I'm watching Gunbuster

There's a training montage set to the most absurdly blatant ripoff of the Chariots of Fire theme imaginable

A training montage of giant robots, which are controlled by joysticks and foot pedals, running and doing pushups

This works on the same principal as nascar drivers training by towing trailers full of gravel right

also hold up is this where Gurren Lagann's gag with the characters looking at each other's heads on the communicator screen came from

I haven't actually watched any mecha anime older than Evangelion before okay

passenger spaceplane with disposable booster stage is a pretty rad design

the opening is teens running next to sunsets and then spinning hair and then cool robot poses bc anime openings haven't changed in 30 years

what tipped you off

adedas

okay scifi plots dealing with relativistic time stuff are always cool

k lets bust some more guns

They get passed by ships at near lightspeed, and the light shifts from blue to red as they're overtaken

Went into this with very little knowledge besides "Gainax mecha before Evangelion" and there's way more rad hard-sci stuff than I expected

how come the male pilots get pants

This question is of course rhetorical; the answer is Gainax

FINALLY

WE'VE GONE ANIME

Observations:
- In-fiction those movies are 50+ yrs old
- A background artist painted a tiny recreation of the Nausicaa poster for this shot

(also this series is directed by Anno, who was previously responsible for animating the Giant Warrior at the end of Nausicaa)

speaking of background art, all of it is extremely pretty

This show has a really weird relationship w fanservice. Lots of nudity but every time it happens it's super tonally jarring and voyeuristic

it obv wants to be like YAY BOOBIES but the setting's otherwise too subdued/serious for it to read as fun so it just feels turbo awkward

Contrast Evangelion, also directed by Anno, which totally leans into this & uses "fanservice" to deliberately make you super uncomfortable

Actual media crit prob has a real term for this but it's basically the Ludonarrative Dissonance thing but with boobs instead of guns right

Okay finished it

Kinda cheesy and poorly paced but the art's fantastic and the last two episodes improved it a lot

IMO it has a lot of big thematic ideas with which it never really gets around to engaging

Like "teens drafted into mandatory military service by fascist government facing extinction-level threat" is never really examined at all

And then the ending is Hiroshima scaled up to galaxy-size but never explored beyond just setting up the parallel

they're like "yeah this is prob the most sickening thing humanity's ever done but we're out of options" and then just kinda drop the subject

In that respect it kinda feels like a dry run for later works that handled similar themes with a lot more success

(e.g. Evangelion, Gurren Lagann, arguably Kill la Kill even, although I dunno to what extent that one can rly be traced back to 80s Gainax)

People more studied in animeology probably have much more discerning takes on this than I

Worth watching even for the art alone in any case