Gunbuster

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Gunbuster

トップをねらえ! (Aim for the Top!)
Genre	Adventure, Comedy, Drama, Mecha
OVA
Directed by	Hideaki Anno
Studio	Studio Fantasia, Gainax
No. of episodes	6
Released	7 October 1988 (Japan) 20 February 2007 (US DVD)

Gunbuster, known in Japan as Aim for the Top! (トップをねらえ!, Toppu O Nerae!^?) is a six episode anime OVA series created by Gainax in 1988. It was the directorial debut of Hideaki Anno, who is best known for his role as the director of Neon Genesis Evangelion. The title is a parody of the classic tennis anime Aim for the Ace!. A sequel known as Diebuster, or Aim for the Top 2!, with all new characters, was shown in 2004. Bandai Visual USA announced at Anime Expo 2006 that it has acquired the Region One (R1) license for Gunbuster. A DVD set of the series was released by Bandai Visual on 2007-02-20, but to date, no English dub of the series has been released.

1 Plot
2 Genre
3 Design notes
4 Trivia
5 External links

[edit] Plot

In the very near future, a race of huge, insect-like aliens is discovered traveling the galaxy. These aliens, which are known as the Uchuu Kaijuu, or Space Monsters (Note: This name is what they are referred to throughout the series), seem dedicated to the eradication of the human species as the latter takes its first steps away from the solar system, and they are getting closer and closer to Earth. Humanity has responded by developing spacegoing battleships and giant fighting robots. These robots are piloted by the best and brightest of Earth's youth, picked from training schools around the world.

The story begins in the year 2023, not long after the first battles with the aliens, and centers on young Noriko Takaya (タカヤ・ノリコ Takaya Noriko) (voice: Noriko Hidaka). Although Noriko's father was a famous admiral in the space fleet who was killed during one of the first battles of the war, her own talents as a pilot are questionable. Nonetheless, she has entered a training school on Okinawa. Through the series Noriko, joined by the beautiful and talented Kazumi Amano (アマノ・カズミ Amano Kazumi) (voice: Rei Sakuma), will fight to overcome the trauma of war, the doubts of her peers, and her own lack of confidence.

[edit] Genre

Gunbuster follows the genre of Mecha anime, started by the Mazinger Z series. It is notable for being one of the few anime series ever, if not one of the few pieces of visual entertainment ever, to deal with the concept of time dilation in a way that even approaches realism^{[citation needed]}, and indeed makes it one of its central plot elements. Though the scientific accuracy of the series is variable (it posits the invention of acceleration compensators, artificial gravity and warp drives by the year 2015) it includes many hard sci-fi elements, and provides a consistent technological frame if one assumes that human technological progress has been put into overdrive in order to wage war against the aliens. Gunbuster is also notable as being a spiritual predecessor to Anno's more famous Neon Genesis Evangelion in that the themes of space opera and mecha action take somewhat of a back seat to various romances, rivalries and other relations between the main characters, made more complex by the differing speeds of their aging due to time dilation (For Noriko, the 40 year or so timespan of the major part of the series takes roughly about a year) It is also similar to the later Evangelion in that it begins as a high-school anime, with the students at Okinawa space high-school for girls competing for places among the elite pilots sent to fight the space monsters. This pattern has since become somewhat of an anime cliché. Noriko also shares many personality traits with Evangelion's Shinji Ikari, particularly in her lack of confidence in herself, and Jung Freud, a Soviet pilot who befriends Noriko and Kazumi, is regarded by many fans as a prototype of Asuka Langley Sohryu, right down to her red hair and arrogant attitude.

[edit] Design notes

Much of the final battle sequence is not animated but a series of images portraying tableaux of events during the battle.
The entire final episode is monochrome except for the very end. Unusually, this was achieved by executing the artwork in shades of grey, rather than shooting color animation using black and white film.
The characters were designed by Haruhiko Mikimoto, who also did likewise on The Super Dimension Fortress Macross and on the following year's Gundam 0080. The series is also notable for being the first anime to introduce jiggling breasts as a form of fan service, which led to such movement being sometimes called the "Gainax bounce", this subsequently led to the fan nickname "BustGunner".

[edit] Trivia

According to Fanboys.com, the Gunbuster holds the record for largest number of enemies destroyed by one mecha in any anime.

In a 2005 interview on the Web site Anime on DVD, Jonathan Clements claimed that Gunbuster had never been dubbed because the "music and effects" soundtrack, containing all the non-dialogue audio, had been lost, and that reconstruction would be prohibitively costly.

Within the Super Robot Wars series of games, the Uchuu Kaijuu are called STMC, an abbreviation for Space Terrible Monster Crowd; this term is not used in the original animation.

Gunbuster was originaly going to be a TV series but was shortned into OVA format, the TV series concept was recreated in the PS2 video game, which let the player play through all the episodes (including the re-cap episode). Though several episodes may be skipped on any gameplay mission if the player does not meet certain objectives or uncover the correct information when talking to the characters; in this case a cartoon with the Coach yelling at Noriko and a staticy TV appears (done in the science classroom style).