Gunbuster

jpn Top o Nerae!, aka Gunbuster: Aim for the Top!

1988. OAV. (6 X 30 min.) Science fiction. dir Hideaki Anno, Kazuya Tsurumaki. scr Hideaki Anno, Toshio Okada, Kazuya Tsurumaki. mus Kouhei Tanaka. des Haruhiko Mikimoto, Kazutaka Miyatake, Mahiro Maeda, Koichi Ohata. -bc

Hideaki Anno’s first great work as a director uses a Starship Troopers–like tale of Earth forces arrayed against monstrous insect aliens to tell a dramatic coming-of-age tale, with ample doses of humor, about a teenage girl’s path to maturity and battles with her own fears.

In 2021, Noriko Takaya is a high school girl in Okinawa whose father was killed in a deep space battle with an alien enemy. Coach Ota comes to her school to pick recruits to pilot the Gunbuster, a new generation of space weaponry. He picks Kazumi Amano, a popular senior, and Noriko, a junior, and intends to pair them as a team over Kazumi’s protests. The girls train and go into space on the command ship Exelion for further training. A redheaded Soviet female pilot, Jung-Freud, enters the mix, attempting to sow discord between the two Japanese pilots. Through it all, Noriko desperately wants Kazumi’s approval and support, and is in tears when Kazumi rejects her as a partner on the eve of their first battle. When Noriko goes into combat, her new partner, Smith Toren, is killed in an attack. Back on board the Exelion, she resolves to train harder. During a devastating attack by the insect-like aliens, Noriko enters the new Gunbuster and goes out alone, saving the day by destroying the aliens’ mother ship.

During a stint on Earth, in which ten years have passed while only four months have passed in space, Noriko reunites with her best friend from high school, Kimiko, who is now married and has a three-year-old daughter. Noriko and Kazumi finally get to team up, this time on a mission to escort the empty, decommissioned Exelion into the heart of an invading enemy fleet that threatens to overrun Earth and explode it to create a black hole that will destroy the invading aliens and the planet Raioh. On the way, Kazumi breaks down over the prospect of never being able to see her beloved dying Coach Ota again. Noriko is the one to stay strong and rally Kazumi to complete the mission.

Finally, in 2048, Noriko and Kazumi are reunited for a mission deep into another galaxy to set off a Black Hole Bomb that will destroy the aliens but take out their entire galaxy, ending the threat to Earth for all time. A pitched battle in space and a malfunction in the bomb represent the greatest threat yet faced by the girls and the fleet. Noriko comes up with a plan to set off the bomb, but she needs Kazumi’s help. . . .

Top o Nerae 2! (2004, OAV, 6 eps., made as the first of Gainax’s 20th-anniversary projects)

This is classic 1980s character design—beautiful female faces with lots of linework and character and oversized incredibly detailed eyes, with special attention to the pupils. Of the two major female characters, Kazumi is the classic beauty, with strong features, striking eyes and red lips, and long, flowing dark hair, the mature, self-confident one, who moves with a special kind of gravity that the other girls all idolize. Noriko is more the classic kawaii girl—spunky, cute, short-haired, all leaps and bounds, eyes and mouth wide open, eager to prove herself but emotionally all over the place, breaking into a laugh or a grin at one moment and tears the next. A lot of attention is paid to the way the girls move, and to the shape and curves of their bodies. Part of this strategy, of course, is to provide fan service in the form of nude showers and bathing scenes. One can also defend such scenes as showing the girls relaxing in rare moments when they don’t have to train or prepare for battle.

The other main characters are not as detailed, with Coach Ota’s eyes often hidden behind sunglasses; Jung-Freud, the stereotypically arrogant European redhead, always seeking to one-up the two heroines; and Kimiko, Noriko’s best friend, the bespectacled sidekick who stays behind, gets married and has a child, while Noriko stays young in outer space.

The spaceships and mecha design are not just intricate, but also quite beautiful, a sign that the designers weren’t just looking for functional spaceships and mobile suits, but visual beauty as well. The outer-space crafts and structures are all incredibly detailed, as if this were science fiction illustrated art. The aliens are quite unusual, appearing to be organic life forms that can live in space, although their exact nature is never explained. When spacecraft-like insects leave their “mother ship,” it’s never clear whether we are seeing an actual ship or a mother insect releasing her young to fight. Many of them do indeed look like spaceships as they fly alongside the Exelion, but are encrusted with organic features.

There are short classroom lessons in between the episodes in which childlike (superdeformed) versions of Noriko and Kazumi stand in front of a blackboard and attempt to explain the science behind some of the more startling aspects of the story, most notably the difference in time as experienced in outer space, where four months go by, and on Earth, where ten years pass in the same amount of time, prompting Noriko to say things like, “It’s all because of that meanie, Einstein.”

The final episode of the six is in black and white and is letterboxed, although the meaning of this stylistic choice is never clear.

This was an early production by Gainax, the fledgling animation studio that had made a big splash the year before with The Wings of Honneamise. Hideaki Anno, one of the founding members of Gainax, made his official directing debut with Gunbuster and went on to direct Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and His and Her Circumstances.

While Gunbuster has all the then-state-of-the-art trappings of a Gundam-like space spectacular, with a fantastic new generation of mobile suit weaponry, heavy-duty training by teenaged pilots, and grueling pitched battles with monstrous enemies in deep space, it’s less about the mechanics of space combat than about the character and personalities of the two teenaged girls involved. It’s about their relationships with each other and the adults and other girls around them, and Noriko’s growth as she overcomes her fear and doubt to become Earth’s champion.

Gunbuster was deliberately modeled on sports anime, with its title a direct reference to a popular 1973 animated series about a girls’ tennis club called Aim for the Ace, and its plot echoed the earlier show’s premise of an inexperienced girl being chosen by a new coach to partner with a more skilled player. Gunbuster frequently parodies Aim for the Ace and similar shows, as in the first episode when we see the girl cadets in full giant mobile suit regalia at Okinawa High School for Girls doing knee bends, push-ups, and jumping jacks in a row and at one point shows Kazumi jogging along the beach in her robot suit. But then the story line and characters take off into a moving tale of highly emotional teenage girls called on to serve their planet in adventures that usually feature stoic do-or-die warrior males. We see the contrast between what is expected of them and the torment they go through to get there. Both girls freeze up and get distraught in the midst of crises. The focus is on their ability to overcome those challenges and accomplish their individual and collective missions.

Particularly touching is the occasional look back at Earth and Noriko’s best friend from high school, Kimiko. The contrast between Kimiko, who ages normally over the course of the decades, and Noriko, who hardly ages at all, is quite striking in the scenes where they briefly reunite on Earth. Somewhere in between is Kazumi, who returns to Earth late in the story and stays for fifteen years with the ailing Coach Ota and ages that amount of time before reuniting with the still-youthful-looking Noriko for the final mission. The only other anime that has shown such detailed aspects of characters aging is Millennium Actress (although we mustn’t forget Bulma in Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z).

For fans of mecha and space combat, there are several exciting space battles and some interesting twists involving the alien insect threat that look forward to Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997). These are expertly animated action-packed scenes, bursting with genuine suspense, and they offer a valuable counterpoint to the scenes of the girls training and living on the ship while waiting for the chance to fight.

The ending of Gunbuster is a real jaw-dropper that involves an extreme extension of the “time dilation” concept so prominent in the series. To say anything about it would spoil the surprise, but it is a one-of-a-kind ending.

In The Anime Encyclopedia, authors Jonathan Clements and Helen McCarthy assert that one of the models for Gunbuster, aside from the aforementioned Aim for the Ace, is a 1971 live-action WWII film by Kihachi Okamoto, Battle of Okinawa, and they cite various parallels between the two films.

Gunbuster shares similarities with Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 Hollywood film, Starship Troopers, which was based loosely on the Robert Heinlein science fiction classic that was actually adapted for anime, also as a six-part series, in 1988, the same year as Gunbuster. Heinlein’s 1959 book also offered one of the first instances of “mobile suits” in science fiction literature, providing some of the inspiration for Mobile Suit Gundam.

Animation studio Gainax was born of the efforts of a group of fans eager to produce anime and went on, in 1991, to produce Otaku no Video, a parody of the new wave of anime fandom. In Gunbuster, Noriko has posters from Yamato, Nausicaä, and Totoro on her wall (along with Van Halen) and is called an otaku by Kazumi.

violence Lots of explosions and battles in outer space. profanity Mild profanity in subtitles. nudity Full female nudity in shower and bath scenes.