This one doesn't play like an anime, it plays like evidence. A single pilot reel from 1991, made to sell a Gainax feature that was supposed to follow Royal Space Force: Wings of Honneamise, and then Honneamise died at the box office, the Japanese asset bubble popped, and every wallet in Tokyo snapped shut at once. What's left is the pitch itself: the studio showing you what the movie would have looked like, with no second act coming, ever. You watch it the way you'd read a blueprint for a building nobody poured the foundation for, cataloguing every choice that was meant to convince a room full of executives. Fans keep calling it slept on because it is, and because the people who find it never stop wondering what the finished thing would have been. Twenty-some minutes of a future that got cancelled by economics.

Route 20: Galactic Airport is a 1991 science fiction special from Gainax, made as a pilot film for an anime series the studio intended as its follow-up to its first feature, Royal Space Force: Wings of Honneamise. The full series was never produced: Honneamise performed poorly in theaters, and after the Japanese asset price bubble burst, no backer would finance the project. The pilot's sequence is set to "The Crystal Ship" by The Doors. Yoshiyuki Sadamoto later drew a short manga titled Route 20 based on the original concept.