The Music of Gunbuster

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 eycatch is actually a single man, overdubbed repeatedly to sound like a group of people. The voice is that of the composer, Kohei Tanaka, sneaking his way onto the audio as a bit of cost-cutting DIY.

Tanaka has said, with his tongue firmly in cheek, that Gunbuster was also something of an embarrassment for him because of the number of tracks on it that were commissioned deliberately as pastiches of other composers – Holst, for example, Mozart and Dvorak most noticeably, but many others, too. This is not something that bothers Yoko Kanno, nor indeed did it bother Tanaka when he wrote what has to be the most notorious of his compositions, the ending theme to Dragon Half.

Kohei Tanaka has seen every angle of the music business, starting out in publicity for a music company, after study at the Berklee College of Music, and even ended up at one point playing the piano in a hotel bar, before he was tapped as a composer for Japanese animation.

Even though he has gone on to compose for Sakura Wars and One Piece, Gunbuster is arguably the second-most remembered piece of his among anime fandom – really, nothing’s going to top Dragon Half, is it? But I love the Gunbuster soundtrack; it is a beautiful score, and all the more impressive for the way it follows the direction of the show itself. Tanaka has said in interviews that when he was first approached, he was only given the plot for the first two episodes, so by episode three we find him desperately pivoting from what he thought was a parody to something far more serious.

He would, of course, be back for the sequel to Gunbuster, Diebuster many years later, so it can’t have bothered him that much. But this is probably a good time to mention that there is a man called Pianeet, whose real name, I think is Yui Morishita, who recorded an absolutely beautiful piano sonata based on the music of Gunbuster back in 2011; click above to hear it in all its glory. Pianeet’s rendition of the Gunbuster score demonstrates wonderfully just how well put-together it is, integrating bombastic, propagandistic marches, classical pastiches, and movie-quality incidental music to make a truly moving whole.

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