To celebrate the enormous variety that science fiction (both Western and Japanese) has to offer, a group of amateur animators came together to create 8mm anime shorts to present at a sci-fi convention known as DAICON. DAICON stands for "Osaka Convention," with "dai" being an alternate reading for the first character in "Osaka." Their first short, entitled DAICON III Opening Animation premiered at the 1981 convention, and its sequel, DAICON IV Opening Animation was shown at the 1983 convention.
Conventions like these are the root of otaku culture, these particular events actually pre-dating the term "otaku" itself. Popular anime titles often took inspiration from existing science fiction works found in other parts of the world (Mobile Suit Gundam for example was based on the 1951 novel Starship Troopers). In these videos, we are treated to seeing both Japanese and American science fiction titles placed side by side, particularly in DAICON IV.
The main character of the short is a young girl clad in a bunny costume, representing the energetic bishojo character type that has become a flagship icon for anime. Throughout the film, we see her wrestling giant robots from the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise, running past monsters from various tokusatsu films, and even wielding a lightsaber against Darth Vader from the Star Wars films. After facing against the monster from the Alien film series and a giant robot from the Transformers cartoon, she hops onto a flying sword and rides it through the sky like a surfboard. In a climactic moment, the earth is shattered by what is unmistakably a nuclear explosion, destroying a city in a storm of rubble and cherry blossoms, the national flower of Japan. Following the reshaping of the landscape, the spaceship DAICON (which is shaped like a daikon radish) fires a powerful "otaku" ray, reviving the trees and restoring peace to the earth.
The animators behind these works were none other than the founding members of Studio Gainax: Toshio Okada, Yasuhiro Takeda, Hideaki Anno, Hiroyuki Yamaga, and Takami Akai (among others), who were all college students in Osaka at the time. Using extremely high quality animation techniques that exceeded expectations for independent films, they created a visual spectacle that expresses their hope that the ideals behind science fiction will be what saves the planet.
The short film has inspired such an impressive legacy that it is commonly referenced in contemporary media. The Gainax anime FLCL pays homage to the sword-surfing bunny girl in its 5th episode, while the opening for the live-action drama Densha Otoko draws heavily on the original video, even using the same song by Electric Light Orchestra.
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