| Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko | |
| Ja Kanji: | それゆけ!宇宙戦艦ヤマモト・ヨーコ |
| Ja Romaji: | Soreyuke! Uchū Senkan Yamamoto Yōko |
| Type: | light novel |
| Author: | Takashi Shōji |
| Illustrator: | Takashi Akaishizawa |
| Demographic: | Male |
| First: | 1993 |
| Last: | 2013 |
| Volumes: | 12 |
| Type: | manga |
| Author: | Takashi Shōji |
| Illustrator: | Yōichi Kadoi |
| Publisher: | Fujimi Shobo |
| Demographic: | Shōnen |
| Magazine: | Dragon Comics |
| First: | October 9, 1995 |
| Last: | September 9, 1999 |
| Volumes: | 8 |
| Type: | ova |
| Director: | Akiyuki Shinbo |
| Music: | Tomoki Hasegawa |
| First: | March 6, 1996 |
| Last: | June 5, 1996 |
| Runtime: | 30 minutes |
| Episodes: | 3 |
| Type: | ova |
| Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko II | |
| Director: | Akiyuki Shinbo |
| First: | August 6, 1997 |
| Last: | December 22, 1997 |
| Runtime: | 30 minutes |
| Episodes: | 3 |
| Type: | tv series |
| Director: | Akiyuki Shinbo |
| Network: | TV Tokyo |
| First: | April 4, 1999 |
| Last: | September 26, 1999 |
| Episodes: | 26 |
| Portal: | yes |
is a Japanese anime series based on a novel by Takashi Shōji. It consists of two 3-episode OVA sets and a 26-episode television series animated by J.C.Staff[1] and directed by Akiyuki Shinbo. The series was released in the United States by The Right Stuf International on DVD in 2003.
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.
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.