This is the four minutes that bought a company its future. Before Gainax was Gainax, it was a pack of Daicon fanboys with a proof-of-concept reel, and this 1985 pilot is the pitch that convinced Bandai to hand a bunch of unproven kids a feature film budget. Watch it as a document: every rivet of that alternate-Earth hardware, every deliberately un-heroic bit of retro-futurist design, is Yamaga and company arguing that anime could be about the unglamorous labor of getting a rocket off the ground. The animation is denser than it has any right to be for something made to impress executives in a room. Two years later Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise arrived and flopped, then quietly became untouchable. This is the receipt. Four minutes, and you can see the whole studio deciding what it wants to be.

A short science fiction pilot film made in 1985 for Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise, the feature film released two years later. As a single special, it served as an early preview of that movie project.