brace yourselves, I'm about to
w a t c h
a n i m e

Anyway watching Diebuster since I watched Gunbuster a few weeks ago

Just getting started it's already 1000% more Anime than its predecessor

Aired over 2004-2006 which is exactly the period in which I started discovering the medium, so like, 80s anime looks old & this looks normal

The mecha space force having its name changed from "TOP Squadron" to "TOPLESS" is a good metaphor for Gainax's evolution over 1986-2006 lol

Gainax Car

oh apparently Nia's weird eyes in Gurren Lagann are a reference to this

Animators having a great deal of fun with very limited frames

since twitter refuses to display the gif big enough:

that anime thing where you introduce a character's deep-seated trauma and then heartwarmingly resolve it in the space of exactly one episode

The Episode About The Side Character

when you want to flesh out the emotional development of the cast but can't afford more than exactly twenty-five minutes for side characters

We now return to:

anime

So a fun comparison from Gunbuster to Diebuster: Here's how the Space Monsters changed between 1988 and 2005

The second one is actually *animated* though

The 80s anime thing of spending an absolute fortune on magnificently detailed paintings, but then having half the series being slow panning shots across said entirely static paintings, is really something

I watched Record of Lodoss war as a kid and it's prob the strongest example I can think of. Ridiculously beautiful art in which barely anything besides mouths and the camera ever move

It's a really cool aesthetic but honestly I think I prefer the modern tradeoff of detail for motion

(just not gonna talk about Akira because nobody's ever going to have the budget/patience combo to do something like that ever again lol)

Anyway look how hype this title is

Also I really like that the protagonist is a robot and nobody cares at all

Like it's just offhandedly mentioned occasionally and has no particular bearing on how people treat her

k finished Diebuster

It's fun. Plot's kinda all over the place. Finally tying things back to Gunbuster was super rad

Much like Gunbuster felt like sort of rough draft of Evangelion in a lot of places, this felt like a pretty direct precursor to Gurren Lagann

Also wow Gainax's stuff is WAY more self-referential than I realized. Mecha with organs, planets as weapons, goggles as powerups

I mean in fairness Gurren Lagann's explicitly a genre parody so of course it's full of references, but even Trigger-Chan's design is pretty reminiscent of Nono

Six episodes is kind of an awkward length in which to tell a decent story tbh