"These aren't gay enough!" - Hayley on Amuro's shorts.
"Glad Amuro's finally coming out of the closet." - Hayley on the Gundam's redebut.
"It's so cool how every fight with the Gundam is just a horror movie now."- Hayley, Mobile Suit Gundam Episode 33, "Farewell in Side Six".
This may be the only time in media history I'm okay with a remake.
Mobile Suit Gundam episode 15 Cucuruz Doan's Island is an infamous moment in the show's history. A horribly mismanaged production, mostly outsourced to a Korean studio led to an episode rife with some of the worst animation in the entire show, a man boldly declaring he knows "mobile suit martial arts" before throwing boulders and a woman who looks more like an exiled Buff Clan from Space Runaway Ideon the following year than a Mobile Suit Gundam character. Most releases of the show remove it entirely. If you watch the show on Crunchyroll, episode 14 (the almost as infamous boy band on hoverbikes ep) the next episode preview shows Cucuruz Doan's Island while the subtitles just talk about episode 16 instead. It's a long-running personal shame for everyone involved and character designer/animator Yoshikazu Yasu, when asked how to milk this franchise for nostalgia yet again, somehow convinced Namco Bandai to let him expand this 24 minute episode into 100 minutes.
Yoshikazu Yasu's manga Gundam: The Origin is a retelling of the original show with additional details added to the backstory and hefty retcons about what happens where and who is deployed to White Base when. Since this movie's his baby, it is set during The Origin. Does this mean there's actually three One Year Wars instead of the two I described during Thunderbolt? Nah, I think we can put all playpen wankery into The Origin and it fits pretty well. There's a direct to video miniseries from the early 2010s adapting chunks of the manga not covered in the original TV show, but we skipped over it because we didn't need even more nostalgia milking at the time. If you've seen the gifs of an extremely breedable Garma Zabi or Char playing basketball then you've really hit the high notes anyway.
All this is to say that Sleggar Law and the Core Booster are present in the movie. The latter means Sayla gets to do more than shout over the comms channels and the former means there's somebody enabling Kai Shiden's tomfoolery. It's a fun dynamic made all the sweeter by the time a goat beats the hell out of all three of them during the climax, complete with a ridiculous nod to Osamu Dezaki's dramatic shading first pioneered in the 1970s.
After something as emotionally sterile as Gundam Narrative, it's such a treat to see how Yoshikazu Yasu directs characters to move. We've had a couple of Yasu-less Tomino shows by this point and he tends to direct character animators differently to Yasu. Where Tomino pushes for humanity expressed through absurdity, Yasu expresses humanity through discomfort. The original show through to Char's Counterattack are laden with people shifting nervously, biting nails, awkwardly covering their disappointments and adjusting their uniforms. It's all back in full force here and gives us one final reminder why these characters have been so compelling for over 40 years. The same can be said for the surviving original voice actors. Tohru Furuya has since become the second-most cancelled man in Japan, but it really is incredibly how young he can still make Amuro sound when pushing 70 years old. It sounds nothing at all like what was doing with Ribbons and even that was 13 years prior to this movie's recording sessions!
Since we're skipping Gundam Hathaway until the trilogy is complete, this is the first real foray into current era Namco Bandai Filmworks fully pivoting to 3DCG mobile suit action. The direction is great, and given it's using The Origin as a base I can forgive the egregious panel lining and decals everywhere. We're in a strange world of reimagining a classic work's art so sure, let's replace everything with Master Grade ver.Katoki model kits for the action. Might as well get a bit weird with it.
I don't really need to talk about the plot and themes here, but I like almost every aspect of how the episode has been expanded. Doan's a good pilot not through mythical boulder-based martial arts but because he was a special forces officer. His old squad come back for revenge and he deals with most of them before the most fearsome are outwitted by Amuro. We both complained that the guy with the lizard tattoo feels a bit too extra for a Mobile Suit Gundam character. The fucked-up face and earrings? Sure, those are enough. The tattoo makes him feel a little too 90s Punk rather than the types of emaciated freaks who are loyal to the Principality of Zeon back in 1979/UC 0079.
I've complained before about how weird and gross it feels to talk about nostalgic Gundam projects. Is it really the good old days when we're returning to a war which wiped out half of all humanity? Still, expanding on one of the sillier and weirder moments in the original show may be the only allowable exception. We even ramp up the World War 2 commentary with M'Quve whipping out a Hitler quote as a joke.
We're so close to the end of this project and every retread of past material becomes that much more exhausting. They're more tolerable spaced out by years of development and release schedule, but when you see them side by side you can really appreciate when Gundam is able to justify its continued existence versus when it's begging for death. I sure hope we never have to revisit the One Year War after this.
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