Gunbuster / Toppu o nerae! ("Aim for the Top!") (1989) A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1997 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Transcends its juvenile source material to become a really unique and powerful anime about love, growth and loss.
GUNBUSTER started silly, then grew and grew until it reached a climax that knocked the wind out of me. The audience I was with expected a lightweight girls-and-big-robots story, but they got seriously rocked back on their psychic heels during the three-plus hour course of this remarkable anime.
GUNBUSTER tells the story of Noriko, a young girl hellbent on piloting mecha for Earth's space navy. From the opening scenes, she has a long way to go: she barely even knows the controls -- it's like one of those war-movie sequences where the novice pilot has a crib sheep taped to the windscreen). But the coach -- named, appropriately enough, Coach -- sees that she has determination, and nourishes that thoroughly. Noriko eventually befriends two other pilots: Yuriko, who plays a "big sister" role to her, and Jung Freud, a Russian girl who is at first a rival, and then an incredible pillar of strength in the later part of the movie.
As they get into the thick of combat, a new element comes into play: time dilation. A mission which takes only five minutes subjectively causes six months to elapse on Earth. This isn't new, but the way the movie handles it is unique: the time-dilation effect causes Noriko to remain the same age while the others, especially "big siser" Yuriko, age relativistically. Ultimately it's Noriko who becomes the big sister, in a perversely brilliant set of psychological twists, and has to summon her own strength to save the ones who helped her before. This is the movie's greatest asset: it takes cliched notions and then slowly turns them inside out over time, revealing a genuine core of emotion we didn't suspect was even possible.
The long, drawn-out final chapter of the movie is some of the most emotionally harrowing time I've spent in front of a screen. The filmmakers letterboxed the final third and filmed it in *black and white* -- extremely unusual for anime, of course, and with the net effect that we concentrate on the characters and their climaxing dilemma, and not the pretty scenery.
And then we come to the coda scene, which is almost as jaw-dropping as the closing shots of 2001 or PLANET OF THE APES. I will not describe it -- but I will say that it must be seen in context, after the agony and anguish of the previous segments and the cosmic upping of the ante have come and gone.
Three and a half out of four cosmic amoeba.
syegul@ix.netcom.com EFNet IRC: GinRei http://www.io.com/~syegul another worldly device... you can crush me as I speak/write on rocks what you feel/now feel this truth =smilin' in your face, all the time wanna take your place, the BACKSTABBERS=
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