The main character of Diebuster, contrary to what people believe, is neither Lal'C nor Nono, but Space itself. The multiplicity of worlds that the character's inhabit, and the otherworldly denizens within that overwhelms the concept of human and what it means to create a civilization in an excess of empty matter.
It also happens to be a story about a friendship between two girls, but that's another thing. It's kind of the Gainax ability (at least with Tsurumaki and Anno) to make the small struggles of everyday humans reflect the state of the whole cosmos. But that's one of the secret great things about animation, that the worlds crafted are wholly subjective, and thus they HAVE to reflect psychology because its our definition of what makes a world rather than an actual world. Old cinema theorists used to talk about how the objective eye of the camera was aimed at capturing the beauty and naturalism of the world, and maybe a film like Boyhood is our greatest testament to that in current times, but Animation is wholly opposed to that sensibility, and with CGI being so prevalent, movies are turning away from that as well to an idea of pure image (whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is the subject of tons of conversations between various philosophers of media and postmodernity. Can we still live while we continuously reject the Real at every instance? Or maybe its an inherent human thing to warp, restructure and be contrary to Nature).
The bad thing is that no one has ever really conceived of what it means to step outside the cinematic notions of time and space and to have a work of art that lies wholly beyond the space in front of the camera. The greatest animators are harvesters of this sensibility, from Miyazaki to Satoshi Kon to the Gainaxers and the Shaft personnel. Makoto Shinkai even, who, despite being called a realistic artist, edges what is Real to an extreme that somehow pushes past it. Madoka Movie 3 is the farthest I have seen someone go in this attempt at pure Animation, at least outside of strange non-mainstream experimental film stuff. Sakuga, the art of creating motion through Key Animation, is a skill practiced solely at harnessing this sensibility. TTGL will add fury to the lines and thickness to the brush so as to create faces that burn out of the screen and actions that explode into the frame, while keeping all other aspects pretty streamlined.
But while all that is theory, we're here to talk about Tsurumaki and his craft. Sarah Horrocks, a comic book reviewer, talked about how Tsutomu Nihei's greatest strength in Knights of Sidonia was his ability to capture the pure silence of Space, changing his sensibility wholly from his previous cyber-bio-punk actiony works. Tsurumaki knows all of that, the gracefulness of it that has been reflected in great films like 2001 A Space Odyssey and Interstellar. But he also has a plethora of tricks up his sleeve to vary the tempo with high octane space battles, using all of the old missile circus style explosions and tricks. He uses CGI when necessary, and not it an alienating way, but to depict mass and weight. He can draw close quartered distilled emotional spaces like those out of Evangelion no problem as well. From small inhabited spaces to large encroaching Space itself. And he also has a kind of Pinky-Film exploitative sexual sensibility that pushes normal fanservice into a kind of high level pop-camp-aesthetic. This is not the degraded erotic fanservice that punctuates so many shoddily made harem shows, but the type of thing that emphasizes curvature and body-motion and sometimes straight out bare-faced Faster Pussycat Kill Kill Kill clothes-tearing brazen stuff that reflects an underground sensibility that so characterizes Gainax's subversive values in every way (then again Anno came up with all that in the original Gunbuster, so this is just an evolution of that).
The thing is that the original Gunbuster was beautiful at moments, with its noir-space-opera purple shadows and it’s cynical war plot that sort of resembled Joe Halderman’s The Forever War except while trying to stick in all the anime stuff about Truth and Heart and all that. All of it though was really jarring with the melodrama and characterization that Anno hadn’t fine-tuned yet, until it would explode into the oppressive atmosphere of Evangelion. Diebuster really shoves it right out the window by being willing to take the blazing Shounen values all the way while also respecting character and atmosphere. It even pushes the science from the pop-science of time-dilation and all that new quantum physics that was becoming in-vogue at the era, to science that probably completely doesn’t make sense in any way but sounds completely out there. Episode 3 is more or less perfect. And Tsurumaki being a guy that doesn’t care too much about exposition, as compared to Gunbuster at least, at least makes it so that exposition is being carried out with visual stimulation, and uses visual storytelling for the most part.
But really Diebuster is about imbibing the world. It’s a vision the same way Blade Runner was a vision, or that Madoka was a vision, or that Akira was a vision. A large large larger than life vision that seems to want to destroy Reality in every way and shows us that if escapism was this all-encompassing, then it’s completely okay to stake your entire life in a small cramped up apartment making stuff like this one particle at a time over copious copious drawing boards. A work to show that really who the hell needs anything that Life has to offer when our Dreams are so gallant? And you’d pay your whole soul fending off cockroaches and dirty walls and meagre salaries and horrible real life shit just to capture that sort of thing for ephemeral seconds on screen.
