Tag: Jonathan Clements

July 25, 2023 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Even though Gunbuster was released across three video cassettes, two episodes a time, its format preserved the two-part structure of TV anime, with a little “eyecatch” bumper at the halfway mark to imply that the show was just about to break for commercials. The chorus of voices that sings “Gunbuster~~~!” in the […]

July 16, 2023 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Noriko Takaya, the leading lady in Gainax’s Gunbuster, gets her first unwelcome taste of battle in the episode “First Love, First Sortie.” But as the title implies, she also finds something else, in the form of her brief encounter with the handsome American pilot Smith Toren.

July 1, 2023 · 0 comments

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 […]

June 16, 2023 · 1 comment

By Jonathan Clements. “I have loved novels, films and animation since I was a child,” says scriptwriter Reiko Yoshida, “and I was hugely interested in the world of stories. But it was not until I graduated from university when I thought I would make a career out of it.” However, she wasted no time after […]

June 11, 2023 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. They meet one evening on a bridge in Kyoto, like those two samurai heroes of old, Yoshitsune and Benkei, but it has been 200 years since those legendary figures fought in the war commemorated in the Tale of the Heike. Now, in the 14th century, Kyoto is a gutted, ramshackle ruin, worn […]