HugaChan

Anonymous 10/11/2009(Tue)04:10:03 No.362382

Gunbuster should be appreciated for putting into perspective the growth of director Hideaki Anno's talent. As in a "Holy Christ did he suck!" kinda way.

Let not another sentence be wasted before telling the truth: Gunbuster is bad. The plot is paper- thin, the characters are non, and the directing is lame.

Looking at Gunbuster, one begins to understand how there could be such a commotion over Neon Genesis Evangelion: all to Anno's credit, it's unbelievable how far he had come as a director at that point. Imagine for a moment that The Dark Knight, as you have seen it, was made by Tim Story roughly ten years after he had finished The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and you have a pretty good idea of the reason why Evangelion is such a marvel.

That's because watching Gunbuster, it becomes incredibly hard to believe that the same person responsible for it's utter lack of tension, literally useless characters and hackneyed story was capable of pulling off a masterpiece of storytelling a decade later. Not to mention being able to do the entire premise of Gunbuster a bajillion times better another decade later with Gurren- Lagann.

But just what is it that makes Gunbuster so bad? To put in two words: it's amateurishness. On it's own, the concept and the ideas behind Gunbuster could have very well worked, but it fumbles the execution so freking hard that the experience of watching it becomes a chore.

The idea is that Takaya Noriko is a teen girl studying to become a mecha pilot to join the army in order to fend off an alien invasion. She's also the daughter of the first space ship captain to venture out against said alien foe. Coincidentally, she sucks. She is one of the worst trainees in her school, and she barely has any hopes of becoming a pilot. However, she quickly makes friends with the ace pilot candidate of her school, Amano Kazuki, and the new coach sent over to her school to choose the two pilots to take on the mission turns out to be the sole remnant of the crew of Takaya's father. He staunchly believes that despite Takaya's fumblings, she has what it takes to become an ace pilot. So, as it goes, pepped up by the coach, Noriko decides to train hard so as to live up to the coach's expectations and to carry on her fathers heritage.

As you can see, the plot is standard fare for this kind of thing, but plot was never an important aspect for mecha anime. Mecha stories always tried to win audiences over with epic battles and intrigueing character interaction. Gunbuster fails both these aspects, and right in the second episode at that!

By that time, the two chosen pilots (Takaya and Amano of course) are sent to a large space station orbiting the Earth in order to train with the rest of the pilots for repelling the aliens. There, they meet the single, most inexcusably bad character of mecha anime history (and possibly all of anime history): Jung Freud.

Jung Freud is a very special kind of bad because you can play the worst drinking game in the world with her. Hey, why not try it out right now if you have the patince! The rules are simple: watch Gunbuster again in it's entirety, skipping over every scene that has Jung Freud in it. Take a drink every time there is something that you feel you would not understand about the story due to skipping Jung Freud's scenes.

See why it's the worst drinking game in the world? You don't get a damn sip!
Besides being barely something you could call a "character" in a "story", and more like a dangerous bipolar cunt who's either friends with the two main girls or antagonizes them depending on what mood Anno was in at the time of making any given scene, she adds ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to the plot! I'm serious: remove every scene in which Jung Freud makes an appearance (there isn't a single line of dialog that references her when she isn't around), and NOTHING CHANGES! The story remains perfectly comprehensable, and the character relations stay christal clear. Seriously, there's absolutely no reason for Jung Freud to be in the story at all! She never does anything important and none of her scenes are vital to anything in the story. Sure, there are loads of anime characters that you can actively hate, but at least those characters add something to their specific stories. Jung Freud doesn't even accomplish that! She's literally the most worthless anime character ever made!

Still, a single enigma of character- existence should not be enough to make a story suck. Sadly, the rest of the cast does not fare much better. It's not that they are unlikable or something like that, it's just that they are all underdeveloped and boring. None of the characters have a single remarkable personality trait that would make them interesting. And since the series is so much character- rather than plot centric, it ends up being all the worse fo it! Since we can't bring ourselves to care about these characters, watching them going through their struggles is just boring. It doesn't help that the directing is so lame.

Perhaps it's a concious decision, seeing as most of the action takes place in outer space, but one thing is for certain: Gunbuster succesfully manages to to turn all of it's big, dramatic scenes completely weightless! There are scenes of tragedy, victory, impending doom and time passing all over Gunbuster, but the directing is so slow that they lose all their emotional pull. And when there's a big space fight, the directing is either not good enough to cause us to worry at least a little bit about the characters involved, or it deliberately makes the absolute worst decisions possible (I'll get back on this point right away). It's interesting to note that the alien foe in Gunbuster is never ever shown for half of the story. Yes, there is an encounter with them in the first half, but we don't get to actually see them until the second half. This might have been a good way to make the aliens even more menacing, but events in Gunbuster unfold so slowly that we can't take the threat seriously because we can not believe that any human being would remain in inaction for so long.

The most interesting thing about Gunbuster is it's very own scientific gimmick of time- dilation. Since most of the characters travel in subspace faster than light, it's explained that time for people in regular space goes faster than for people in subspace. While this remains nothing but a convenient plot- device to set up an interesting story premise here and there, at least it doesn't outstay it's welcome, and it helps to give the story a humongous scale.

There is one thing I haven't talked about yet, though I absolutely must, and that is the one episode of Gunbuster that encapsulates everything that's wrong with it into thirty minutes: the final episode. The first thing you have to know about it is that it all plays out in black and white. Remember, this is not a story that should be taken seriously, this is a story about two girls sitting in a giant asspull of a secret weapon super mecha that can singlehandidly defeat entire legions of alien spaceships. The fact that the last episode actively tries to show the characters as people who have grown up during the course of their lives, in a bloody giant robot story, just makes the entire concept all the more pretentious! Just like Jung Freuds existence, there was absolutely no reason for the episode to be filmed this way.

Remember when I said that the directing delibaretly makes the worst decisions possible? The final episode of Gunbuster is about humanity striking back at the aliens at their core, attempting to rid itself of them once and for all. It features the biggest battle of the entire story, and the best chance for all the characters to get liked by the audience by being badass against a gazillion aliens.

The director skips through the entire battle in a montage.

This might sound merely annoying on paper, but it's mind numbing when experienced. It is the experience of waiting for hours for a single awsome scene to happen only to find out that that one scene was never made in the first place! It simultainiously spits in the face of both the audience AND storytelling in general! And you can't even fault Gunbuster for being old! If Rose of Versailles was capable of fabricating a gripping story with characters we couldn't not care about, A DECADE EARLIER, OUT OF HISTORICAL EVENTS THAT WE ALL KNEW THE ENDING TO NO LESS, the fact that Gunbuster can't produce a single exciting scene in a GIANT ROBOT STORY THAT IS COMPLETELY MADE UP, THEREFORE FREE TO BE CHANGED BY THE CREATORS AT ANY TIME is simply inexcusable!

In the end, it was for the good of everyone that director Hideaki Anno realised what he had to work on in order to not be bad, and it's almost a miracle that he was capable of such advancement as a director. In the meantime, Gunbuster stands as proof that even the most accomplished directors might have been awful back in old times, and that the Bay of today might turn into the Scorsese of tomorrow!

Hey, an industry can dream, right?

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