Anime Secret Santa: Gunbuster review, part two

I took a bit of a break, and I’ve still got Kyousougiga to watch as well as Kamisama Kiss. Plus, Dumbing of Age isn’t going to read itself. But I’m back on the Gunbuster train.

Thankfully, the show itself took a bit of a break too. Ten years have passed since they left school and old classmates are instructors now and even have kids. It’s crazy what ten years can do to your old high school friends. I don’t know yet; I just went to a student-organized five year reunion with my friends, so who knows what’ll happen to all of us in five more. But enough about that, we should be talking about anime. 

I’m actually glad I accidentally spread this review over two parts, because it’s in these last two episodes that I realize what Hideaki Anno and his crew at Gainax were trying to do with this entire show. Anno, just like with His and Her Circumstances (at least the parts he worked on it) and Evangelion, is trying to create an incredibly humanizing piece of fiction, in Gunbuster and Evangelion’s case set in this superb world of robots and bouncing boobs.

The dichotomy with the robots provides a great contrast with everything else that’s going on around them. By all means, robots should not exist in this show and it could, in fact, work both without them and the aliens that they’re fighting. The way that this story is framed, of distance between friends and loved ones, is Voices of a Distant Star before Shinkai even thought about making it.

What created the agency for these characters was things like seeing Amano 15 years later meeting Noriko six months later. Or even before that when Noriko saw Kimiko 10 years later. The execution of seeing them together after that extended absence was maybe what Voices was missing that Gunbuster did not for me.

In those moments, it set up the final conclusion’s emotions so much better than any of the fantastical/science fiction elements could have alone. Anno knows that it’s his characters that drive the story and he characterizes them spectacularly. Noriko has grown so much, yet she looks exactly the same as when we first met her. Amano is still the strong young woman she was, but she’s matured in ways much less tangible and evident without looking just a little bit below the surface. And Jung Freud provides the perfect third wheel to the duet of Gunbuster pilots because of her lofty personality and little intrusions/insertions into the story. Jung’s introduction provided us with Noriko in space for the first time, then gaining friends, then growing stronger for the sake of humanity.

The sixth episode, in typical Hideaki Anno fashion, quickly runs out of budget and, in fact, is animated almost completely in black and white. The only color sequence is at the very end when Noriko and Amano return home.

I spent the first four episodes just having fun with being immersed in the world of Gunbuster and into the mind of a younger Hideaki Anno. But the fifth and sixth episodes convinced me that the man knows how to weave a story and how to write characters. He sometimes struggles with story, as this was way too sprawling for what I ended up taking out of the series (which was the relationship between Noriko and those on Earth and how being separated affected her), plus we didn’t really find out anything about these aliens that attacked aside from that they are evil. But we arguably don’t learn that with Evangelion either and that was fine.

Now, if only Hideaki Anno always had infinite money or money management skills for his animation budget.