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Forum - View topicDoes Gunbuster Hold Up Today?
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Jacut
Posts: 140 Location: Paris, France |
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OVA 5 is the best episode in the history of anime and OVA 6 comes very close. So, yes. The real question here is: why bother watching today's animes when you have Gunbuster?
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Arale Kurashiki
Posts: 754 |
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I don't think anime "ages", actually. So of course Gunbuster is perfect, and always will be.
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Shay Guy
 Posts: 2137 |
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Nothing hits quite like that final scene. And judging from the Google Image Search results for spoiler["okaerinasai"] in katakana, I don't think I'm alone in that opinion.
Back in 2011, someone made a series of blog posts about a lot of weird Japanese imperialist subtext that doesn't make it through in translation clearly. It's a fascinating read. On the sheer mecha-nerd side of things, Gunbuster itself is still one of the biggest piloted robots in anime, at 250 meters, and has some of the most absurd combat feats. |
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5846 Location: Virginia, United States |
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Gunbuster is one of the best anime of all time.
Review was a nice thinking piece on why it is good. So now the question is, does the BD do the series justice? |
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Vaisaga
 Posts: 13230 |
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It's not just subtext. The official timeline included in the DVD boxset tells of how America fell on hard times, sold Pearl Harbor to Japan, and then the US attacked Pearl Harbor. Japan kicks their asses and becomes the world's leading superpower and Japanese becomes the primary language of humanity. Anyways, Gunbuster remains the greatest anime of all time in my book. |
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Marzan
 Posts: 515 |
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What’s the point of these “does it hold up “ pieces? Do we have some monopoly on quality anime today? Of course it holds up. It’s a masterpiece
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Arale Kurashiki
Posts: 754 |
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There's this bizarre idea about art that our understanding of art as a species has somehow become elevated so drastically in a matter of decades to render older works "aged" or "out of date", and most people agree with it. Like an "inherently" good show will suddenly become "inherently" bad due to the passing of time, as if the work corrodes.
There's many different angles people approach this from, but by and large I think it's very unnecessary language, or at the least is thrown around way too much. Public opinion, and even individual opinion, may shift with the times and contexts, but the work remains the same. |
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Vaisaga
Posts: 13230 |
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In this context it's more like "We were blinded by its brilliance initially, but as our eyes adjusted we started seeing the cracks underneath." Under that new perspective, we can judge if those cracks are fatal or not.
Another way to see if something "holds up" are the messages it contains. Something can go from "It's a work of art!" to "I never notice before but this work is super xenophobic and terrible!" |
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Rob J.
Posts: 47 |
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Well, it's a great introduction to Gunbuster for a newbie like me. As I've been lurking in the forums over the past year (the CrossAnge reaction thread was particularly memorable) and reading Answerman, I'm finding historical features and second-take pieces like this one to be valuable. Just because something old is being re-released doesn't mean that it's self-evidently a classic. I'm finding that I generally don't like the anime style of the late 80's and early 90's (it's as much about face shapes as the big hair, sweat bands, and neon colors) so I need the articles like these to help me decide if a title is worth checking out despite my qualms. I enjoyed last year's reviews of shows from the 2012 seasons, too, for the same reason. |
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Fedora-san
 Posts: 464 |
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I'd say the majority of the time people who were there for the initial release of a media fully noticed and understood the message, it was just at the time said message was openly allowed to be promoted without much pushback. Although it's harder to objectively judge in Japanese media because a lot of things people try to claim are 'outdated views' by American standards are still very much common in anime and associated mediums today It is ultimately a subjective question, though. |
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ANN_Lynzee
ANN Executive Editor
 Posts: 2948 Location: Email for assistance only |
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Thank you for sharing this. It's the new generation of fans that I have in mind for the 'hold up' articles, since new folks are coming into the fandom every day and maybe not been born when this show came around or old enough to watch it during its first release. |
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spacedin
Posts: 44 |
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Nationalism and imperialism are two different things. And as we are seeing in Ukraine right now, the former is very useful in staving off the latter. Also, practicioners of the latter vehemently oppose the former for everyone but themselves, as anyone who peruses Russian and Chinese state media for as little as 5 minutes can quickly see. |
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spacedin
Posts: 44 |
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Gunbuster - or at least the first half anyway - is a parody of both the shoujo sports manga/anime Aim For The Ace - a massive and influential hit - and the American military film Top Gun. (No incongruity: the producers of Top Gun acknowledged that their goal was to make a sports movie with military trappings, hence its "best pilot" competition that not only doesn't exist in reality but is antithetical to actual naval pilot training.) The original title of the work was therefore "Aim For The Top." Gunbuster merely refers to the combined mechs, and was used to market the title outside of Japan as the original title would have been obscure.
As for the Japanese imperialism accusation referenced earlier ... please know that in context it actually represented an improvement. At the time the Cold War was going on, and for all that everyone knew not only was it not going to end anytime soon but it was actually escalating. Asia was a Cold War battlefield (Viet Nam, Cambodia, Korea etc.) plus Japan had maritime borders with hostiles the Soviet Union, China and North Korea. And prior to the Cold War? The colonial era with Great Britain, Spain, France and (to a lesser extent) the United States controlling much of Asia. Even today, Japan sees Hawai'i and Guam's being part of the United States in terms very differently from how Americans do. So the alternate history proposed by Gunbuster dealt with both problems - colonialism and the Cold War - and resulted in mankind both united and at peace. Which is the long term goal of the progressive movement. As for whether it holds up ... more so than Aim for the Ace and Top Gun do! (And I loved Top Gun, and also very much liked Top Gun 2.) Start with the way that the characters look and behave and you will see what a quarter century of moe has done to the anime industry. Now I actually don't mind moe, but the characters in Gunbuster look and behave like you would expect someone their age to instead of like middle-schoolers. Noriko's immaturity, rather than being depicted as cute, has real consequences. Also, Gunbuster lacks a lot of the "problematic" and tired tropes that modern anime can't seem to exist without - no brosiscons and no deres - and in its place there are actual developed characters with realistic motivations. And as alluded to earlier, the class struggle wasn't part of the narrative, and neither were racial, religious or national conflicts. This contrasts not only with Gundam but Anno's own later work Evangelion (where extreme nationalistic and religious ideology play a huge role in ending humanity as we know it). Yes it is older animation, but it is a lot better than the average output - both in Japan and the U.S. - in the late 80s and early 90s, including some works that were huge hits and/or are considered classics. So there is a ton of stuff that one would have to write off if that is the reason. And yes, the sci-fi is very solid. It's view on the nature of time is preferable to that of Avengers: Endgame (which itself very closely resembles Adventure Time's take on it) and is as good as or better than the sci-fi of that era which included the Star Trek reboots, The Outer Limits, Stargate and a ton of B-movie franchises (Scanners, Species etc). So writing off Gunbuster would also mean writing off most sci-fi, even modern stuff. So, a lot of reasons to check it out and not very many reasons not to. Now Diebuster on the other hand ... |
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Arale Kurashiki
Posts: 754 |
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I mean, I'm a young person and first watched Gunbuster well into the 2010s myself, but I wasn't thinking of it as an older work in contrast to "modern standards" either, it was just something that looked interesting to me in and of itself. I know a lot of people could argue that I'm a weird elitist outlier, but I do think that seeking out and enjoying shows for oneself regardless of their time of release can be very fulfilling. Not saying that an article introducing people to Gunbuster is a bad thing whatsoever, of course. I just think the language people use to talk about art is often very market-driven. |
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Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1778 Location: South America |
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I watched Gusbuster for the first time in 2015. It instantly became one of my all time favorites. Its a masterpiece and its required watching for any serious anime fan.
So the question is not whether it holds up or not but why there hasn't been great stuff like this in recent years: while the production of anime certainly has never been greater, the average quality is not very high and I struggly thinking about anything recent that compares with the masterpieces of the past (like Gunbuster, EVA, Miyazaki's movies, LOGH, etc). |
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