In the distant future of 2006 Mankind had only recently made its first steps towards exploring the vast reaches of space. Well that or its 2016 and we havent even set foot on Mars yet you can pick which world line sounds cooler. Anyway with huge advancements in our understanding and manipulation of quantum physics weve managed to evolve our technology to the point where we can effortlessly cruise through our own Solar System from the Milky Way to the outer reaches to new and asofyet unidentified planets lurking right outside the range of our telescopes. But as we begin to take our greedy first steps outside of our own cozy little system we make a much more sobering discovery Giant space bugs have been destroying entire systems by laying eggs in their stars which gives a whole new meaning to sunnyside up. Among their first targets was the fleet being led by The Luxion which was in turn piloted by the heroic Admiral Yuzo Takaya A man who gave his life to make sure his entire crew could make it home safely. This cowardly 2015 ambush orphaned his daughter Noriko who decided on the spot that she would follow in his footsteps and train to become a pilot herself so that she could either find him and save him or in the worst case scenario avenge his death. Now alongside her perfectionist senior classmate Kazumi Amano a soviet pilot named Jung Freud and their gruff Coach its up to Noriko Takaya to overcome her deeply rooted inferiority complex and realize her destiny as the hero of the human race who If she succeeds Will remember her even 12000 years in the future Its easy to look at an anime from the eighties and pick on it for looking subpar. Ive done it myself despite the vast differences that exist between then and now in terms of budget technology and artistic resources. The reason I do this is that even back then it was entirely possible for an anime to look really damn good and Gunbuster is one of the most reliable examples of this. There are plenty of static shots in this show where theres no movement on screen save for the flapping lips of the featured characters because of course there are but between these shots there is not one piece of motion in this show that looks cheap or stilted. The animation is consistently fluid save for perhaps one or two nude scenes that the animators got a little clumsy at. But hey were talking about Gainax here an its believable that most people on staff wouldnt know what a naked woman looks like. Thats not to say the series doesnt show its age of course The space battles and mecha action are so wellanimated that they hold up pretty well even today but the art style is firmly rooted in its time. Characters look far more realistic in proportion than the moemodels of today despite the enlargened eyes on our teenaged protagonists. The mechs are nothing to write home about as they look disappointingly bland compared to even the existing mechs of its time especially with Gundam preempting it by almost ten years. The military uniforms are pretty authentic looking for the men and the leotards the girls where strike an impressive balance between being sexy enough for viewers but also just barely professional enough to not be distracting from the tone. The aliens when you actually see them look awesome and are by far the visual wonder of the series. The music was composed by Koihei Tanaka and the soundtrack as a whole is awesome. The main voice actors pooled together to sing quite a few original songs for the series including the opening theme Active Heart and insert songs like the electrifying fight theme Fly High. Unfortunately the instrumental compositions are a little bit bland and easily forgettable as Im pretty sure Ive heard them all in other shows either repeated verbatim across the Gainax library or tweaked for similar shows. The opening song is awesome but Im afraid the accompanying video is mostly a collection of shots from the show and theres little to be said about that. There really isnt any dub to speak of although Ive heard rumors of one coming but the sub is more than serviceable on its own with a lot of great acting and emotion behind each performance. Most of the cast members have very impressive credits to their names. One of the unique joys of reviewing older anime is that you get to compare it to all the titles that came afterwards and figure out what ways it affected the genre as well as how many titles it may have inspired. Gunbuster like many of Gainaxs early projects actually inspired quite a few anime over the past 28 years. There are two ways an anime can show inspiration Well actually there are more than that but only two of them are presently relevant. The first is when an anime becomes really financially successful so a bunch of other studios try to rip it off to copy its success. There are many examples of titles that tried to do this to Madoka Magica Azumanga Daioh Lucky Star Berserk Haruhi Suzumia and Evangelion to name a few. But then there are other examples when an older anime is really heavily flawed and the shows it influences actually manage to improve upon it in unimaginable ways. Two years ago I mentioned this was the case with that train wreck His and Hers Circumstances so Where does Gunbuster lie? Well for starters lets look at the title that I feel borrowed the most from Gunbuster Battle Athletes Victory. Yeah I know you were expecting me to say Evangelion but well get to that later. Gunbuster starts off with a very simple story We have a teenage girl who enlisted with a training program so she could one day ascend to Outer Space and follow in the footsteps of their deceased parent. She encounters hard times and doubts her abilities which are noticeably behind where they should be. An older rival with toptier grades is miffed by this and says some things that shake our heroine down to her foundation. She learns how to improve through hard work and winds up leaving her best friend behind to travel into outer space with her rival whom now has more respect for her. This is literally the plot of Gunbusters first episode and Victorys first TEN episodes. Yes the first episode of Gunbuster has the exact same plot as the first ten episodes of another series that bears some other striking similarities to it all the way down to the students athletic attire. So which approach worked better? Well Ill try not to talk too much about Battle Athletes Victory too much as Im planning to review it in the future but suffice to say the story and characters have infinitely more meat attached to them than they did in the original and even though its ten times the length very little of it could be called filler. It had several extra characters each one unique and important in their own way to the point that even the heroines rival had her own rival as well as a heart breaking backstory that explains her to a T. This is to say nothing of the heroine herself whose plight is far more compelling. Noriko and Kazumi arent bad characters by far but if Im being completely honest there isnt much to them. We know that Kazumi is prideful and headstrong and her doubt in Noriko serves the main characters development but thats it. We dont know her family her history her drive her dreams her outlook on life All of which are clear with Victorys Jessie Gurtland. Noriko is a bit more developed but after shes told to work hard and not give up she just instantly starts doing so and improving. Theres a bit of realism to this as the elapsed time shows that improvement isnt an immediate thing but theres little to no psychological complexity to it. Akari Kanzaki had a far deeper problem as her inferiority wasnt a mere complex but a security blanket. By convincing herself that she was incapable of succeeding she was sabotaging herself. She had an excuse not to try and thus she had an excuse not to fail. She had to hit rock bottom before her best friend was able to beat some sense into her and even at that point she still wasnt done developing because said friend had become her new security blanket which left her beyond devastated when that blanket was no longer available to her. Yes the obstacles Noriko had to overcome were very clearly defined and her improvement was paced well within the episode but it was also incredibly vague and the fact that almost every single training animation in the first episode had NOTHING to do with space combat didnt help. Victory went there and portrayed the character with a kind of intimacy that no amount of fanservice can deliver. But is it fair to judge a 1988 series by a set of standards that wouldnt be established for almost ten years? Yes and no. No because obviously the medium of storytelling has to evolve over time but also yes because Battle Athletes Victory didnt cause the problems in Gunbuster it just called attention to them. Nobody jumps to defend Snow White and Cinderella just because modern Disney movies tend to contain more active and complex princesses Yes they were fine in their own time but times have changed and youre far more likely in todays era to see those films judged by todays standards. Likewise the main characters of Gunbuster are nothing but chump change compared to the ones from Victory. And yes you can blame the six episode format for this Well four episodes and a twopart conclusion that was literally an afterthought But just because development and pacing issues can be excused doesnt mean they should be forgiven especially when were coming to the part of this review where were going to have to take off our nostalgia goggles and admit a hard sad truth to ourselves Gunbuster just isnt very good. Yeah Im sorry but it still has numerous problems that a limited episode count cant be blamed for. The story is competently told for the most part but as it goes on it keeps on hitting more and more problems as the cracks in its writing become clearer and clearer. There are so many missed opportunities that other shows would have jumped on without hesitation especially if it meant adding dramatic depth to the story and plot. In episode 2 were introduced to the third girl in the main cast who well be referring to as Russian Asuka because another reviewer already called dibs on calling her Prototype Asuka. She challenges Kazumi to battle causing them to go awol and accidentily discover a very unnerving secret about the military. The three of them get put on probation for this and despite all of the material a good writer could have squeezed out of not only that secret but even the probation situation neither plot point is ever brought up again. One sloppy looking nude bathing scene later all is forgotten. The story would not have changed even a little bit if theyd never been caught or were just let off the hook completely or if their discovery had been a bunch of lost frisbees on top of the ships roof nothing would have changed. And remember when I brought up Evangelion? Well episode three is the poor mans Kaoru episode. And for the record the original Kaoru episode was ALREADY the poor mans Kaoru episode. In the space of about half of an episode Noriko meets a dude gets conveniently dumped by Kazumi and then finds herself overwhelmed in combat when her love interest and current combat partner dies as a result. Feeling guilty for this As she damn well should she sits out the next battle even though shes suddenly exactly the soldier they need to save everyone. She picks herself up by her bootstraps joins the fight saves the day and it all feels so empty. The story is so rushed that we know about as much about Norikos love interest as we did about her rival Nothing. Hell even Shinjis bullshit I love myself now shtick was more compelling than Noriko just getting her act together out of nowhere because the plot demanded it. But the space fighting is cool right? All of the mecha action is intense and awesome right? Yes. Yes it is. Im not much of a mech fan never have been but the scifi backdrop and fastpaced mecha action had me watching at full attention even when I was bonetired. The action is the heart and soul of Gunbuster and its by far where it shines the brightest. Its also the part of the show that should by all means have least amount of explanation possible poured into it. Unfortunately Gainax didnt get this memo. See theres a good reason science fiction isnt supposed to be rooted in science fact It would be too freaking boring if it made sense. Using Star Wars for an example nobody cares how a ship can slow down in outer space What we do care about is who our heroes are why they are the way they are and where their journey is going to take them. Gunbuster does the exact opposite of this by developing the science and technology of this world and giving everything else minimum effort. Between each episode in the DVD box set are mini episodes where chibis of Noriko and Kazumi dump exposition thats full of big words but dont mean a single damn thing. It keeps going on and on from there sounding progressively regressive in its sanity until its finally suggested to us that Space Travel can be greatly improved by harnessing the power of ESPers and dolphins wearing space helmets. No I am not making up a word about that but heres the strange thing These details were so incomprehensible from the beginning that nobody really complains. Viewers before then had already given up trying to make sense out of ANY of the things Gunbuster has to say about its own universe so why not dolphins? These spurts of insanity could be used as a running gag but thats not the kind of sense of humor Gunbuster had. Remember how there was a lot of training in the first episode that had nothing to do with space battles? Pushups and running laps in giant mech suits marching up and down huge flights of stairs in lead sandals? That was intentional. That was Gainaxs honest attempt at a joke. Thats its sense of humor in a nutshell. Didnt laugh? Me neither. Even the villains are described halfassedly as attacking the human race because our existence is meaningless to the universe. Not a threat mind you but just meaningless. I really hope that was just a character describing his own theory because there is no way Gainax would be stupid enough to make that canon And yet theres no disproving it. Oh and dont point to that one military secret because we cant prove that predates the attacks. So yeah were just innocent victims here. Guess what? Villains without understandable motives are boring. At least Starship Troopers offered up the possibility that the bugs were provoked. Im no physicist but from what Ive heard the only part of it Gunbuster gets right is the time disparity between those traveling at lightspeed and those on Earth as its a plot device used a few times especially in the final two addon episodes. Its an interesting idea to say the least and its used well at first up until the final two episodes where it breaks down into an excuse to explore new futures without having to age the how young protagonist. The new futures by the way bring abrupt out of nowhere developments like Kazuki being in love with their Coach Her and Norikos robots can combine Yeah I hate to say it but the final two episodes dont even really need to be there. At the end of episode four a charming little blurb tells us that while two final episodes have been confirmed the only things theyd come up with were the two titles. And the story was largely over at that point so moving forward the only way to really round out two new episodes was to repeat the plot two more times With minor spoiler differences. In a way you can kind of tell that Gunbuster was created by a group of otakus just barely starting to find themselves as storytellers. They even made their main character identify as the Ultimate Otaku a designation that amounts to a few posters on her wall and the visual of her calling out the names of her attacks presumably because it was the only way to make her feel relatable to them. I dont want to come down too hard on it as it was only their second project and their first financial success and they DID expand a lot of its ideas several years later with Evangelion. Its a very amateurish piece of work which makes sense because they were amateurs at the time. Its a very important title in their history so I still highly recommend you check it out. Gunbuster was originally available stateside by Image Entertainment with a very boxy DVD set that was released in 2007. Its since gone out of print but you can still find it floating around online for about fifty bucks unless you get really lucky like I did. Its set for a rerelease in May by the company Maiden Japan wholl be releasing it in movie format. Yes they somehow trimmed the three hour series into a 95 minute movie and no I havent seen it so I have no idea how well itll hold up. A sequel series is also available on DVD but since I havent seen Diebuster myself I have no idea what it is or how it ties into the series. The manga by Kadocha is not available stateside. Earlier in this review I said Gunbuster wasnt very good and I stand by that assessment. If youre a die hard fan of it I apologize but I only saw it recently and I dont have the benefit of nostalgia goggles. Thats not to say its a bad show of course Honestly I enjoyed it. If you can ignore how bare bones the writing is it has a very simple story and while the characters are closer to constructs than people theyre still likeable. The final two episodes while a little pointless are more of exactly what this series delivers on the hardest Great action and decent animation. Unfortunately the animation is one of the only things about it that doesnt feel dated and even with that issue removed it tends to feel a bit mediocre. Its still an okay series and its engaging enough to keep me awake where other shows wouldnt. Not only would I recommend it to people hell Id watch it again. Its one of Gainaxs best shows even if that honor is slowly becoming more dubious. I give Gunbuster a 6/10.
60 /100
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