Oh no! Gunbuster is back with a sequel!!

[thomas7g]

Oh my. Gunbuster is coming out with a sequel!

For those who never heard of gunbuster, it was a relatively unusual production. A group of fanboys with alot of talent formed their own animation company and made their own film, Wings of Honneamise. It was a great picture with incredible visuals and a ton of love and work went into it, and it flopped. It was too artsy, trying too hard to be a piece of art and philosophical. A would-be astronaut thinks about the meaning of life.

Boooring!

So the company did an about face and did GUNBUSTER. Still with great animation. But they threw in lots of naked bouncy girl parts and robot vs aliens action scenes. Which is sad cause underneath all that they finally had a much better story. A girl grows up in the shadow of a great war hero father. But from her perspective, she has this horrible lonliness for her late father, and is scorned by others her age cause she gets preferential treatment that she doesn't want. Her mentors push her into combat because she is the daughter of a war hero with great skills. But they ignore if a girl who has grown up insecure from her father's loss can handle seeing people die around her.

They could have made a classic. But instead they made Gunbuster. Which can be entertaining. But it was kinda notorious at the time.

Now they made a sequel. The first OVA comes out in November. It looks like they have gone a totally different direction again. But who knows. They are still Gainax. And they have made FLCL, Evangelion, and Kare Kano amoung many others.

[Agelastus]

I actually think of Gunbuster as a classic. It often features in my "top ten" lists.

The sequel sounds nowhere near as good (it's actually more of a "side-story" than a sequel, from what I've read - which is a bit of a shame as I would like to see if Jung-Freud had managed to literally, rather than metaphorically, keep her promise.)

The climax of episode four is one of the finest in all anime. And it is topped by the last episode which packs enormous emotional punch. Particularly at the climax...






MAJOR SPOILER HERE!!!!















....when the shattered Gunbuster is orbiting the Earth of ten thousand years in the future. It is dark. There are no lights. They cannot see Okinawa, their home. They fear humanity is gone. And then lights appear, red lights spelling out in Japanese "welcome home". As the lights of the cities come on, they abandon the Gunbuster, their capsules spiralling joyously home as colour bleeds into a previously black and white episode. Some of the best closing music ever swells as the credits run.

Magic.

And it made me tear up the first time I saw it.