RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 1 sourcesBack at San Diego Comic-Con, Bandai Namco Filmworks unveiled the newest Gundam anime in the storied mecha franchise ( with a decidedly convoluted name ), Mobile Suit Gundam RG Xarx-Zero . With its announcement came the double whammy that it has a video game tie-in set a century after the events of the anime and that the show is being helmed by Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex director Kenji Kamiyama . TLDR : Gundam fans are eatin' good .
Although we're still a ways away from the Gundam anime's release, we've got plenty of info about the show to wet fans' appetites with regards to what this flavor of mecha has in store. For starters, its titular mech adheres to the anime rule of cool by sporting a tattered cloak. We love to see it.
Bandai Namco Filmworks didn't just flex the new Gundam anime's hype moments and aura—as the kids say. It also popped the lid on its story. Here's the show's official logline:
The three revelations delivered by the Autonomous Interstellar Object from another galaxy ushered in an age of unprecedented prosperity, allowing humanity to expand across the entire solar system. Gravity Control. FTL Communication. Cognitive Materialization. Yet less than ten years after its discovery, the Object that had delivered these three revelations suddenly ran rampant, spawning an aggressive, self-proliferating ecosystem. Humanity came to see this unknown ecosystem as the Apocalypse. For three months, humanity fought the Apocalypse to a standstill in orbit above Earth. Forced to abandon the planet, humanity marked that year as A.A. 1—the first year After Apocalypse. By A.A. 45, children born on the Moon and in space colonies have never known life without the Apocalypse. And on the lunar surface, a boy named Ray Azumi awakens—
io9 got a chance to speak to Kamiyama via email to talk about how he became the anime's director, his affinity for the series, and how it'll evolve the long-running franchise's core themes.
Kamiyama is no stranger to penning large-scale but intimate sci-fi worlds. Ask any anime fan off the street, and they'll tell you that Stand Alone Complex is up there not only as the best iteration of Masamune Shirow 's ahead-of-its-time cyberpunk manga , but it's also one of the best anime series, period. According to Kamiyama, the secret sauce of each of his works is a deeply lived-in world with compelling characters that draw fans in from one project to the next. For Kamiyama, this phenomenon doesn't just pertain to his own illustrious resume but to Gundam's mass appeal over the past 47 years. While being "the guy who directed Stand Alone Complex " comes with the hype that the new Gundam anime would carry over elements that worked for the former re-fashioned in a Mobile Suit Gundam shell, Kamiyama instead assembled RG Xarx-Zero out of the elements that Gundam has built up for nearly half a century.
While we've waxed poetic about now being as good a time as any to get into the original Mobile Suit Gundam , it, like One Piece , has an intimidating mountain of content to watch, made all the more complex by the existence of alternate timelines . Although the previous Gundam anime, GQuuuuuuX , required some Universal Century homework to make sense of it all, Kamiyama assures prospective viewers that RG Xarx-Zero is its own standalone series. Though it wouldn't hurt to have a glancing familiarity with the show's OG protagonist, Amuro Ray, and antagonist, Char Aznable .
"It has its own independent timeline. That said, the reason I deliberately gave the protagonist the name 'Ray' is that, even within a story set on a new timeline and in a new world, I wanted viewers to grasp intuitively— without any complicated explanation—that he is unmistakably the protagonist," Kamiyama said. "There’s also a character clad in red who appears, and I did that because I wanted viewers to intuitively understand what red signifies in the Gundam series."
Speaking of what signifies Gundam, the new series' name is the latest in a long line of Google searches asking how to pronounce its title. Given the tradition of mech and show titles seemingly being convoluted nonsense but actually surprisingly meaningful, we asked Kamiyama what RG Xarx-Zero 's (pronounced "Alex Zero") name signified.
"It carries the sense of starting all of the various settings from zero—of taking my own thinking about Gundam back to a zero base and rethinking it," he said. "On top of that, Xarx and Zero are two things that are one, and equal to each other—a bit of design you’ll come to understand as you watch the series.
Pinning down what Gundam represents also varies from person to person. Much to the chagrin of creator Yoshiyuki Tomino , the substance of the series' anti-war themes has played second fiddle to the spectacle of giant robots fighting. Like Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway: The Sorcery of Nymph Circe director Shūkō Murase , Kamiya also believes in the preservation of that core theme, while also harboring a desire to see how it can evolve in RG Xarx-Zero .
"I think the simplest theme running through the entire Gundam series is 'anti-war,' but the way we view war has changed with the times," he said. "I felt we needed to reexamine, in a contemporary light, why wars break out and what forms they take."
That being said, cool robot fights are as much a staple of the anime series as its prescient themes, and learning how each new Gundam series animates its hulking automatons through a mix of 2D and CGI animation never ceases to fascinate. When it comes to SOLA Animation and SUNRISE's methodology for reshaping how its titular Gundams move, Kamiyama says it came down to finessing CGI and dynamic camerawork to emulate that unmistakable hand-drawn, cel-animated feel that makes Gundam Gundam.
"Hand-drawn animation is, these days, produced and sustained largely by the motivation of a small number of animators, yet the timing and stylized exaggeration of movement that hand-drawing achieves still has a real po...
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