Fashionably late (I was in space for five minutes, for you it's been two days), but I finished the show! Wanted to grind out my own take on it first so I wasn't subconsciously influenced by anything, but I'll have a proper read over everyone else's comments tomorrow.
Episode 5
Yaass, Fly High at last. I always liked that track, although I'm genuinely surprised to find it's just an insert song - I honestly thought it would have been either an OP or an ED.
On a more serious note, I've heard a lot of praise for and discussion of the way Gunbuster handles the passage of time, but it still hits you hard when it actually happens. The scenes of Noriko visiting Kimiko are quite heartbreaking. It's not just that she's changed physically, even the way she addresses Noriko has changed now. I did think Noriko seemed to dismiss the idea of her pulling strings to get Takami on the escape ship rather lightly though.
For the reference spotters, the traditional black robe Coach Ota wears when he gets out of his hospital bed is exactly the same as the one adopted by the Coach in Aim for the Ace under similar circumstances, and the alien infiltration ships that 'bloom' after they strike the Excelion are remarkably similar to the radish ship from the Daicon opening films.
Episode 6
I feel this episode is the most Hideaki Anno thing that I think even Hideaki Anno could possibly ever conceive of. I knew that it was in black & white, but is it not also in Tohoscope? That is a power move.
Maybe I'm just trying too hard to see things, but, with the vintage tokusatsu film-style presentation and time having progressed another fifteen years, I couldn't help feeling the aesthetic of the mechanical designs had changed to look a bit more like something from the 60s. The cable-car type ship Amano travels in and the black hole bomb in particular both have that very rounded look I'd associate with sci-fi productions of that era.
I was also a bit surprised when we got the montage of still frames for the big battle sequence too. Knowing what came later, it would be easy to see it as a bit of desperate cost cutting, or even a determination to challenge audience expectation by avoiding the standard violent outcome, but I suppose it also seems like something you might well have found in a 50s or 60s sci-fi b-movie, when budget and special effect techniques often weren't enough to cope with the grand dreams of their creators.
Then there's that ending. In a way, I wish I hadn't seen Franxx so relatively recently, I think my 'oh so that's where that came from' realisation rather diminished things a little, but it was still quite poignant. As logistically difficult as it is to believe it could be done, the moment the lights came on was rather heartwarming.
So yeah, that's it then. I enjoyed watching this one and it's been great to go through it with everyone else. It wasn't the show I expected it to be, except when it was, but it was also a lot of other things too and somehow it made all that work as a whole. Even if I had finished Gunbuster when I was a kid, I don't think I'd have appreciated it as much - it definitely feels like something you need to have lived a bit more to get the most out of.
Youtube is recommending me an intriguingly silly looking video to do with the PS2 game, but I'll leave that for tomorrowtoo.
