Hogan Reviews

The next batch of older anime reviews was originally just going to be me finally re-watching and reviewing the original Evangelion series / film but between me planning that and now Hideaki Anno’s prior work, Gunbuster, was released on Blu-Ray here in the UK so I thought, why not? When it popped up in a recent Super Robot Wars game that featured the series I thought how some of the character designs were familiar but I didn’t remember much of anything else, so I assume it was one of those anime that aired in the late 90s / early 00s on the Sci-Fi channel that I watched but never recorded / rewatched, so I was looking forward to this! Was I right to look forward to it? Well…

Gunbuster was a six episode OVA series, released two episodes at a time, and in classic Anno fashion the budget and quality slowly drops as it reaches its conclusion… Our main protagonist is Noriko Takaya, the daughter of legendary space admiral Yuzo Takaya, though by the time the series starts her father had died defeating a large army of “Space Monsters” (that’s the only name they’re given…) and due to this she enlisted in a school that trains pilots of Machine Weapons (mechs) but she’s initially terrible at it. This is why new coach Ohta’s decision to pick star student Kazumi Amano and Noriko as the two pilots to go to space as fully fledged soldiers is met with anger and resentment, especially given Ohta is one of the few survivors of Yuzo Takaya’s crew. School bully Reiko Kashiwara challenges Noriko to a Machine Weapon duel and initially beats her easily, but Noriko manages to clear her mind (turn off her guidance computer in an extremely on-the-nose Star Wars reference) and beat her with a swift counterattack. The point being proven Ohta, Noriko and Kazumi fly off to space and arrive at the Silver Star, where Captain Tashiro introduces the star female Machine Weapon pilot from Russia, Jung Freud, who has heard the stories of how good Kazumi is and wishes to test her own skill, which she does during their space flight test. The two duel with Noriko along for the ride trying to stop them and together they stumble upon a preserved body of a Space Monster, which freaks Noriko out.

Noriko sobs at a reflection of herself sobbing… A good sum up of the first half of this OVA series!

This then led to an unknown object being detected out at Neptune and so as part of their “sub-lightspeed training” Noriko and Kazumi are sent after it, with Ohta along to supervise. What’s fun here is the Anno included the time discrepancy for objects travelling that fast so before they head off they say goodbye to their fellow soldiers as the few minutes in sub-lightspeed will mean six months would have passed around the Earthsphere. When they arrive they find the object is the Luxion, the ship Noriko’s Dad died on, and it’s only been a short time since the accident for the ship so Noriko tries to save her father but only finds an empty bridge with a large hole in the wall. Ohta manages to pull her back to their ship and they arrive back at Earth to find the still-in-construction ship Exelion now complete and ready for its first voyage, which is where the next couple of episodes take place. First Noriko meets a young American male pilot called Smith Toren and the two very quickly fall for each other, go out to fight the Space Monsters together, and Noriko freezes with fear which results in Smith being killed. Kazumi decides to give up their partnership in hopes Noriko is sent home but this just spurs her on to train even harder, though an attempted duel in space a short while later leads to Noriko breaking down into tears again…

The cool teacher and the grizzled veteran talk strategy. Try to guess who’s who!

This then leads to a rather miraculous turn-around as a massive Space Monster army arrives and Kazumi and Jung are among those launched and out-numbered but when everything seems hopeless Noriko launches in the experimental Gunbuster suit and pretty much single-handedly defeats the entire army, including destroying the flagship. It was a sudden bout of bravery and skill, that’s for sure! In fact there is something of a role reversal because in Episode 5 it’s Kazumi who has a breakdown in the middle of combat as she and Ohta have started a relationship but she found out he has “space radiation syndrome” and only months left to live and not wanting him to die while she’s off fighting is breaking her heart. They do fight though, her and Noriko form Gunbuster from two mechs just for the hell of it and detonate the Exelion on the edge of the Solar System to destroy a massive Space Monster fleet, though the resultant black hole also damages Earth and the other planets as well…

I’ll leave episode 6 to the spoilers, but it’s the sixth episode where the problems with budget are most evident. Without saying too much it’s in black and white and widescreen, like an old film, and I do believe Anno when he says he did that for the classic cinema effect but the big climactic space battle is black and white storyboard artwork shown one after the other like a slideshow to music, literally no animation at all, and THAT is clearly a “ran out of budget” moment, and the fact it has to be in black and white does make me wonder if the “artistic choice” was do to make the slideshow less obvious. It’s certainly a let down, not that the series was amazing or anything, it’s fine for a mini-series though Noriko’s arc seems to be missing the middle, she goes from scaredy cat wimp to bad-ass like a light switch!

Overall Thoughts:

The titular Gunbuster, looking smug like only a giant martial-arts-kicking super robot can!

Gunbuster is significant mostly because of being Anno’s other work before Evangelion as otherwise it’s … fine. The main characters are a bit shallow and their character development is on fast-forward, and by the end of the series a major battle sequence has to be reduced to a storyboard slideshow due to having ran out of money. It has its moments, but I won’t be in a rush to watch it again…

Over ten years after the end of the previous episode from her perspective, Kazumi had been with Ohta until he passed and then settled as a Machine Weapon instructor (alongside the school bully from Episode 1, who is now much older due to all the space travel Kazumi did…) but when a pilot is needed to join the fleet in Sagittarius A, where the Space Monster homeworld is located, she joins up and soon warps to the Earth fleet where she meets Noriko and co., who aren’t much older than when we last saw them. Also delivered is “Buster Machine 3” which is somehow the entire planet Jupiter compressed into a spaceship that when allowed to detonate will wipe out the enemy’s entire star system and ending their threat for good. After the previously mentioned unexciting storyboard sequence the bomb doesn’t go off so Noriko and Kazumi have to dive into the compressed Jupiter and set the bomb off themselves, which they do.

Well at least I didn’t need to guess which episode this screengrab came from! (Admittedly because it was the last one my blu-ray player’s screenshots folder, but mainly the lack of colour and aspect ratio…)

While the Earth fleet escapes our two main heroines manage to outrun the blast but due to the length of sub-lightspeed travel they had to do to escape they arrive back at Earth 12,000 years into the future. At first they’re worried there aren’t any humans to come back to as the planet is dark, but instead lights turns on in the shape of the message “WELCOME HOME” and the two pilots happily head down to Earth. Bit odd the people of 12,000 years future Earth would get everyone across the globe to turn their lights off so they can deliver an amusing message to the two heroic pilots, but whatever. It works, and is a far happier ending than Anno’s next work anyway!