Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Overture to a New War

Aired: 1993

A theatrical prelude to the long-running OVA adaptation of Yoshiki Tanaka's space-opera novels, produced by Kitty Films and distributed by Toho. The film revisits the OVA's opening Battle of Astarte with new sequences and freshly reconstructed scenes, drawing closer to the inner lives of Yang Wen-li in his cadet days on the Free Planets Alliance side and the young Reinhard von Lohengramm and his sworn friend Siegfried Kircheis in the Galactic Empire. Functioning as both an entry point for newcomers and an enriching expansion for veteran viewers, the picture sets the stage for the grand interstellar struggle between Alliance and Empire with theatrical-scale gravitas.