Legend of the Galactic Heroes Review

The premise is a debate, not a war. Reinhard is reforming an empire by seizing it and Yang is defending a republic he privately despises, and the series spends a hundred and ten episodes insisting that the better system and the better man are not the same question. Named officers die between battles, off screen, from politics, and the narration files those deaths as historical record rather than tragedy.

The cast runs to hundreds and the writing keeps almost all of them distinct through voice alone. The animation is where a modern viewer will struggle. This is late-eighties OVA work with held frames, recycled fleet stock and long stretches of talking heads over starfields, and the engagements are diagrams with commentary rather than action sequences.

The score is borrowed classical repertoire, Mahler and Dvorak and Ravel, which is enormously effective and also not original composition. Nothing else in animation has attempted political fiction at this length or with this much seriousness, and almost nothing in live action has either. It asks for patience on a scale few shows dare to, and it repays the whole of it.