Gunbuster Files: The Easter Eggs

By Jonathan Clements.

The writer and producer Toshio Okada wrote in his memoirs about the experience of announcing Gunbuster: Aim for the Top at a press conference, in which the journalists all looked shocked, and then disappointed, and eventually sidled away, because they were hoping for something serious, and instead were getting pitched this thing about schoolgirls piloting giant robots.

“Animators,” he complained, “make this kind of anime because they have to, but what they really want to make is World Masterpiece Theatre. The journalists were the same. They all turned up ready to write about fighting robots, but as soon as we said ‘girls shake their arses in front of a space battleship and flowers appear in the background’ some journalists – even from the dedicated anime press – stood up from their seats and left.”

Okada faced similar resistance during the production of Gunbuster, when some of the subcontracting animation studios literally refused to believe the storyboard instructions they were receiving. As part of an early quintessentially 1980s training montage, pilot Noriko is shown putting her mecha through its paces like a boxer – jogging, doing press-ups and skipping with a giant rope.

“So we’ve got a skipping robot,” wrote Okada. “The scene only lasts for a moment, but it’s tricky to draw. It looks stupid but it requires highly-skilled shots. And the producers and directors were obliged to explain to the animators why such a scene was necessary.

“If it was a fan asking ‘Why is that robot skipping?’ we’d just say ‘Because it’s funny.’ But when it’s a serious query from the people who are going to have to work through the night for three or four days, then we needed to say something.

“Shoji Murahama would come to me and say things like: ‘Mr Okada, today we have to go to Studio XX this evening.’ And I’d be like ‘Why?’ And he’d say: ‘They’re confused again.’”

“And there wouldn’t be much to say. They were professionals, so when I turned up, they would talk seriously about budgets and timetables. But before I arrived, it was like: ‘Bring me the man who thought up such a ridiculous story!’”

Gunbuster was notoriously loaded with sight gags and in-jokes, from the early newspaper articles that substituted pictures of the animators for the heroic crew of Noriko’s father’s ship, to a controversial image in the opening credits that was carefully left unmentioned on Japanese TV. A split-second shot of Japan from orbit, seen in the opening credits, actually shows the locations of all today’s nuclear power plants underwater, as if the nation has suffered a series of atomic disasters. When Okada mentioned this in a TV interview, it was mysteriously dropped from the eventual broadcast.

Gunbuster is riddled with references to the Gainax staff and their favourite sci-fi shows. There are asides in the script (including an appearance for Blade Runner’s Tannhauser Gates), and background images not only of famous vessels, but of giant-sized model-kit construction sprues. Episode three begins with a karaoke rendition of ‘A Man and Woman’s Love Game’, which was originally written as an advertising jingle in 1986 for Takeda Pharmaceuticals Gastrointestinal Medicine.

Such frivolities caught a number of the production staff off-guard, including composer Kohei Tanaka, who started writing the music for the series based on the tongue-in-cheek tone of the first two episodes, only to find himself increasingly pivoting and rewriting as later episodes became darker and more melancholy. The moment when the show truly takes a tone for the serious comes when Noriko loves and loses her American pilot almost-boyfriend, Toren Smith… although that is a whole other story…

“When we completed the sixth episode and showed it to people,” wrote Okada, “they said: ‘Now we can see that you can make a great anime. So next time, make a serious one.’”

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. Gunbuster: Aim for the Top is released in the UK by Anime Limited.