Things I love: Gundam
I like big robots and I cannot lie
Last May, I wrote about how the Gundam franchise came to America for our Ani-May month. In that article, I mentioned that I was doing a watch of the main Gundam timeline. During the original airing of Gundam Wing and some other series that followed in the US, my brother and I were both into the franchise. But as I moved onto college I drifted away from it, not having friends into anime or Cartoon Network on campus TV. But now I am fully back to being a fan of the franchise and it has been a source of joy for me in the last few years.
Two things brought me back: My brother got me a model kit of one of the jaegers (big robots) from Pacific Rim for Christmas 2019. The pandemic gave me time to actually take the time to build it. The link here is that the kit was a ‘gunpla’ style kit. Gunpla (a portmanteau of Gundam and plastic) is one of the principal reasons the Gundam franchise has stuck around since its inception in 1979. The kits are as ingenious as Legos, but from the opposite direction. While one of the great things about Lego is that they are a whole system of interlocking plastic pieces that can be combined to make new things, gunpla kits are all highly specialized pieces that are typically made for the specific kit you are building, though there are definitely repeated design elements and techniques across the kits. Also similar to Lego, it’s a great way for me to try and slow down my brain, which is always moving at 100mph, and focus on something that is tactile and requires I pay attention to the things directly in front of me.
Gunpla also don’t require glue or any tools to put together other than a pair of ‘nippers’ to cut the plastic parts off of the plastic mold frame, and the plastic is molded in different colors, and they typically include some stickers. From there, you can paint or use marker to add detail, change the color scheme, or an endless number of customizations. One other thing I like about gunpla is that there’s a great range of kits in both price and complexity, which adds to the sense of growing with the hobby as you get more into the experience. Pictured below is a kit I recently put together of the classic original Gundam design, but done with an “American” color scheme and stickers, because why not. Not bad for $10 in the 2020s, even if it’s only 5 inches tall.
The other thing was a sense of nostalgia. The first thing I revisited was Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team, which is a ground-level side story set during the events of the original series. It’s one of the most grounded entries in the franchise, and one of my favorite depictions of how the idea of war sours while fighting it. Largely set in the jungles of Southeast Asia, it is definitely heavily influenced by the Vietnam War and its depiction in other films. I didn’t really connect to those stories until more recently, but this particular 12 episode series stuck with me from when I first saw it in 2001 on Cartoon Network. I had always intended to pick it up on disc and revisit, but a spontaneous search showed that it (and a bunch of other Gundam shows) were streaming on services I had. The 08th MS Team is on Hulu, and I do recommend it highly.
I am still only feet deep in anime, but since the summer of 2001, I have watched eight series and seven movies, most of which are set in the franchise’s main timeline. Trying too explain all of that would be a whole series of articles, but the short version is that about half of the Gundam material available in America takes place in the Universal Century timeline of the original 1979 show, and the other half is set in a series of alternate universes, most of which use similar robot designs and themes, but tell their own self-contained stories.
Of the anime I have seen, I think Gundam (along with Dragonball, the works of Studio Ghibli, Demon Slayer and a few other super popular shows) is highly accessible to Western audiences. Most of the stories are focused on their own sense of ‘realism’ which limits the kinds of anime tropes and cartooning that sometimes go over my head. It’s not that those things are bad, but Gundam rarely breaks the fourth wall or dips too deeply into comedy. So I think that’s one reason why I’ve been able to sink so deeply into it with relative ease.
One other thing I love about the series is its worldview. Series creator Yoshiyuki Tomino seems to believe that the next generation is the best hope for humanity to improve the world and stop damaging the planet, and that belief continues across subsequent shows from 1979 onward. There is a mix of reasons why Gundam stories tend to center on teenage boys (and a teenage girl is the lead for the first time in the new series, The Witch from Mercury), which have to do with corporate sponsors, model kit sales, etc. but built into the franchise is a sense of hope in a world where suffering and injustice are perpetrated or ignored by the ruling class. The world is dark, and not every moment has that optimism (its protagonists are often broken by their experience), but it is always reaffirmed that the world is worth fighting for. And given everything that’s happened over the last few years, it is nice to have that reaffirmed.
Feel free to reach out if you want specific recommendations or have some for me!