Gunbuster - The Movie DVD

Because Gainax originally intended to make Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise and break up, but Wings of Honnêamise consequently performed poorly, Gainax made Gunbuster to help recuperate the losses from Wings of Honnêamise. Taking into account the same work's bad reputation of simply being shown to anime fans, this work has works originally planned by Haruhiko Mikimoto, who worked on Super Dimension Fortress Macross and was popular for beautiful girl characters. The title appears to begin as a parody of the anime Aim for the Ace! and the film Top Gun, and is a homage to Shōwa era anime and tokusatsu. The plots of Aim for the Ace! and Top Gun would inspire the plot of Gunbuster.

This work starts out as a parody at the core, but later, the story has serious content, inspired by Joe Haldeman's science fiction novel The Forever War. The sixth and last episode is shot in black-and-white and has the last scene show minimal coloring. In the remastered version, that part is black-and-white. Regarding planning for the last part, Anno and Okada said, "If that is it, it is good".

The characters' names come from staff members and people Gainax was closely involved with. The protagonist Noriko Takaya is named after this work's art staff member Noriko Takaya. Koichiro Ohta is named after Toshio Okada's friend and manga artist Nao Minda's real name.