguished works based on Matsumoto. The futuristic trappings are all rendered in deep, warm colors and rounded shapes. The costumes tend to be based on past eras. In the climactic battle between Earth and La Metal, the Earth men use archaic weapons taken from the History Museum, ranging from WWII-era tanks and fighter planes to ancient catapults and cross-bows. The short, rounded cartoonish character design of Hajime and Amamori is contrasted with the slender, attractive women around them and the tall, long-haired, fairly realistically-drawn men from Queen Millennia’s planet.
Yayoi Yukino, Queen Millennia’s alter ego on Earth, with her cat, “Leiji,” in the TV series
The subtitle of the TV series was “A New Tale of the Bamboo Princess,” indicating the story’s roots in Japanese fairy tales.
The Cockpit (1993)
The Cockpit adapts three short World War II stories by Leiji Matsumoto, each directed with great care by a different animator. As with so many works by Matsumoto, there is an air of overwhelming tragedy pervading this piece, more obvious here because these stories are set during actual historical events (which occurred when Matsumoto was a boy) and because many of the major characters we meet die violent, sometimes pointless deaths. For American viewers, the fact that these stories are told from the points-of-view of our wartime enemies, the Germans and the Japanese, should not outweigh the empathetic feelings for all sides expressed here. There are sympathetic Americans depicted in two of the stories, which is not always the case in anime stories with a wartime theme. Above all, the futility of war and its waste of bright young lives is the persistent theme of these three stories.
Matsumoto’s work was adapted into many other memorable works, including “SF Saiyuki Starzinger,” a TV series which retold China’s legend of the Monkey King and his epic “Journey to the West” in futuristic space science fiction terms with Princess Aurora and her Monkey King-like cyborg escort on a mission that will save the universe.
It should be pointed out here that Yamato, Harlock and Galaxy Express continued to be rebooted and updated with new productions well into the 21st century, although I haven’t kept up with those. In fact, I have quite a few waiting to be watched. However, if you’ve read this piece up to now, it won’t be any mystery whether I prefer the pen-and-colored-ink cell-animated versions of Captain Harlock or any CGI remakes.
I’m not sure how much of Matsumoto’s manga has been published in English. Animerica Magazine serialized “Galaxy Express 999” 20-odd years ago and Viz published volumes of it, but that’s apparently all I have in my manga collection from Matsumoto, aside from a single war story included in Frederik L. Schodt’s landmark work, Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics.
From “Ghost Warrior,” included in Schodt’s “Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics”
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