Anime review: Gunbuster

Giant robots against space monsters!

Gainax is rightly famous for their very original approach to animation. For good and for worse they never leave a boring impression and their output is always stylistically impressive.

This is not to say that they produce only masterpieces, quite the opposite indeed, Gainax are infamous in the non fanatic side of the anime fandom for having invented the lost style incredibly interesting plot that literally goes nowhere more than a decade before lost.

So I approached Gunbuster with some trepidation, will I get awesome Gainax or absurd Gainax?

In the end we got a little bit of both.

The main story, a fearsome struggle against ever increasing odds where humanity is obliged to continually up the ante just to survive is really engaging and interesting.

This is intersected with the personal story of two young female giant robots pilots which is literally modeled onto another famous anime of the 70s. They even admitted it in the title, the Japanese Toppu o Nerae is clear reference to Ace o Nerae, Jenny the tennis player for the uninitiated. (If a serious anime fan wanders into this little blog I want to preventively apologize for any spelling error).

The obvious point is that this blatant implant of the whole human plot from another anime, in another genre, doesn0t really work and, as it often happens with Gainax, has his reason d’être mainly for the hardcore anime fans who can recognize it.

Visually is a little bit dated, is a series from 1988, one of the first efforts of Gainax and the debut of director Hideaki Anno of Evangelion fame. Probably, as a fairly hardcore scifi fan, the part that I find more interesting is the realistic treatment of how a war in space would really work.

This is not the masterpiece claimed by many but the struggle against the space monsters is interesting and original. Considering that it’s only six half hour episodes long it’s certainly worth a look.