Weekly Anime Post 180

Finished The Fable which was breddy gud. I'm sad we didn't get to see the Christmas party - I'd have loved to get a bonus OVA of Youko and manager drinking together.

After watching the Daicon IV animation last week I got me aa hankerin' for some classic Gainax so I pulled out Gunbuster which still holds up - weird faces, Gainax bounces and all. It's only six normal-length episodes and it manages to tell an entire compelling story during that time, something most modern anime can't do.

The airliner from episode 1 is definitely inspired by the Fireflash from Thunderbirds, it's got basically the same design. The Excelion is clearly a star destroyer, too. Gainax's love of classic scifi is great to see.

Its also a really well-done depiction of the actual problems of relativistic space travel, like a traumatic event happening six months ago for most people, but only an hour ago for the main victim.

After watching Gunbuster I thought I'd strike whike the iron is hot and watched Diebuster which was... a show. It's nowhere near as good. The tone bounces around all over the place, things make way less sense, and the robots are less interesting. It makes a lot more sense when you remember that gainax was doing Gurren Lagann at the same time, it feels like that more than Gunbuster.

Watching Now and Then, Here and There. It's very weird starting out, and does that thing I hate when the bad guy is just insane and evil for no reason and it doesn't give you any reason why all the others follow him.

Also watched Vampire Hunter D which was standard 80s anime - lots of still frames with speed lines in lieu of actual action. Gonna watch Bloodlust later.