Gunbuster The Movie

Aim for the Top! Gunbuster is a six part OVA series, released in Japan in 1988, it was the directorial debut of Neon Genesis Evangelion moper Hideaki Anno, and the second commercial project for fledgling studio Gainax. Starting out as a tit-bounce sports show parody, Gunbuster quickly pulled the rug, morphing into a bleak treatise on human sacrifice during a space war. Under review here is the 2006 theatrical-run re-edit that parred the six thirty minute episodes into a ninety odd minute feature, better to run alongside newly minted sequel series Diebuster.

In the near future, mankind's initial light-speed steps into the cosmos are marred somewhat by an all-out attack by giant insects named Space Monsters. Zippy flagship The Luxion is sunk, along with series heroine Noriko Takaya's father. Flash forward several years and Takaya is moored in a military training academy, struggling to make sense of her towering mecha armour. Comically inadequate, Takaya is still short-listed for intergalactic warfare by her hobbling coach. Why? She's got guts! Resulting montages, and something of an explanation for Takaya's oafish piloting (sensory overload), are excised here. Plot rolling forward into the heavens without ever really crystallising why this responsibility should rest on such a passive character. This lends the first half of Gunbuster The Movie a darkly comedic quality - Takaya consistently caught up in events monstrously out of her depth.

These deletions, as well as drastically reducing girl-crush star student Kazumi Amano's role, highlight Takaya's similarities to another Anno hero, Shinji from Evangelion. Both are uprooted children shouldering a world shattering burden that they have never actively pursued; a pair of reluctant kids tangled up in someone else's idea of who, or what, they should be. This idea even extends to a metatextual consideration of this form fiddled release. Gunbuster The Movie's streamlined narrative direction raises some interesting questions about director's cuts and after-the-fact rearrangement. With the jiggling fan service, that the series pioneered, all but gone and Takaya's melodramatic relationships trimmed to fleeting connections, the series loses its schizophrenic identity; allowing the feature to concentrate on the off-world alienation experienced by pilots subjected to lightspeed. Is this an attempt on Anno's part at injecting integrity? If nothing else, this tidying up certainly brings the piece further in line as a prototype offering of what would become the Evangelion phenomenon. Or is it simply a sensible attempt at creating a trackable human arc within a halved timeframe?

With the first four episodes rifled through in record time, full undivided attention is turned to the fifth and sixth segments in which Takaya finally begins to shine, and the cost of deep space pugilism is further explored. Such favouritism is excusable, since this is where Gunbuster transcends many of its mecha show forebears, arriving at a mood and place that has more in common with novels like Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. Takaya literally slips out of human time during her enlistment. Whilst only a year passes for her on the lightspeed front-line, decades pass on Earth. Friends and rivals live out the entirety of their lives while she remains, essentially, a child. This is what makes Gunbuster special. These elements are the main meat of the story, rather than endless rounds of alien bashing. Gunbuster expertly juggling these hard sci-fi time rulings with triumphant 70s mecha action tropes in the penultimate encounter, and a melancholy, monochromatic suicide mission for the finale. The fact remains then that Gunbuster is a rare, and genuinely affecting piece of animation, no matter which form it takes.