Original interview from Monthly Newtype (May 2025), original text by Hisashi Maeda and Makoto Ishii; cover image: official character design sheets from the “Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX: -Beginning- MATERIALS” pamphlet by Yumi Ikeda.
My number one goal is to create an interesting and enjoyable work
What Director Tsurumaki wanted to do
— Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX is the first TV series directed by Director (Kazuya) Tsurumaki, so what was your approach in gathering the staff?
First of all, both the Director and I had already decided to ask Ikuto Yamashita-san for the mechanical design. As for the character design, when I asked the Director if he had anyone in mind, he immediately answered “I want Take-san”. We went with the first choices without any trouble. Previous to this work, there was this project called “Nihon Animator Mihonichi”[日本アニメ（ーター）見本市, Japan Anima(tor)’s Exhibition, 2014], where many different creators made a short animated movie each. In that project’s context, Director Tsurumaki made the short titled “I can Friday by day!”.
— It was re-released on YouTube just the other day, right?
Exactly. Take-san did the character design for that work too, and it’s a short I personally really like as well. The concept behind the “Nihon Animator Mihonichi” project was to have the creators make their animated shorts as freely as possible, exactly the way they liked and envisioned. So, once again, I had the confirmation that Director Tsurumaki really likes Take-san’s designs (laughs). For the rest of the staff, I basically picked the people who I knew could truly understand and realize what the Director wanted to do. As a result, a lot of them naturally turned out to be people who had already worked with him in previous occasions.
— What’s your personal understanding of Director Tsurumaki’s vision and intentions for this work?
Well… at the stage when he told me about Take-san, I figured the characters would take on a pop direction. Defining the scenery and backgrounds is largely up to the art director’s discretion, so I asked Hiroshi Kato-san, who always deeply understands Director Tsurumaki’s taste and intent. Rather than making something entirely new and unique, I believed this project should go for the “usual Tsurumaki imagery”. Last time I asked the Director to “create something exactly the way he wanted” the result was “I can Friday by day!”, after all. Even if it’s Gundam —so it slightly leaned into the “real” direction— I interpreted the director’s intent as going for that very pop and stylish kind of imagery.
— Sugitani-san, you temporarily worked under Sunrise[now Bandai Namco Filmworks] and were involved in the production of “Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn”. Did you intend to carry the “Gundam-ness” you felt back then over to this project?
Being involved in the production of a proper, legitimate Universal Century Gundam work like Unicorn, was really a great experience for me —it was like a dream coming true. Now, I want to make sure readers understand this clearly; my desire to “work on a Gundam series” was entirely fulfilled that time. So, for this new project, my original aspiration was to have Director Tsurumaki create something beyond my expectations, like anything I’ve seen before, that wouldn’t be bound to the same outline and framework of the past Gundam entries. While of course being approved by Sunrise, I wanted to create something with a totally new and fresh approach that only Director Tsurumaki could come up with, something that could be only made at Studio Khara. To put it bluntly, I believe that if another company were to make a Gundam series trying to incorporate elements from Evangelion in it, the chances of it being received poorly would be very high. On the other hand, I thought it might actually work if it were the very studio that created Eva attempting to put its unique elements into Gundam, in a way only they were capable of. In that sense, when we were planning the project, I remember telling Director Tsurumaki that “I wanted to create something that could be only made at Studio Khara”.
— Going back to the previous topic, what about the other members of the main staff, aside from Yamashita-san, Take-san and Kato-san?
In the initial phases, the first person I contacted was Hajime Ueda-san. Director Tsurumaki told me that before starting the new project, he wanted to have a talk with Ueda-san. I didn’t know about it, but it seems that the two of them had already discussed a project with a girl as the protagonist in the past. That was the first meeting with Ueda-san; then, during the second or third meeting, the Director already proposed his idea of a story set in a world where Zeon had won the One Year War, and the direction for the project was decided. After that, we invited Yoji Enokido-san to join as the scriptwriter.
— I’m starting to see how it came together now.
That was how the story came about, so now I guess it’s the visuals’ turn. With Yamashita-san as the main mechanical designer, I thought the mechanical animation designer and chief mechanical animation director couldn’t be anyone other than Sejoon Kim-san. For him too, “Nihon Animator Mihonichi” was the occasion where we first met. There, he did the mechanical animation direction for Yamashita-san’s short “Iconic Field”, then he worked again as the mecha animation director for “Shin Evangelion Movie:||”[シン・エヴァンゲリオン劇場版:||, EVANGELION:3.0+1.01 THRICE UPON A TIME, 2021], and besides, he’s been heavily involved in Gundam before. GQuuuuuuX’s mecha designer is Yamashita-san, and it’s a Gundam series, so there was no one more fitting than Kim-san. To be honest, I was really hoping for him to accept, or I would have been in big troubles (laughs).
— And what about the animation character design?
For the characters, it might have been audacious, but we held a competition aiming to find someone who would cover both the roles of animation character designer and chief animation director at once. Out of the people who took part in the competition, the Director selected Yumi Ikeda-san and Shie Kobori-san. These two were hired as douga staff at Studio Khara, and are what you’d call homegrown members of the studio. As someone who has worked with them since the days of production management, I was truly happy to be able to ask them to join this project. Actually, Director Tsurumaki has been looking over their drawings since their very first days as douga animators.
— What do you mean by that?
When douga staff are hired at Studio Khara, Director Tsurumaki is the one to first review their portfolios at the document screening stage, and he’s also responsible for the hiring exam. He oversaw the exams to promote douga staff to key animators as well. And even aside from all that, he’s basically responsible for the guidance and supervision of young animators at Studio Khara. Having gone through that process, these two were originally members who Director Tsurumaki had recognized for their talent —what you might call the “Tsurumaki children” (other members of GQuuuuuuX’s staff who joined the studio around the same time include Gen Asano, now working as the mechanical animation director, and episode director Touko Yatabe). It feels like the seeds Director Tsurumaki has been steadily and carefully sowing have finally started to sprout.
— There’s a real sense of continuity with the studio’s history.
Also, the CG for every episode is directed by Khara’s in-house member Takashi Suzuki-san, and the color design is made by Wish, who we always work together with. T2 studio is in charge of the compositing, and I believe the experience and know-how accumulated during Eva’s production are being put to excellent use.
— As the producer, what are your personal goals with this project, Sugitani-san?
I’ll be repeating the same things from earlier, but what I wanted the most was to see what would happen if the staff who worked on Eva made a Gundam series. Fortunately, I’ve been involved as a production manager and producer in both franchises, so seamlessly merging together the good elements I found in each of them was also one of my goals. This aspect was emphasized as the tagline for the work, wasn’t it? I hope this will also be an opportunity for those of the younger generation who don’t know “Mobile Suit Gundam” yet, to experience the franchise for the first time. But ultimately, my number one goal is to create an interesting and enjoyable work. I’m a huge, huge Gundam fan myself. That’s why I’d be incredibly happy if we managed to create a Gundam series that the viewers would find “interesting” too. And if it becomes an opportunity for more people to approach Eva as well, I’d be even more grateful. After all, both Gundam and Eva are extremely important works to me.
Original interview from Monthly Newtype (May 2025), original text by Hisashi Maeda and Makoto Ishii; cover image: official character design sheets from the “Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX: -Beginning- MATERIALS” pamphlet by Yumi Ikeda.
There are going to be some quite high tension developments, like a roller coaster
The characters are all going to take it to the limit
— How did you approach Machu, Nyaan and Shuji’s characters when writing the script?
Machu is sort of a textbook protagonist, so it went relatively smoothly with her. In the first episode, she’s introduced as a regular girl living her simple, daily life, and then, all of a sudden, she sneaks inside of a Mobile Suit. It might seem like she’s a bit reckless and eccentric… but in my interpretation, the most unique trait of Machu’s personality is that she doesn’t have prejudices.
— She doesn’t have prejudices?
Side 6 is basically a normal, everyday world, somewhat resembling present day Japan. But there’s an area inside the colony where immigrants —both legal and illegal— and refugees live, people who are relatively discriminated against within the colony. Even in a society with such a dark side, Machu doesn’t hold any prejudice towards the refugees and the illegal immigrants there. Whether that’s because she fundamentally lacks the concept of prejudice, or because she simply doesn’t want to acknowledge it, even I am not totally sure. If a normal girl were to come in contact with a smuggler of illegal Installer Keys like Nyaan, she’d probably report her to the police immediately. But not Machu, she’d just go ask for the “compensation for her broken smartphone” or something. This is to say, Machu basically considers Nyaan to be her equal. In this sense, inside that Side 6, she’s certainly a peculiar girl.
— I see.
It’s exactly because Machu sees Nyaan as her equal that the moment she notices the bruise on Nyaan’s face left by the military police, she feels so angry inside. She’s thinking, “Why is the police beating up a girl about the same age as me!?”. And then, she gets even angrier at Nyaan’s attitude of it being only natural that they’re being violent against someone like her. Machu’s inner anger reached its limit when the military police Mobile Suits started to arbitrarily destroy the buildings in the refugee settlements, with the excuse that “they’re illegal anyways”. It’s at that point that she decides to sneak in the Mobile Suit —it was a manifestation of all the anger she was bottling up deep inside herself. Actually, it’s very similar to the anger Amuro felt in the first episode of “Mobile Suit Gundam”[機動戦士ガンダム, 1979], when he saw Fraw Bow’s family getting bombed. That’s why I believe I was able to get Machu to step into the Mobile Suit in the proper, traditional way of a Gundam protagonist.
— So, she might not be hot-tempered, but in terms of sense of justice…
She has one. Perhaps, that sensation is something very closely linked to the abilities of Newtypes.
— What about Nyaan’s character?
Contrary to Machu, Nyaan was very difficult for me to handle. I couldn’t quite grasp the balance Director Tsurumaki wished for. It felt like a déjà vu… it was the same with “FLCL”’s [フリクリ, 2000] Mamimi. No matter how many times I asked the Director to explain that character to me, I couldn’t fully understand her. In the same way, I would make Nyaan feel somewhat like a refugee, then more like a smuggler… but each time, I’d get told there was “something not quite right” about her. In the end, we settled for a “shy illegal smuggler fearful of strangers”. Although, of course, there is a fully correct interpretation of her character still inside the Director’s mind.
— What about Shuji? I think he’s a pretty mysterious character…
As a scriptwriter, Shuji was a rather troublesome character. The Director told me he’s “a character who doesn’t talk much”… Well, thinking of it, characters who don’t speak much are always the Newtype-y ones (laughs)
— Writing the dialogues is a big part of the scriptwriter’s job, after all.
Right. Gundam as a series doesn’t have many characters with signature lines or catchphrases, but I thought it would be better for Shuji to have one; that’s when I came up with his “…that’s what the Gundam is saying” line. Basically, I interpreted the Director’s order that “he doesn’t talk much” as “he doesn’t express his own thoughts much”. So, using the “that’s what the Gundam is saying” line, it’s not Shuji who’s talking, but the Gundam. And Shuji comes across as a character who doesn’t speak all that much. And then of course, I also hoped that the line would stick with the viewers and catch on (laughs)
— Ahaha. You can tell some of the lines are pretty intentional. Like the smugglers’ “Hello, are you in a hurry?”.
Yes, yes. Reusing that passphrase from Mobile Suit Gundam’s Miharu was my idea —it was like a declaration of intent that “I’ll reference the First Gundam whenever I get the chance to”. I feel like references to the First have been made in so many works to the point of exhaustion, but that’s precisely why I’ll be intentionally making the most fanatic-level, exotic references I can (laughs).
— Talking about lines, the poetic ones that don’t make perfect logical sense, like [Machu’s]“I don’t really get it, but I sort of get it!”, feel really good.
Director Tsurumaki hates explaining things through dialogues, you know. To him, “It’s okay even if it’s not clear”; he’s inclined to think of dialogues with the premise that “that’s how real life conversations work to begin with”.
— But a script is something written rather logically, isn’t it? It must be hard…
It really is! (Wry smile). I can’t quite write like that unless I become a Newtype myself. Oh, but in that case, that would make me an Artificial Newtype (laughs)
— (Laughs). Well then, lastly, please tell us what to expect from the future developments of the story.
It’s going to be like a roller coaster, with some quite high tension developments, so keep your expectations high. Machu, Nyaan, Challia Bull, Shuji, Xavier… They’re all going to take it to the limit, so brace yourself for what lies ahead!
Original interview from Monthly Newtype (May 2025), original text by Hisashi Maeda and Makoto Ishii; cover image: official character design sheets from the “Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX: -Beginning- MATERIALS” pamphlet by Yumi Ikeda.
I thought that by depicting the feelings I’ve experienced under the Cold War, I could convey a unique atmosphere unlike that of any other Gundam before
A “Cold War” feeling in the Universal Century
— When talking about this work, you’ve often mentioned the genres of “Alternative” or “Fictional War Stories”, what do you think the appeal of these genres is?
Rather than the militaristic component, I’d say the interesting and thrilling part is the SF one. The first half of the theatrical pre-release version, “Beginning”, is an alternative version of the One Year War, so I mentioned the words “Alternative War Stories” before, but in terms of composition, I think it’s more like a “Historical What If”, a genre close to SF, about a world set in the aftermath of a rewritten history. An alternative history work I like is “Red Sun Black Cross” [レッドサン ブラッククロス, a board game and novel by Daisuke Sato]…
— The one by Sato Daisuke?
Yes, that one. Do you remember how it starts? As a whole, it’s an alternative history version of the Second World War, but it starts off depicting the beginning of the Fourth World War set in 1990. Right off the bat, it threw us into a world we knew nothing about —a world where, forget World War II, even World War III was already over. I keep coming back to its prologue, and it still excites me even to this day. I feel that this sense of excitement, at least for me personally, is the kind of thrill distinctive to SF.
— Talking about Sato Daisuke’s works, there’s “Nobunaga-den”, in which he ponders how Japan could have won the Second World War, and arrives at the conclusion that “Oda Nobunaga shouldn’t have died at the Honno-ji Temple”. In a sense, I felt that this idea was similar to GQuuuuuuX.
I just told you how, to me, GQuuuuuuX is a “Historical What If Science Fiction”, but originally, the idea of a story set in a world where “Zeon won the war” was more akin to the alternative history genre. I believe there are two main approaches to alternative history works; the first one is to make a historical change in the initial setting or premise of the story, and then develop what happens next like a simulation. The second one, is develop the events that lead up to the historical change, thinking in what way history would need to be altered to make that change possible in the future. In GQuuuuuuX’s case, it’s clearly the latter, and there’s this point often discussed among Gundam fans that “The Federation wasn’t able to defeat Zeon just thanks to the efforts of Amuro and the single Gundam unit alone”… Though, it’s mostly the military fanatics that bring this up… (laughs)
— Like bringing up the difference between a “tactical victory” and a “strategic victory”.
That’s why, to lead up to GQuuuuuuX’s future, there are some more military-oriented, realistic changes to the OYW, like for example “Zeon’s colony drop being successful and the Federation suddenly losing their headquarters in Jaburo”. But then I thought: “This is Gundam, after all” (laughs) “and since it’s Gundam, the existence of the Gundam itself has to be the trigger for the turning point in history”. That’s when I came up with the idea of “What if the pilot of the Gundam was Char instead?”. That’s the exact opposite of how (Hideaki) Anno, who wrote the script for the One Year War part, conceptualized it. I believe he wrote that script starting from his desire to write a version of the war in which Char pilots the Gundam and achieves great things. Though, ultimately, they’re still both like an alternative history work.
— The place where the protagonists, Machu and the otherslive, Izuma Colony, is an interesting setting. Starting from the name itself, it has a Japanese flavor to it, and overall it somewhat resembles modern day Japan.
There are two reasons why I decided on such a setting. The first one is that I wanted to use Japanese language. At the time of “Top wo Nerae 2!”[Gunbuster 2: Diebuster (トップをねらえ2！DIEBUSTER), 2004, it was prohibited to show (Japanese) characters and writings, and in terms of direction, it was a nightmare to work around it (wry smile). I thought that using written characters would have made it so much easier to express many different things. The other reason is, if you watch any Universal Century episode up until now, it’s clear that English is the official language. However, there are a few colonies, like Moon Moon or the Texas Colony for example, rooted in a special and distinctive culture of their own. So, I thought it would be fine if there was a colony whose customs were heavily influenced by Japanese ones. Side 6 from the first “Mobile Suit Gundam” was originally designed as a caricature of Japan. I thought it would be okay if there was a colony with many residents of Japanese origin.
— And what about the time setting?
To tell the truth, I wanted Machu and the others to be born after the end of the war; I thought they would give off a stronger impression of being a “new generation” that way. But in the end, things happened and we decided on UC 0085 as the time setting.
— I find that “I wanted Machu and the others to be born after the end of the war” really interesting. What are your thoughts and feelings on dealing with a post-war scenario?
Rather than a post-war, I’d say it’s a Cold War. When I was a kid, we were right in the mist of the Cold War; the US and the USSR never fought each other directly, but it felt like the next war could break out at any moment. There were novels or movies about the USSR army suddenly landing on our territory and turning Japan into a battlefield, and back then, it didn’t feel all that unrealistic. When we decided on UC 0085 as the time setting for GQuuuuuuX, a certain member of the staff pointed out that “You’re doing Gundam but you’re not writing about war?”. All the previous Gundam up until now have portrayed a war of some sort, be it a full-scale war between different powers, or a factional struggle within the military, almost like a civil war. So I thought that writing about a “Cold War” would have worked as well. I thought that by depicting the feelings I’ve experienced under the Cold War, I could convey a unique atmosphere unlike that of any other Gundam before.
— It’s true that, despite not being directly at war, there’s palpable tension between the two factions, and the atmosphere in the colony turns really tense just by the arrival of a battleship like the Sodon. It really gives the impression of a Cold War. Those under 40 today only became aware of the world after the Cold War was already over, so they don’t know what that atmosphere felt like.
That’s right. I think (Yoshiyuki) Tomino-san’s generation is the last to have known the experience of war throughout their childhood. My generation, of course, didn’t experience actual war, but we do understand the feelings of the Cold War. Naturally, conveying those sensations to the current, young generation is very difficult, but in today’s reality as well war has broken out in Ukraine, and conflicts and civil wars continue unabated in the Middle East. It’s not outside the realm of possibility for the current situation to escalate in a world-wide conflict. I believe that, to some extent, the prospect of a “future war” between nations has unfortunately become a reality among the young people of today. That’s something that hasn’t been felt for about 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, isn’t it?
— Indeed, I understand the feeling that the thread of terrorism has taken us back to the terror of the Cold War. I think a world where a space colony, while certainly not depriving the characters of their freedom, still somewhat feels like a claustrophobic place that’s tying them down, is reminiscent of your previous works…
Well, that’s the influence of what I felt like when I was young. I grew up in the middle of the rice fields in Niigata, and even though the horizon stretched out in all directions, it still somehow felt “narrow”. Of course, if I walked all the way past the mountain, I’d eventually reach Tokyo, but that wasn’t actually feasible, was it? I felt like I was trapped inside my small, familiar garden, and I wondered, “Am I going to spend my whole life in this place?”. I depicted that fear in “FLCL”[フリクリ, 2000], as well as in this work. It’s not like Machu thinks that “A space colony is too narrow, I hate it”, but she feels like “The world has to be much more vast, more free…”. She could, in principle, go to other nearby colonies, but in reality, she doesn’t. She lacks the freedom to say “whenever I want to go, I can do it in an instant!”; that’s especially true for children. I’m depicting the same things I myself felt in the past.
— So, that’s really a theme you want to focus on in the works you direct?
It’s rather because I want young people to watch my works. When I ponder what kind of feelings the youth of today would actually feel, I think it has to be something similar to the sense of confinement, or the fear and the anxiety about the future I too felt back then.
— Machu being bothered that the gravity inside a space colony isn’t real is too an extension of those feelings?
That in particular incorporates another slightly different thematic. Is the Red Gundam that Shuji pilots the real one? Are Newtypes and their abilities real to begin with? Is the alternative world of GQuuuuuuX itself real at all? This idea of whether something is “real or not” is present in many ways within the story, and I believe it might be another element especially interesting for the young viewers.
— What do you mean by that?
For example, thoughts like “I wanna become a mangaka” or “I wanna become a musician” always come together with doubts like “Is this talent actually real?” or “It works in class or at cultural festivals, but would it really work as a profession for the future?”, “Is it a real, genuine talent comparable to that of famous mangaka or artists that everyone knows, or does it only work among friends?”. In this sense, I feel like it’s a very valuable theme.
— From what you said today, I feel like what you’re trying to do is depicting a sensibility close to that of the 80s and 90s, in which anxieties about the world and adolescence are mixed together, in a new, modern way.
You’re right. Even if I were to research the feelings of today’s youth, I doubt I’d be able to properly portray them on screen… (laughs)
— From this perspective, I’m really looking forward to see how the three main characters, Machu, Nyaan and Shuji will be portrayed. Talking about young characters, there’s also the poor Xavier…
Xavier’s a character I like. I hope I was able to portray him in an interesting way. Please, look forward to it.
The second part of the Creators Talk on Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX -Beginning- premiered yesterday on the official Gundam Channel on YouTube, this time featuring Episode Director Daizen Komatsuda and Storyboard Artist Mahiro Maeda, as well as Director Kazuya Tsurumaki and Producer Yuki Sugitani, who already talked at length about the project in the first part.
This latter half of the interview focused directly on the team and the environment behind the project, as well as a more detailed look at the storyline. This is to say, this post will inevitably contain a few spoilers about the story and setting of GQuuuuuuX -Beginning-, so read at your own risk.
Much like last time, instead of translating the whole talk word by word, I picked out only some of the more interesting questions and answers, compiling a list of highlights from the interview, as I believe this format works best when translating spoken interviews as opposed to the usual written ones.
— Well then, the words “One Year War” that we so strictly withheld last time have finally been unveiled. […] Director, how do you feel about the public’s reactions, now that this trick you’ve kept secret until this very moment has finally been disclosed?
Tsurumaki: Well… I believe Gundam fans have something to say… to me, or to Studio Khara… “What the hell are you doing?”
Maeda: On X or something I’ve seen people writing “Anno’s clan”… I thought that was a fantastic expression, like, we’re a clan already.
Everyone laughs
Sugitani: I’ve also read a post saying Anno-san is Tsurumaki-san’s M.A.V.
Maeda: Well, that’s true (laughs)
Tsurumaki: Everyone’s saying “Anno this” or “Anno that”, but this idea of writing an alternative version of the One Year War… it wasn’t actually Anno who proposed it. We had him write the script, but it’s not really his fault. It’s… Khara’s fault, if anything.
— You mentioned this in the last interview already, but you said you didn’t expect your proposal to actually get accepted; you thought it would be rejected, but it unfortunately got the green light, right?
Tsurumaki: Yeah… of course I also wanted it to be accepted, but I really believed at least half of it would get turned down. So, I was surprised when they said it was all good.
— I really thought, “that madman, he really did it… he touched the taboo of all taboos…”.
Everyone laughs
— “This will definitely get him in the firing line”… this “Alternative One Year War”.
Tsurumaki: Yeah… well, in the past, during the Gainax era, there was “Cyber Comics” [An anthology comic specialized in robot anime published by Bandai. Gainax’s predecessor, General Products, was also involved in its editing], and inside this… how do I call it, otaku manga magazine maybe…? Well, inside that, there were a lot of bizarre Gundam stories that had nothing to do with it…
— Like side stories?
Tsurumaki: Hm, not exactly “side stories”… there was one featuring a ninja Gundam for example, or one with magical girls… They played around a lot with it. So, yeah, there was also a time when Gundam was written in such a way —not officially, of course, it was just an unofficial manga, but I sort of “grew up” with things like that. There’s also the game, Gihren no Yabou[ギレンの野望, Gihren’s Greed, a series of turn-based strategy video games], I’ve actually never played it myself, but I thought it would have been interesting to do something similar.
[…]
— Thinking about the One Year War in Gundam, there are some historically unshakable and firm points and events; did you ever ponder whether it was really okay to change or alter them?
Tsurumaki: Me personally, I read a lot of alternative versions of stories, so I do know and understand how to effectively set them up, but even so, for this project, I did worry about what the fans would think of the changes like, for example, Amuro not appearing even once. Though, I also understood that worrying too much about that wouldn’t be a good thing, so, in the end, I made it the way I wanted.
The discussion then delved into more specific details about the story; Director Tsurumaki explained how, in his vision, the Gundam itself was the very key that lead the Earth Federation to win the One Year War, and not Amuro, like some may think. Therefore, initially, his and Yoji Enokido’s plan was to make a 5-minutes-or-so introduction, showcasing the alternative OYW just until the moment Char gets his hands on the RX-78-2 Gundam, to then jump directly into Machu’s world, and gradually explain the alternative OYW through “documentaries-like flashbacks” throughout the course of the series. Since this initial plan didn’t line up well with the serial TV broadcast structure, it was Ikuto Yamashita who proposed the idea to make a whole, independent episode focused solely on the OYW. In the end, Hideaki Anno was appointed as the script-writer for that very introductory episode.
When asked if there was anything he finds particularly impressive about Anno’s work, Director Tsurumaki answered that the number of modifications (and how thorough and attentive they are) is truly remarkable —something he wouldn’t have been able to achieve by himself. Producer Sugitani then mentioned how well-written the dialogues are, as they really “feel like something written by Tomino himself”.
After a brief section where the two new interviewees revealed their favorite Gundam series and Mobile Suit, followed by yet another brief section where the staff answered a few questions Kajita gathered from the fans, to wrap things up, he asked everyone to leave a message for the viewers, starting with Maeda.
Maeda: I’ve always thought that Tsurumaki-san is an incredible person. We’ve always worked together on Shin Evangelion[シン・エヴァンゲリオン劇場版, Rebuild of Evangelion]; not on the TV series, but I’d always been looking at it from afar, noticing the parts he worked on and thinking “Ah…! this is Makky’s work!”
Tsurumaki: (laughs)
Maeda: Of course, Anno-san is an incredible person too, but I’ve always believed that, looking from afar, it’s thanks to the individuality and great qualities of all the people around him, like Tsurumaki-san‘s, that they were able to create such an amazing work. He really is his right-hand… his M.A.V., his buddy… though he may not like me saying this (laughs)
Tsurumaki &Sugitani: (laugh)
Maeda: I believe he created some amazing works, and he still is to this day; when I went to the US, anime fans over there were saying things like, “if I have to pick a favorite anime series, that’d be FLCL!” —the works he creates are just that incredible. And that [FLCL] was his first ever TV series, right? Having your first major work become that famous and popular is truly outstanding, so I’d be glad if you could support and enjoy this new project as well.
— […] Next, it’s Komatsuda-san’s turn.
Komatsuda: Evangelion has become the “main” title associated with Studio Khara, and it’s always talked about as the work by the genius director Anno-san… but, well, since Eva Ha[ヱヴァンゲリヲン新劇場版:破, Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance] I’ve been working on it as the assistant director; basically, there was Anno-san at the top, then Tsurumaki-san supporting him, and then me supporting him in turn, and Tsurumaki-san supervised a very substantial part of the work, like the storyboard —the blueprint of the animation; basically, he was the one who controlled and checked it, for example-
Maeda: -and [he managed] the communication between the staff as well.
Komatsuda: Yeah! So, an entire TV series directed by Tsurumaki-san is something I’d wholeheartedly want everyone to watch and appreciate. After all, I’m one of the “Tsurumaki children” within the industry; back at Gainax, I was one of his students. One of Tsurumaki-san’s amazing qualities is his ability to communicate, he’d often come up to me while I was at the desk to ask questions about my work. Whenever he has a doubt or a question, he immediately speaks up and asks it. This quality and nature he has to start conversations, being frank and honest with the people around him no matter whether they’re younger or older, asking about every doubt he has, makes him really approachable. So, when even someone like a key animator is struggling with something, like, say, having problems understanding the time-sheet, it just feels natural to go ask Tsurumaki-san. He’s the kind of person who can teach many different skills to many different people; he’s a mentor to everyone who’s ever worked under him, on his projects. This is something I really want people to appreciate this time as well.
— […] Now, Sugitani-san.
Sugitani: Well, I’m someone who stays outside of the actual production so, for me, it’s a bit different from what Komatsuda-san said, but even so, when we had to work on Evangelion for example, if I had doubts about something, like the content of a scene or some directorial decision, it was natural for me as well to just ask Tsurumaki-san. I too thought that Tsurumaki-san was simply amazing in that sense, and this time too I feel very grateful that we managed to make a show with him as the director. At times, I wonder why, given how strict and severe he is about the production, everyone seems to love him (laughs). He’s the type of person who never gives in to compromise… but people just naturally gather around him. Sometimes I think it’s really unfair (laughs)
— I think it’s really admirable and charming.
Sugitani: The Director alone cannot make an anime by himself, but many people gather around him with the will to assist and support him…
Tsurumaki: It’s something I’m truly grateful for. […] Well, Sugitani-kun… Producer Sugitani was behind the production desk managing the schedule for Shin Evangelion, and that was an extremely tricky and difficult task, so half the reason why I accepted this job was to pay the favor back. I’m really glad it worked out so well… well, I mean, it’s not over yet [talking about the production of the TV series], so I don’t really know how it’ll actually play out in the end (laughs), but at least, as of now it’s been a great success, and it’s an important achievement for Sugitani-kun as well, so I’m really glad.
I’m currently in the middle of my trip around Japan and I obviously couldn’t miss the chance to go watch the new Gundam —Studio Khara’s Gundam— movie, Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX -Beginning-, as it got released in the theaters here just a few weeks ago. I wasn’t planning on posting anything on the blog during these first three months of 2025, but listening to the Creators Talk featuring Director Kazuya Tsurumaki, Chief Mechanical Animation Director SeJoon Kim and Producer Yuki Sugitani, that premiered on Studio Khara’s official YouTube channel the evening of the 26th (right as I left the theater after my first rewatch of the movie), I couldn’t contain my excitement and started live-translating on Twitter some of the more interesting exchanges they had. Unsurprisingly, most of the exchanges ended up being very interesting, so I decided to collect all of the fragments I translated into a longer blogpost, and share it on here as well. As a result, the goal of this post isn’t to cover the entirety of the interview (like I usually do), but only a few excerpts that I personally found particularly valuable and noteworthy.
— I hear working on Gundam is too heavy a cross to bear for many, but what about you, did you accept promptly to direct this new project?
Tsurumaki: No. I also said this to Producer Sugitani at the time, but I wasn’t confident I liked Gundam enough to be able to direct it…
Sugitani: That’s true, and my answer was, “the fact that you’re worried about that to begin with means it’ll probably be okay, don’t you think?“
Everyone laughs
Sugitani: Yeah, rather than being a “prompt” decision, it took some time to get an answer back, and I sort of had to beg the Director to take on the role.
Tsurumaki: I love it, I really love Gundam, but there are so many people in the world who love Gundam, and compared to them, I couldn’t say I had the confidence to direct it.
[…]
Kim: What about you Sugitani-san, did you accept right away when you got the offer from Sunrise?
Sugitani: I said, “alright, I’m gonna talk about it with the company tomorrow”.
Everyone laughs
Sugitani: I was having a meal with Sunrise’s Ogata-san, and he asked, “would you be interested in making a Gundam with Tsurumaki-san?“, and I was like, “are you for real?“.
Everyone laughs
Sugitani: “If you’re serious about this, I’m going to talk to the others at the company right away“, and, well, he said he was serious about it so the next day I came up to the others and said I had to talk.
[…]
Sugitani: Since I joined Khara, I basically got assigned to the “Tsurumaki Unit”, and since about Eva Q [ヱヴァンゲリヲン新劇場版:Q, Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo, 2012] I’ve always worked together with him like this, so I thought, “with Tsurumaki-san [directing it], he’ll definitely show me something new that I can’t even begin to imagine“.
— […] personally, [GQuuuuuuX] is a Gundam project I’ve always wanted to see realized.
Tsurumaki: Oh, is that so?
— Yeah, really!
Tsurumaki: Well, at first I believed Sunrise would reject my proposal, and if they did I would have been fine with that and called it a day.
Everyone laughs
Tsurumaki: To be honest, since it was a pretty heavy burden after all, there was a part of me that hoped Sunrise would reject my proposal and the project would end there, like, “I’m sorry it turned out like this Sugitani-kun” and move on. But then they unfortunately said it was all good so…
— So, when you got their answer back, your reaction was something like, “what, really?!“?
Tsurumaki: It was more like, “are we really going to do this then…?”, and then I started to feel a bit scared, I thought the fans would think, “what the hell are you doing?“
[…]
— During the production, were there any points in particular you absolutely didn’t want to negotiate on, and wanted to insist on no matter what?
Sugitani: We really like Gundam, but we really love Evangelion too, right? When I first talked [about this project] to Tsurumaki-san, I asked him to make something only us could. And, well, this is a co-production between Bandai Namco Filmworks and Studio Khara, so we’re creating it as a project made by “the company that made Evangelion” together with “the company that made Gundam”. After Eva Q, there was a time when within Studio Khara we worked on a very intimate project, Nihon Animator Mihonichi[日本アニメ（ーター）見本市, Japan Anima(tor)’s Exhibition, 2014], where the plan was to create many 5-minutes anime short according to everyone’s likings and visions, and in the context of that project, there was one work directed by Yamashita Ikuto-san, Guuzou Sen’iki[偶像戦域, Iconic Field], right? Yamashita-san was in charge of the direction and the original plan for that short, while for the animation direction, we asked Gundam Unicorn’s [機動戦士ガンダムUC, Mobile Suit Gundam UC, 2010] Director [Kazuhiro] Furuhashi. We also had Kim-san for the mechanical animation direction, and for the character animation direction, we asked [Iwao] Teraoka-san, who had too previously worked on Gundam Unicorn as an animation director as well. So, basically, that time, Yamashita-san created something very “Eva-like” working with the Gundam team, while on the other hand, at the same time, again for the Nihon Animator Mihonichi project, Tsurumaki-san worked on I can Friday by day!, and the character designer for that short was Take-san, the same as this time. So, for this project [GQuuuuuuX], it’s like the staff members of those two shorts came together and merged.
— It sort of feels like their fate was decided during that project.
[…]
— What about you, Kim-san? Were there any aspects you wanted to insist on no matter what?
Kim: I really wanted to work together with Director Tsurumaki […]. My big brother is very into anime, and before I came to Japan, he said to me that if I wanted to study anime, I had to watch one show in particular: FLCL[フリクリ, 2000, Kazuya Tsurumaki is FLCL’s director TN].
Tsurumaki: (laughs)
— Oh, he really is a good brother.
Kim: And when the songs by The Pillows started playing… wow… I thought, “so anime can be like this, huh”. Thanks to that, I love FLCL and I really love music too, and I’d say I have a pretty good music sense as well […]. So, yeah, Director Tsurumaki is a person I’ve always really looked up to, so my focus for this project is to support him; if there’s something he wants to do, I want to help him achieve it… to the point I’m ready to die together with him. […] So, rather than a personal focus of mine, I wanted to support the director, helping this project fit into his vision.
[…]
— Okay then, what about you Director Tsurumaki? What points you did you want to absolutely insist on no matter what?
Tsurumaki: Well… directing… planning a new Gundam project necessarily involves planning new Gunpla models as well —they’re synonyms. It’s not like I’m personally into building Gunpla all that much, but I do understand they’re a huge, important part of the franchise, so I wanted the new Gunpla models to be fascinating and attractive. I told Yamashita Ikuto-san that I didn’t want him to be overly influenced by the other Gundams’ designs, to the point the new design line-up wouldn’t feel “Yamashita-like” anymore; I wanted a Gunpla like nothing I’d ever seen before.
— I’m sure everyone who drew fan-arts had a pretty hard time wrapping their heads around how to move and draw this thing [the GQuuuuuuuX] (laughs)
[…]
— Sugitani-san mentioned this earlier, but there’s this fan-service-like element where the world [of GQuuuuuuX] feels like it’s linked to Evangelion, right?
Sugitani: Well, that’s probably just because the director really likes that kind of atmosphere I think…
Tsurumaki: Yeah, exactly! (laughs). It practically feels like they share the same setting and world, but it’s actually absolutely nothing like that. It’s really just fan-service —or rather, since it’s a production by Studio Khara, I thought I could have had some fun with it. There are some aspects of Gundam that feel pretty stiff and strict, like the pre-determined, “official” setting for instance… but well, since Studio Khara is the one producing it, I thought it was fine if I played around with that a bit.
[…]
— Kim-san, earlier you talked about the troubles you had working with the complex designs and materials created by Yamashita-san, but were there any points in particular you had specific difficulties with?
Kim: This time, we’re using an hybrid approach where both 3D and hand-drawn animation are mixed and blended together —there’s no clear separation between the two. Considering a few consecutive cuts for example, cut #1 and #2 might be 3D, cut #3 might be hand-drawn, and then cut #4 might be 3D again. So, we had to make sure it all felt as natural as possible. 3D animation is very efficient, but we were worried that if, when watching consecutive cuts, the distinction between the two techniques was too clear and noticeable, it would end up looking like a mess in the eyes of the viewers. I believe it’s still somewhat possible to vaguely distinguish between 3D and hand-drawn, but we wanted to make it so that the contrast between the two was as subtle as possibile. In order to achieve that, we had various discussions with the 3D team to make sure the shading looked like that of a drawing. This was, at first, one of the more critical aspects I was worried about and paid particular attention to.
[…]
Kim: This is something I think about all the time, but I really believe the emotions and love you feel while drawing are always reflected onto the paper, isn’t that so? And I believe that this time, the passion and love for this project from the many people of the various departments is really showing.
— That’s truly fascinating. After all, working with this hybrid approach as you explained, there really is a meaning behind the choice of not going full-CG and instead including hand-drawn animation as well. There really is a meaning in using hand-drawn animation, right?
Sugitani: The director expressed this intention as well. Like, “this cut will look better in 3D, this one is more suited for hand-drawn”; he decided on when to use either of the techniques. Like with the poses, for example…
Tsurumaki: …and the shooting scenes as well; there’s this cut where the Police Zaku raises the machine gun and shots, and animation-wise, it’s a bit dishonest. If we used 3D, it couldn’t lie —it would have been a more stiff and truthful movement, but with hand-drawn animation, we could lie a bit, making it so that its shoulders would somehow enter inside its torso. I thought it would have looked cooler that way, so I asked for that cut to be hand-drawn. Like in this case, there are ideed cuts better suited for hand-drawn animation, and others where 3D might be more appropriate instead, and I hope I made the right choices.
— Animation-wise is a very interesting technique, choosing which of the two to use for every cut.
Sugitani: It has that [Yoshikazu] Yasuhiko-san feeling to it…
Tsurumaki: Yeah! Originally, in the first Gundam, Yasuhiko-san’s animation itself, especially looking at like the waist, the hands or the shoulders [of the mobile suits], has a pretty different form compared to the solidity and truthfulness of 3D. It’s something you just cannot replicate with 3D.
The interview concluded with the staff deeply thanking all of the fans for the huge success of the movie, explaining how all the support they’re receiving is the fuel that enables them to work harder. Please look forward to the release of the TV series, and enjoy the unique experience of the theater as many times as you need to catch all the details, even the smaller ones!
Original interview from Gundam Info published on June 25th 2021, titled: “Exclusive long interview!『Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway’s Flash』director Shuko Murase on the ‘broken’ Hathaway and the ‘indecipherable’ Gigi“, original interviewer: Ryota Fujitsu; genga from the official Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway’s Flash Twitter account.
— I believe that adapting the 3-volume novel written by Director Yoshiyuki Tomino into a movie trilogy calls for a lot of ingenuity and intuition. In the case of “Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway’s Flash” Part 1, the opening features the sound of a ticking clock, and the film ends with a scene where the clock left behind by the protagonist, Hathaway, is in Gigi’s hands, creating the impression that “the time that had stopped started to move again”.
Actually, the sound of the ticking clock at the beginning was an idea of (Koji) Kasamatsu-san [the movie’s sound director]. To begin with, the clock that Hathaway buys was introduced as a prop to remind Gigi of him as the two eventually drift apart. After learning about this idea, Kasamatsu-san decided to add the ticking clock sound in the opening. When I asked him if that [“creating the impression that the time that had stopped started to move again” t.n.] was his intention with the addition, he confirmed it. Kasamatsu-san wondered if he might have gone a bit overboard with it, but since it was such a great idea, I decided to use it as it was.
— So the cohesive feel of the addition was the result of that kind of exchange. By the way, had you alreadyread the novel, Director Murase?
I read it for the first time after taking on the role of director. Short after the novel was released, I started working on Mobile Suit Gundam F91[March 1991, Murase worked on the movie as an animation director and key animator] so I was aware of its existence, but I did’t read it at the time.
— What were your thoughts after reading the novel from the director’s perspective?
(Reading through the novel) I could clearly picture the scenes. It felt as if it was written like a storyboard. Though, of course, the characters’ emotions and thoughts were much more detailed. There were parts where I actually felt that Director Tomino himself had written it with the same mindset he had when writing TV series. For example, early on, characters with names are introduced, but then they never appear again. I think that was probably the result of trying out many different characters and keeping only the ones that seemed interesting or had potential. I intend to follow along with that result in the movies, without changing the story too much. I want to make it clear that characters like Mihessia and Hundley Yeoksam were deliberately shown on camera in the first part, but their relevance doesn’t go much beyond that.
— Talking about the movie, the Davao air raid sequence around the midpoint, spanning from midnight to dawn, was truly impressive in many ways. For instance, in terms of the mecha direction, I was impressed by how many shots featured interactions between mobile suits and humans.
For the consecutive battle scenes about halfway through the movie, I explained to the mecha animators that I didn’t want them to depict the mobile suits, but rather to portray the phenomenon of their presence. The mobile suits themselves weren’t the focus of the sequence; instead, the real focus was on the people in the foreground and the reactions happening around them. The presence of mobile suits, which are far bigger in size than humans, involves things like trees being eradicated and falling to the ground, strong wind passing through… That was the kind of phenomenon I wanted to depict. I feel like we were able to somehow bring that out on screen.
― Did you place the emphasis there because you thought that you needed to go that far in order to make a mobile suit battle scene interesting?
No, it was because that’s how it’s written in the novel itself. The scene of the Gustav Karl landing on the rooftop of a building and then sliding off from there was also staged and arranged just as it was in the novel, and even the fireworks-like sparks flying around when mobile suits clash into one another and beam particles scattering around and damaging the surroundings are all portrayed exactly according to the novel. The previous works up until now hadn’t been able to bring all that to life, so I thought that if we adapted the novel faithfully, it would surely be interesting. After writing Hathaway’s Flash, Director Tomino went on to direct F91, and a similar scene was featured there as well. Coincidentally, I was the one responsible for the animation in that scene. I tried to achieve the same result in F91 but it didn’t work out, so I wanted to make sure to get it right this time.
— Watching the movie, the way mobile suits like the Gustav Karl or the Messer were staged really gave them a “giant” feel, but personally, I thought the Penelope went beyond that and was portrayed almost like a “kaiju”.
That’s right. I wanted the Penelope to feel monstrous, something completely different from the other mobile suits. The way light flows and moves across the Minovsky Craft Unit of the machine was also influenced by the parts of kaiju that used to have a similar glowing effect when they moved. The novel also mentions the unique flying sound, but I thought it would be better if it left a lingering sensation after it flew away, as if it were moving by some mysterious force, so I opted for that chirping-like sound effect. For the Penelope, I intentionally created shots with poses that emphasized a bird-like image, such as the flight form, rather than the more conventional standing pose.
— On the topic of mobile suits’ advancement, the Gundam universe has a lot of setting constraints, what are your thoughts on that?
That is indeed a crucial point. The Gundam universe is so vast that even if you ask people who could be considered Gundam experts, each one of them would have a different individual tolerance for what is considered acceptable (laughs). That being said, if we don’t decide on some sort of foundation, those things will always be an inconclusive mess. Therefore, this time we decided to be very strict in regard to those aspects. For instance, the fact that communication isn’t possible under Minovsky particle dispersion is something we’ve strictly adhered to. The novel also includes a scene where Kenneth and Lane are unable to communicate, and we’ve made sure to follow that thoroughly. Fortunately, even with such strict adherence to the setting and constraints, there was no need to alter the story, so that was a relief.
— On the drama side, there’s a depiction of Hathaway, who, despite having to reunite with his comrades, finds himself unable to leave Gigi’s side. This development too follows the novel, but bringing it to the screen with a stronger emphasis really drives home the feeling that Hathaway is a character torn between “emotions” and “ideals”.
The sequence where Hathaway embraces Gigi while catching a glimpse of his comrade, Emerelda, is a bit chaotic in the novel. By condensing and rearranging it slightly, I believe the meaning of the scene comes across more clearly.
— In terms of adapting this work into a movie, how did you approach Hathaway’s characterization?
Why did Hathaway become Mafty? The novel does provide a reason, but I still find it somewhat unconvincing. Under the name of Mafty, Hathaway carries on Char’s ideal, but why would he embrace the ideology of an opponent he once fought against? The novel just skips over that part, doesn’t it? But I’m sure there must have been another layer to it. I believe that’s the key point of this work. That is the core of Hathaway’s character in the movie.
— You mean, there must have been a turning point that led Hathaway to become Mafty.
Exactly. On the surface, we’re staying faithful to the novel, but I’m aiming to clarify the meaning and motivations behind Hathaway’s actions, presenting them as part of a coherent guiding principle for his character. As for what exactly happened, we’re going to concretely portray it in the future; the first movie doesn’t touch on it, and even at the recording sessions I didn’t offer any explanations. The only thing I explained was that Hathaway is a “broken person”, someone who “thinks of himself as integral but is, in reality, broken”.
— On the other hand, what about the heroine, Gigi?
Gigi’s a character with a dual natureーshe has an incredibly pure side and yet is also able to perfectly adapt to the adult world. But because there are hardly any people like that, the novel was my only reference, which made it extremely challenging. On the other hand, there was also the difficulty that if I portrayed her exactly as she was in the novel, she would come across as an unpleasant woman. Gigi is a character archetype that often appears in Tomino’s works, but if I portrayed her exactly as she is, I felt like it would make people wonder “why is everyone so drawn to this girl?”. So, I made sure not to have her come across just as an unpleasant woman. I believe she’s probably the kind of person who can get away with saying something unpleasant, not just because she’s beautiful, but because she has a certain charm to her too. In that regard, her design helped out a lot.
— So Gigi was an even harder character than Hathaway.
That’s right. Director Tomino depicts these type of characters all the time, so it’s probably something he’s fond of. But for me, that’s not the case. However, I chose to portray her including all the sides of her character that I didn’t fully understand, and I believe that’s how the current balance was achieved. If I had made her into something I could fully understand, Gigi wouldn’t have been the person she is (laughs). Adding Ueda Reina-san’s acting to all that, I believe Gigi’s character came together with a great balance.
— Personally, I found the orange accents in Gigi’s eyes very impactful.
That was the work of (the character designer) Pablo Uchida-kun. It’s not something you’d typically think of, adding orange highlights like that. He said that it wouldn’t be really noticeable from a distance, but it definitely works well as an accent. It was very effective.
— In the movie, you used the scene where Kenneth rides a horse as a trigger to show the relationship between Quess and Hathaway as depicted in Char’s Counterattack. That scene was placed at the end of the Davao airstrike episode.
When I rewatched Char’s Counterattack in preparation for Hathaway’s Flash, I realized clearly that the moment when Quess rushes toward Char is the true starting point of Hathaway’s Flash. Perhaps one could say that a more concrete starting point would be when Hathaway killed a person on the battlefield, but that scene slightly differs between the movie and the novel versions [Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack — Beltorchika’s Children, 1988], and besides, I believe that was more of a “consequence” than a starting point. I believe that, after all, not being able to stop Quess there was the spark that started it all. For those who haven’t seen Char’s Counterattack, this scene might be confusing, but I felt it was a good addition, even just visually.
— This is mainly related to the visual aspect, but when Hathaway is recalling his memory of Quess, his face becomes a silhouette and you can’t see his expression. Watching your past works, it seems like you, Director Murase, have a sort of fixation on dark visuals. Could you share the intention behind that?
Perhaps it’s because many of my works tackle that kind of themes. And using dark images is relatively easier. Also, I personally like staging scenes with silhouettes.
— In this move too there are a few cuts where the ground crew is portrayed as silhouettes.
There are indeed. When thinking about the balance between the backgrounds and the characters drawings, usually, you would make the characters brighter and keep the backgrounds from standing out too much, but personally I like to make the characters almost fade in and the backgrounds look cleaner. And by staging the scenes with silhouettes, it allows the imagination to expand, so to speak…
— Using dark backgrounds allows for a more effective use of light too, right?
By using light, you can create a sense of depth, or make the viewer feel the space. If you light up everything, the sense of scale disappears. If you depict giant things like mobile suits as silhouettes and light up just one part of them, it properly conveys their dimension. Even a flat surface gains a sense of distance when light is cast only on certain areas. I made sure to pay close attention to those aspects in my direction. But I also understand the animators’ dissatisfaction when the screen is so dark that you can’t see their drawings and line-arts. In order to draw a clean silhouette, you need to make sure the interior is properly defined as well. The inner lines are still absolutely necessary. So, at first glance, they might look like silhouettes, but if you look closely, you can just barely make out the lines inside—I believe that’s the best balance. In that regard, there wasn’t much room for me to provide precise and detailed guidance this time, but I believe it turned out pretty good in the end.
— For the production of this movie, I’ve heard you created color keys [colored illustrations of important cuts from the storyboard to convey the director’s ideas to the various members of the staff] for some of the scenes. What was the purpose behind them?
In anime, even though there’s a general plan and vision, it’s common to create the materials separately—the backgrounds are handled by one team, and the animation by another—and in the end, it’s up to the photography team to pull everything together. As a result, each section can easily become frustrated if the final use of their work doesn’t align with what they envisioned during the process. I figured that if I gave a general sense of direction by providing exact instructions like “I want this scene to look like this, so put a shadow there”, I could solve this problem altogether.
— Earlier, you mentioned that there wasn’t enough time for you to provide guidance for the final visuals. How do you typically give guidance when you have the chance? Do you write notes, or do you use something like (Adobe) Photoshop to actually compose the screen?
I used to use Photoshop, but while working on Genocidal Organ[虐殺器官 (Gyakusatsu Kikan), 2017] I switched to (Adobe) After Effects. I usually show how I want things like perspectives, incident light, and subtle lighting effects to be handled.
— Do you end up handling the photography [combining materials such as background art, cels, and CG elements into a single piece of footage, while also adding elements like camera work and lighting effects; also referred to as “compositing”]yourself?
The final compositing is completely different. By adjusting the separately crafted materials during the photography phase, the level of completion of the images changes a lot. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do that this time, but I did manage it in key moments, such as the teaser with Hathaway sitting on the beach, the sequence we were talking about earlier where he recalls Quess, and the final shots of Hathaway walking on the ship’s deck. In previous projects, I even joked about working on them just for the fun on the final compositing (laughs). So, it’s actually a very important process that I want to focus on, but since it’s the last step, we often find ourselves racing against the schedule.
— When did you first realize how enjoyable and fun the photography process is?
I guess it was after I became a director… When I was working on Witch Hunter ROBIN[2002], it was a TV production so I didn’t have much leeway to make major adjustments, but when I directed the final episode, I managed to do some compositing arrangements (compiling materials together). From that time on, whenever I direct episodes, I often handle the compositing arrangement work as well. There were also times when I handled it for all the cuts.
— In this movie, there are many three-dimensional camera movements; did you find it difficult to convey certain ideas through traditional, hand-drawn 2D storyboards?
I did. We used video-storyboards (v-boards) this time, but v-boards themselves are 2D as well. I believe there are many scenes that might make viewers think they’re in 3D, but they’re actually 2D. Many things can be made to appear three-dimensional through camera work and the sliding of 2D materials. One good thing about v-boards in that I can convey the speed and timing of the camerawork myself, but tn the actual production process, we had no choice but to create paper storyboards at some point, and I thought there were various challenges in coordinating and connecting the two.
— Did you create the v-boards using some storyboarding software?
No, I used After Effects. I tried using specialized software too, but personally, I’m more familiar with After Effects so I prefer sticking with that.
— Looking back at Part 1, what do you think went especially well, Director Murase?
I’d say the overall balance. At first, I was concerned that it might drag on a bit. Even though I tried to cut and tighten it as much as possible, the first half still feels a little sluggish. However, when I look at the total picture, it didn’t feel that long, and with the battles scenes added in there was a good sense of pacing, so I was relieved. A big part of that is thanks to the sound team’s direction. Also, when it comes to “pauses” in the dialogues, I think the influence of Tomino-lines in the novel played a big role (laughs). Up until now, in dialogue scenes I would carefully structure the timing so that the characters make sure to listen to the others’ words before responding. But Tomino-san’s style is more like a rapid-fire back-and-forth (laughs). Keeping that in mind, I didn’t focus on my usual timing this time. There are very few pauses this way, but that might have helped making the dialogues feel more connected. Though, I’m sure it must have been somewhat uncomfortable for Director Tomino to have his own lines directed by someone else (laughs).
— The second part seems like it will have even more intense battle scenes compared to the first part…
When depicting battle scenes on a brighter screen, things that we could previously conceal in the darkness can no longer be hidden. The challenge lies in how to elevate those elements. As for Part 1, it may have ultimately been a technical blessing that the battles were set at night.
Original interview from Febri, published in two parts, Part 1 on June 18th 2021 and Part 2 on June 21ts 2021, original interviewer: Itsuki Mori; genga by Shuko Murase.
Part ①
The director of “Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway’s Flash”, who also worked on the anime movie adaptation of “Genocidal Organ” [虐殺器官 “Gyakusatsu Kikan”, 2017] and participated in “Mobile Suit Gundam Wing” [1995] and “Mobile Suit Gundam UC” [2010], is Shuko Murase. What was his approach in adapting Yoshiyuki Tomino’s novel into a movie? This interview will be presented in two parts.
~ Tomino-san told me not to ask him anything about the contents. ~
— Please, tell me the details of how you were appointed as the director.
It was a request from Sunrise animation producer Naohiro Ogata.
— “Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway’s Flash” (hereafter, “Hathaway’s Flash”), is a novel written by Yoshiyuki Tomino. What were your impressions when you heard this novel was going to be adapted into a movie?
Tomino-san wrote the Hathaway’s Flash novel without the intent of it being adapted into a movie by Sunrise. Then, times changed, and I think Sunrise spontaneously took the initiative to turn it into a movie.
— What was the concept behind this movie adaptation?
First, I went to greet Tomino-san since I was appointed as the director of the movie adaptation. At that time, he told me not to ask him anything about the contents (laughs), and from that moment on, I haven’t really asked him a single thing. However, when I met with him, he showed me two movies, saying “I want it to be like these”. They were live-action movies produced in Asia; the first one had two male and only one female leads, just like Hathaway’s Flash. At first, I earnestly tried to adjust the movie around that same nuance and style, but the setting and genre were so different it really didn’t fit well. So, I discussed with screenwriter (Yasuyuki) Muto-san and together we decided to change it back and make it align better with the contents of the novel.
~ The characters are reinterpreted in a Gundam-like style. ~
— This time, in addition to the design work by Pablo Uchida, color keys depicting important scenes from the storyboard were created. It’s a methodology that was never used in Gundam works before.
Regarding the color keys, I think Sunrise just didn’t actively make them. Even if we were to put together the ideas each section envisioned separately, the overall spatial lightning wouldn’t be unified, so we needed a single consolidated vision. Moreover, this time we had a genius designer by the name of Uchida-kun working with us, so we couldn’t not make use of his visual sense. However, there were still some difficulties in implementing this method on set, so I realized from now on we need to put in place a proper structure to accommodate for it.
— Uchida-san, Naoyuki Onda-san and Shigeki Kuhara-san were involved in the character design, and like Kenneth for example, the characters were substantially redesigned.
As for the characters, there’s a certain design style that’s typical of Gundam works, isn’t there? Haruhiko Mikimoto-san too, who designed the characters for the novel, had changed the taste between the novel and the game, so to some extent we reinterpreted the characters in a Gundam-like style. Hathaway’s about the same, whereas Kenneth was redesigned to fit the new visuals, and for Gigi, she’s in her teens in the novel but I found it difficult to portray her like that, so I raised her age a bit. I had Uchida-kun drawing the actual redesigns, I told him “you can bring out your own colors”. Including Onda-san’s animation design, I believe we’ve created well-balanced and realistic characters.
~ The base for the mechs is in CG, and only the necessary parts are hand-drawn. ~
— The mechs are made using CG, right?
We decided to use GC because of some physics-related issues. I’m an animator too, so I understood that, compared to the Unicorn Gundam, it would have been impossible to freely move around the Ξ (Xi) Gundam and the Penelope, both of which have over than double the amount of lines. Thus we decide to use CG as the base. We then proceeded by touching up solely where strictly necessary, and only hand-drawing over the parts we really wanted to. Towards the end of the production, there were also storyboards that were developed using CG, so in that sense it was a new way of making anime.
— It must have taken time to figure out how to make the CG models move.
Some of the designs for the CG models were delayed until almost the very last minute, so I regret that there wasn’t enough time to thoroughly finish the animations.
— That being said, the production was handled by Studio 1, the same one that worked on “Mobile Suit Gundam UC” and “Mobile Suit Gundam NT”, including first rate mechanical designers and animators by the likes of Hajime Katoki-san, Seiichi Nakatani-san and Nobuhiko Genma-san.
That’s right. But on the contrary, because so many people were involved, it took quite some time to adjust the boundaries of what ‘shouldn’t be done when it comes to the Gundam’ [Murase is likely talking about the Gundams’ design, which apparently raised some discussions among the staff]. There was a proposal to change the design from the novel, but Katoki-san put forward the idea to create a design that combined the one from the novel and the one from the games, so we decided to proceed in that direction.
— The three main cast members performed the recordings together, and I’ve heard they were given a thorough explanation of the story beforehand.
Until now, I had never done such things as explaining the story before the recordings. When working on adaptations, I usually just make slight adjustments to the image [of the character] the voice actors have already envisioned themselves. However, in the case of Hathaway’s Flash, its prequel “Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack” has different, parallel storylines between the movie and the novel versions, so when making this movie adaptation we had to make several choices and rearrangements. Therefore, I told Kensho Ono-san how I imagined Hathaway’s character to be in the movie. Initially, we were supposed to talk for just about 5 to 10 minutes, but before we knew it we had been talking for about an hour and a half (laughs). Gigi is also a character that’s hard to grasp, so I explained to Ueda Reina-san the direction I wanted for her character to take in the movie, and I did the same with Suwabe Junichi-san, who plays the role of Kenneth. I explained to each one of them the plan of action of their characters by going backwards, starting from future developments.
~ The contents can be enjoyed even by someone who’s watching Gundam for the first time. ~
— Having overcome such complex adjustments, you were able to complete the first episode of Hathaway’s Flash. What are your thought now that it’s finished?
Including the CG part and the hand-drawn part, there were delays in digitalizing the drawings, and there were many difficulties and problems on set. The compositing and editing processes have transitioned to digital, so I think it would all flow more smoothly if the environment could be unified a little more. As for the story, the first episode is nothing but the beginning of it all, so it’s still unknown how the relationships between the characters and the story will develop. Also, the most difficult part of adapting a novel into a movie is that I was constantly thinking about how the people who haven’t read the novel will perceive it. I wondered how to make it enjoyable also to the people who have never watched Gundam, or more importantly Char’s Counterattack, before. The original request was for the content to “appeal to both Gundam fans and those who have never experienced Gundam before”, so we aimed to appeal to both audiences.
— So, to make it enjoyable to those who have never watched any Gundam work before.
Therefore, I structured Hathaway’s Flash in way that those who first met Hathaway Noa in this movie would still be able to follow the story. Now I’m really interested to see how people like that will perceive this work.
Part ②
“Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway’s Flash” has finally been released [the movie was first released in Japanese theaters on June 11th 2021]. Differing from the previous iterations, this new Gundam is characterized by a more true-to-life look. In this second part of the interview with director Shuko Murase, we delve into the use of lighting and 3D for the visuals, as well as the support for Dolby Atmos for the audio and music.
~ Adapting the carefully detailed depictions that only novels can provide. ~
— What really impressed me upon watching the movie was the true-to-life and realistic use of light. The direction really emphasizes the ‘darkness’.
Rather than consciously deploying it for Gundam, many of the works I’ve been involved in before make use of dark scene compositions, so it’s more of a continuation of that. However, this time I thought it might have been bad to emphasize it too much, but following the opinion of mechanical designer (Nobuhiko) Genma-san, we made it darker. I was worried it was a bit too dark, but when I checked it out at the theater, contrary to what I thought I didn’t find it that hard to see, so I was relieved. This may have in part been due to the fact that it was produced to Dolby Cinema™ standards.
— And it also looked clearer in some scenes.
The darker parts are a bit brighter, or rather the range is wider. But I think we could still have improved the accuracy a bit.
— The three-dimensional visual direction of the battle scenes is a benefit of using 3DCG?
Although CG was used, the actual visible elements in the footage were made with analog methods. I believe the parts that look three-dimensional largely look so due to the camerawork that we tried to keep as dynamic as possible, as opposed to fixed and static angles. This doesn’t mean the camera is just rotating around in CG though. We did of course make use of CG models in the process, and we used 3D guides for the background, so I believe there is definitely some synergy in terms of the sense of speed and the perception of depth.
— The characters are also staged in a very subtle and careful way. Perhaps this is also part of the typical pace of “adapting a novel into a movie” you talked about earlier.
For me, it’s easier this way. I had in mind the very different pace at which TV shows are produced; the speed at with Tomino-san usually creates animation is so fast that it just flies by.
— It really is quick.
Instead, we adapted the carefully detailed depictions that only novels can provide.
~ This version of Gigi was created by Ueda-san’s performance. ~
— The very expressive Gigi Andalucia performance by Ueda Reina-san was also one of a kind.
Gigi is a girl that’s quite hard to understand even when reading the novel. Anyways, I really didn’t want to depict her as an unpleasant one. I wanted her to be that kind of girl that says unpleasant things but since she’s cute you end up forgiving her (laughs). So, if her design too wasn’t incredibly beautiful, it wouldn’t have worked. I’m really glad Pablo Uchida-kun was the one working on that. He’s also designed many costumes for her, and I believe that’s something beyond the scope of what a usual animator could create with just their own sense and intuition.
— I see.
Still, if I’m being honest, there were parts [of Gigi’s character] that I didn’t figure out until I heard Ueda-san’s voice. Actually, the type of voice I had in mind for Gigi was completely different to begin with.
— Is that so?
I thought her voice would sound slightly more cool, but during the auditions, Ueda-san’s acting was different from everyone else’s, and something inside me clicked. That’s when the image for Gigi’s character came into view. Her [= Ueda’s] sense of rhythm when acting created a version of Gigi that’s in some ways different from the novel’s.
~ The visuals are retro, but the sound was made in quite a modern way. ~
— With the introduction of Dolby Atmos audio, the sound department has also been renewed this time. The sound director is (Koji) Kasamatsu-san, right?
Kasamatsu-san was in charge of the sound effects for “∀ Gundam” and also had connection with this movie’s producer (Naohiro) Ogata, so he was appointed as the sound director.
— Including the sound of the beams, several changes were made this time.
I discussed with Kasamatsu-san on how there wasn’t really a necessity to remake every single sound effect. There already is a sound that’s typical of Gundam, and swapping it out for something completely different would be wrong. As a result, he was able to create new sounds while still respecting the identity of the past Gundam series, which I’m truly grateful for.
— How was it decided to implement the support for Dolby Atmos audio?
It was decided during production, and Kasamatsu-san too definitely wanted to do it if possible. Up until now I’ve been making things with support for standards like 5.1 surround, so I too am particular about the spatiality of sounds, the sense of ambience and things like that. Kasamatsu-san handled that aspect perfectly this time. In theaters that support Dolby Atmos audio, the sound can also come directly from above, so after watching the premiere, I had a talk with Watanabe Shinichiro-san, who helped with the storyboard, about how we’d like to use this effect again when directing for future productions.
— The soundtrack is composed by Sawano Hiroyuki-san. Was there anything you particularly asked for in regard to the soundtrack?
Sawano-san’s melodies are quite impactful, aren’t they? However, for this work my request was to slightly hold back in that regard. I consulted with Kasamatsu-san about how and where in the story to use the soundtrack that was submitted. There were actually more tracks with vocals other than the two that were used in the final product, but considering the overall balance, we asked for some adjustments such as removing the vocals.
— What are your impressions of Sawano-san’s soundtrack?
Watching through the movie, it’s noticeable how some common phrases are cleverly used throughout multiple tracks, and I think the overall balance is really good.
— I heard that Sawano-san himself wanted to create a soundtrack in line with the current trends.
That’s right. The things we did for the visuals of Hathaway’s Flash are retro, or rather, analog, but the sound, including sound effects and the soundtrack, was made in quite a modern way.
— Having now completed Episode 1, do you have a clear direction for Episodes 2 and 3?
I believe there still are some improvements in terms of production organization that we must address. Apparently, producer Ogata-san has also something to say, and it seems that Tomino-san got to know about it too.
— I see.
I’ve heard several different reactions (laughs)… but I think the overall structure as it stands now will be fine.
For quite some time now I’ve had in the back of my mind the idea of a bigger, more substantial project (by my standards, that is), involving both translation work and writing in some capacity. Something that I have access to a large (or perhaps the largest available) amount of content of, and I’m both passionate and decently knowledgable about, would be what possibly is one of the most ambitious entries in a massive and massively influential franchise: the 1988 movie Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack.
I’ve already covered one long interview with director Yoshiyuki Tomino about CCA last year, even before actually getting started with this blog altogether (being one of my earliest translation works when it comes to interviews, it’s definitely not perfect and I should find the time to review it from start to finish someday). My goal with this article is to make use of all the knowledge I put together around this movie, be it through countless rewatches or thorough research, to translate and comment on the various production materials and notes collected in the Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack Complete Collection of Official Records ―BEYOND THE TIME―, specifically the “Making of” chapter, that I hold dear on my Gundam themed shelf.
For the structure of this write-up, I followed the same order in which the production material is arranged in the original book, thus dividing this article in four main sections:Mechanical Design,Character Design, Other Designs and Background Art. Lastly, a short Notes section at the end features the content included in the last few pages of the chapter. The scope of this project is not a broader look at the production of Char’s Counterattack as a whole, but rather a narrower look into very specific parts and aspects of it.
(The production material showcased in this article is only part of what’s included in the book, and not all of it for obvious copyright reasons. However, the comments and notes, or at least the most relevant ones, have all been translated and are directly quoted or integrated in each corresponding section).
Mechanical Design
This section features various drafts of the mechanical design works, along with commentaries by their respective artists, starting with the early drafts by Mamoru Nagano, who was originally appointed as the main mecha designer for the movie, then moving to Yutaka Izubuchi, who took over after Nagano was taken off the project. Additional commentary on the development of the mecha design by producer Kenji Uchida and Sunrise Planning and Viscial Design team members Kouichi Inoue, Nobushiki Tsukada and Shigeru Horiguchi is also featured throughout this section.
My intent is to present all this as one organic sequence, just occasionally quoting the commentaries directly, and instead incorporating them within the reconstruction of the working process. To keep things in order, this section is divided in sub-sections, each dedicated to a specific artist and his respective designs. The reconstruction tries to follow a chronological order based on the information included in the Official RecordsCollection itself, as well as in some other sources that I’ve listed at the end of the article.
Mamoru Nagano
Hi-S Gundam (and the E.F.S.F. Mobile Suits)
In a similar fashion to the original book, this reconstruction starts off with the very first design for the then-called “Hi-S Gundam“, likely named so after the title of a concurrent (at the time) project, the 1987 novel Mobile Suit Gundam High-Streamer, by the initial main mecha designer, Mamoru Nagano.
Nagano‘s involvement with Gundam is a rather intricate one; he originally widely contributed to the designs for Mobile Suit Z Gundam, and then stepped down around the end of 1984, just a few months before the first half of Zeta started to broadcast, likely due to the mixed (internal) reactions his work got, considering the heavily commercial context of TV mecha design of the time. Possibly around the spring of 1985, producer Kenji Uchida reached out to Nagano again, with the intention to bring him back in the production to design the “main robot” for the second half of the show. Consequentially to his return on Zeta, director Yoshiyuki Tomino asked Nagano directly to work as the main mecha designer on Gundam again, this time for the “next entry”, that would later be titled Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ. And so, by November of 1985, Nagano was already working on the rough designs for the ZZ and the new Zeon Mobile Suits, but despite initially getting the green light from the sponsors, he was fired right before the production began in December of the same year. As a result, Nagano distanced himself from Sunrise and Gundam for some time; not too long though, since in late 1986, following a request by (again) Tomino himself, he was already working on the designs for Char’s Counterattack, as reported in the 1996 winter issue of comic Newtype (as further confirmation of this dating, we also have Nagano‘s signature on the design sheets, “Mamoru Nagano 86“). Char’s Counterattack (which was already the tentative title at the time, according to the Official Records Collection) being a movie and not a TV series like Zeta and ZZ were, was convincing enough of a factor for him to return on the franchise once again; as Tomino pointed out in his invitation, “this time around” Nagano supposedly would have had “fewer pressure form the outside” and could have created “the final Gundam as he envisioned and pleased”. Unfortunately, that ended up not being the case that time either, as Nagano was taken off CCA as well (at least as the mecha designer), and Yutaka Izubuchi took his place.
Despite the unfortunate turn of events, Nagano‘s initial design works for CCA are still included in this collection (which indeed reaffirms itself as “Complete“), and specifically this Hi-S Gundam didn’t make its appearance to the public until relatively recently.
Nagano intended to pour his very own design concept and vision into this design for the Hi-SGundam (and for all the other mobile suits as well). Even though it ultimately ended up not being used in CCA, Nagano says he partially brought this same design concept of his over to Five Star Stories, which he was simultaneously working on at the time. An example of this is the design of the GTM Hi Rhiannon, which reused some of the concepts present in this initial version of Hi-S. This sharing of the same concepts and vision between the two works wasn’t just one directional though, as the opposite is true as well; for example, the designs for the Hi-S and the Psycho Doga were in turn influenced by the designs that were supposed to be used for the Mortar Headds in Five Star Stories instead, but given the “importance of the title ‘Gundam’” he was well aware of at the time, Nagano decided to prioritize the mobile suits‘ designs over the ones for his “own personal work”.
On a more technical note, Nagano remarks that the three rough designs on the right (which are dated “87.27.1“, so supposedly after he made the initial Hi-S design) were not solely meant for the Hi-SGundam, but rather as a general concept for all the Federation‘s mobile suits, as he was asked to work on all of them. Those “unfinished concept designs” were in fact later used as the basis for the RGM-89 Jegan, which does indeed look reminiscent of them. “The designs are so vague” he adds, “because [at the time I was working on them] the visual presentation [of the movie] in terms of direction hadn’t been decided yet”. A majority of the times, it was director Tomino himself who asked Nagano directly what was it that he personally wanted to do with the designs (this is to say, Nagano wasn’t pressured with a predetermined vision or some specific requests for the designs at all), and the two of them gradually figured things out together. That was about the same working methodology they’ve adopted ever since Zeta, or perhaps it’s more correct to say Tomino adopted, as Nagano recalls, aside from some minor adjustments or questions on his designs like the RMS-099Rick Dias‘, he ultimately was the one who had the final word on them; director Tomino on the other hand, instead of focusing on the designs themselves, primarily thought of “how he would use them in the storyboards or the scenario”. And the same was true not only for the mechanical designs, but also for Yoshikazu Yasuhiko‘s character designs.
Mamoru Nagano’s Zeta Gundam
Talking about Zeta, Nagano notes how the mobile suit referred to as “Zeta Gundam” in the design sheets (which are dated December 1986) was his own version of the Z, later used in CCA as the basis for the RGZ-91 Re-GZ, and it’s supposedly also the version that is “the true Z Gundam” to director Tomino.
Nagano was also responsible for the initial designs of the Hi-S Gundam‘s cockpit and the Psycommu Helmets. Unfortunately, he doesn’t remember much if anything at all about the cockpit, as he stated he “doesn’t even remember having designed it in the first place”. What he does remember though, is designing the Psycommu Helmets to be “stupidly big”, so that it would have been clear at a glance that the pilot was a newtype. When he submitted this idea, director Tomino responded with a bitter smile and Nagano immediately understood it didn’t appeal to him at all, and felt somewhat frustrated about it.
Nightingale (and the Neo Zeon Mobile Suits)
The other main mobile suitNagano designed in the initial phases of CCA‘s pre-production is the Nightingale (or, the “Naitiengeaile“, as Nagano himself wrote on the design sheet), that initially shared its name with its counterpart in the 1988 Mobile Suit Gundam:Char’s Counterattack –Beltorchika’s Children novel, and later evolved into its final iteration for the movie, the Sazabi. It’s interesting (but also unsurprising to some degree) that the initial tentative names for the two main mobile suits for Amuro and Char were much more akin (if not straight up the same) to the ones that were featured in both the previous and subsequent novelization related to CCA instead. Or, to put it another way, it’s cool to see how for the novel versions, especially Beltorchika’s Children that perhaps could be seen as a more “true to Tomino‘s vision” rendition of CCA, it was decided to feature these original names for the mobile suits in some capacity.
Much like with the Hi-S Gundam, the design concept for the Nightingale influenced (and was influenced by) some designs in Five Star Stories. Specifically, Nagano says its concept was then used for the Boowray MH, which does look strikingly similar.
Going back to the context of Gundam, Nagano says the only instruction Tomino gave him was to create something new, that “diverged from the mobile suits made up until that point”, but at the same time that “unified the technological backing and confusing design lines of Zeta and ZZ“. In short, the overall idea for CCA‘s mechanical design was to create something that felt fresh and new but also coherent to the technological advancements shown in the previous Universal Century installments.
Mamoru Nagano’s KIllah Dooga and Psycho Doola
Aside from Char‘s Nightingale, Nagano also worked on the initial designs for two other NeoZeon mobile suits: the “Killah Dooga” and the “Psycho Doola“, later reworked (seemingly from scratch, as their lack ofresemblance is remarkable) as the AMS-119 Geara Doga and (possibly) the MSN-03-2 Psycho Doga (which makes its appearance only in the aforementioned novel version of CCA, Beltorchika’s Children) respectively. Despite not remembering much about these two designs at the time of the commentary, he recalls how the idea was to create consistent designs for Zeon, using a silhouette similar to the Dom‘s and Gelgoog‘s (which coincidentally are the mechs that to Nagano best express the essence of a mobile suit, together with the original Zaku) in order to create an immediate and high-level visual distinction to the “Gundam side of mobile suits“.
Some of the concepts from these two designs as well were then partially brought over to the Five Star Stories‘ MHs, and Nagano remarks how both of the Killah Dooga and the Psycho Doola were drawn in the exact same and raw way he originally envisioned in his mind.
Battleships (Ra Cailum & Rewloola) and others
Regarding the battleships for both the Earth Federation (the Ra Cailum on the left) and Neo Zeon (the Rewloola on the right), Nagano explains how at the time he initially wanted to remove “traditional battleship elements” like the gun turrets and the bridges from the designs, as he couldn’t imagine such a futuristic and advanced war technology still held back by antiquated concepts like those. However, since “by that way of thinking even the mobile suits‘ presence would ultimately seem odd”, he decided to stick with a design more consistent with the mechanical world of Gundam.
Additional poses for the Hi-S Gundam (left) and the Nightingale (right) by animation director Hidetoshi Omori
The last piece of production material related to Nagano‘s mechanical designs that’s included in the Collection, are these additional sheets with poses for the two main mobile suits drawn by animation director Hidetoshi Omori. As he remarks, these drawings have “fewer lines” compared to Nagano‘s design sheets, in order to make it easier for the animators to understand the models and animate them.
To bring to a close this section dedicated to Mamoru Nagano, the dates on his design sheets allow us to make a more educated and precise guess on when he started working on Char’s Counterattack and when he ultimately left the project. Most of the designs are dated simply with “86“, but some include a full date, or at least a month written next to the year. The earliest date seems to be December 1986 (“86 Dec.“), on the Zeta Gundam and the Killah Dooga designs. We know for a fact that ZZ‘s pre-production was in its final phases by November of 1986 (or at least, that the latest documented piece of production material, the main cast character setting for the final episodes by Hiroyuki Kitazume, is dated as late as November 19th), so it might be safe to assume the CCA‘s conceptual phase, in which Nagano‘s involvement as the main mecha designer is inscribed, started around December of that same year. It’s interesting that the design of Hi-S Gundam is dated a generic “86” (much like the Nightingale‘s), but the general concept designs for the E.F.S.F. mobile suits are instead attributed to a later date, January 27th 1987 (“87.27.1“). The same goes for the Ra Cailum, as two different designs are included in the collection, one dated a generic “86“, and the other dated a generic “87“. Many other designs are also dated “87“, like the Hi-S‘ cockpit’s, the Psycho Doola‘s and some more in-detail views of the Nightingale. The latest design, the Rewloola‘s, is dated as late as February of 1987 (“87 Feb.“). The last clue we have are the dates on the proposals re-designs for the main Gundam, drawn consequentially to Nagano’s departure from the project by various artists, the earliest one being April 8th 1987.
To sum everything up, we can assume that Char’s Counterattack‘s pre-production began somewhere between late November and early December of 1986, with Nagano (naturally) already on the team. It was then around late February or early March of 1987 that the decision was made to take him off the project, and just a few weeks later, various other designers and artists submitted their aforementioned redesigns for Amuro‘s “newGundam“.
Yutaka Izubuchi
νGundam
Following Mamoru Nagano‘s departure from the project, around early spring of 1987, many other artists were tasked with creating their own designs for the new main Gundam, setting up an actual “Design Proposal Competition” as the Collection labels it. Among the artists who participated in this “competition”, were animation director Hidetoshi Omori (from whose comment we get to know that from around this time director Tomino wanted the new Gundam to “have a cape” on its back), Sunrise Viscial Design team members Kouichi Inoue, Shigeru Horiguchi and Nobushiki Tsukada, Masahisa Suzuki, Kazunori Nakazawa and notably Hideaki Anno, whose design are the first ones to refer to the mobile suit not as “Hi-S Gundam” but as “N Gundam“. By this time, Yutaka Izubuchi was appointed to work on the designs for Neo Zeon-side mobile suits instead.
Various design proposals for the new Gundam, respectively from left to right by: Shigeru Horiguchi, Kouichi Inoue, Kazunori Nakazawa (the last two designs). The last drawing on the right is by Kouichi Inoue and it’s one of the tracings over Kunio Okawara and Yoshikazu Yasuhiko’s original drawings
According to Inoue, it was hard to effectively put together all the requests made by Tomino and the sponsors for the new Gundam‘s design; in order to make the overall design concept clearer, director Tomino asked the designers to “go back to the original Gundam” and to make “something simple” in direct opposition to the complicated and transformable designs from the latest (at the time) installments, like ZZ‘s. Inoue reveals also that one of their inspirations were the Formula One machines, and that they tried to incorporate into the Gundam‘s designs the multi-layered structure of components like the SuperTrapp mufflers. What ultimately helped the team to get closer and closer to the simplicity requested in the design concept though, was a much more straightforward process: tracing over Kunio Okawara‘s designs and Yoshikazu Yasuhiko‘s perspective drawing sheets of the original RX-78Gundam.
A detail that may prove particularly interesting for those enthusiasts who are especially into the technological evolution and progression of the U.C., is that during these early stages of the designs for this new Gundam, the psycho-frame was supposed to be installed all over its body, like in the later RX-0 Unicorn Gundam, instead of just around the cockpit.
Shigeru Horiguchi’s final design for the Fin Funnels
The initial idea to use a “plate-shaped funnel” to make up the cape director Tomino asked for, which Inoue adds was not meant to be a “typical cape that covered one’s whole back” but rather something asymmetrical, “hanged on only one of the shoulders”, was conceptualized by the Viscial Design team. Reportedly, to convey their idea more intuitively to the producers and the director, instead of simply drawing a design sheet for it, the team used a 1/60 scale Gunpla and attached a cut-out cardboard panel on its back left side. That same plastic model was then shown directly to director Tomino by producer Uchida. Upon being approved, the task to refine such design for the Fin Funnels was handed over to Shigeru Horiguchi.
Horiguchi says he drew and redrew the funnels over and over several times, until he finally came up with an idea he was incredibly confident in: what he describes as the “bamboo-sushi-mat-like” funnels in the picture. He was so confident in fact, that on the final design sheets he showed director Tomino, carried away by his enthusiasm, he wrote unprofessional and self-admiring comments like “good!“, comments he refers to in the commentary as the “mistakes of one’s youth”, quoting Char‘s famous line from the original Mobile Suit Gundam. What surprised and pleased him the most though, was Tomino‘s immediate approval of the design.
Yutaka Izubuchi’s designs for the new Gundam: on the left a more rough study sketch and on the right a more refined design
When it comes to his design for the Proposal Competition (dated April 29th 1987), Izubuchi states he was very supportive of director Tomino‘s idea of returning to a simpler Gundam; the rough sketch on the left, he says, was likely a “study to integrate the overall simpler silhouette of the original Gundam into the new design”. His is also the very first design to have Amuro‘s logo printed on its left shoulder, albeit much more complex compared to the very minimal final version. As reported earlier, Izubuchi worked on the νGundam‘s design separately from the other artists and the Viscial Design team, this also explains why his designs are dated a few weeks later (some of the previously discussed designs are dated as early as April 6th). He knew how the other proposed designs looked like, but wasn’t in direct contact with any of the other artists, as producer Uchida acted as an intermediary for everything. Because the schedule was so tight, Izubuchi says he was kind of a “pinch hitter” for the project, and has been one since the time he was working as a “guest” mechanical designer on Aura Battler Dunbine. As another consequence of the pressing schedule, Izubuchi recalls that director Tomino didn’t provide many of his opinions or comments on the final νGundam design.
On a more technical note, as already partially described, some of the features in Izubuchi‘s final design were borrowed from the work of other artists, like the Fin Funnels “cape” concept ideated by the Viscial Design team, and the piece of armor that protects the ankle that was “suggested to him by producer Uchida and originally came from one of MasahisaSuzuki‘s designs”. Another detail he really liked but likely comes from another artist’s idea, is the double V antenna on the νGundam‘s head that thus has four spikes instead of the classic two.
Re-GZ
The RGZ-91 Re-GZ, as mentioned earlier in Mamoru Nagano‘s section, is meant to be a variant of the Zeta Gundam, specifically, a mass-produced (and lower-price, according to Izubuchi) version. The name Re-GZ stands in fact for Refined Gundam Zeta. One key point in designing the Re-GZ was to make it look like the Zeta, but at the same time not “too much like a Gundam“; basically, to make a simplified and stripped-down version of the Zeta. For this exact reason, some Gundam-like elements of the original design were removed or repositioned, like the V antenna that was changed into a simpler non-V antenna-like shape, and instead of being positioned on the front of the mobile suit‘s head, was attached to its top, pointing backwards.
Izubuchi just drew the overall rough design and a sketch of the transformation mechanism, and then entrusted the rest of the work to assistant designer Kouichi Ohata, as he was already busy designing the other mobile suits. Izubuchi says that at the time he had Ohata work in his home studio, so communication between the two was very quick and efficient. Ohata is also responsible for the original concept of the mobile suit‘s B.W.S. (Back Weapon System), that Izubuchi later polished and refined. He then asked mechanical designer Yoshinori Sayama to do the final clean-up for the whole Re-GZ.
Jegan
The RGM-89 Jegan is another of the E.F.S.F. mass-produces mobile suits, Izubuchi says, the successor to the Nemo line rather than the GM‘s. In the early rough designs, the Jegan has indeed overall slimmer proportions and a taller build, additional signs of it being initially inspired by the Nemo. The Vulcan Pod installed on the Jegan‘s head is a reference to the Zeta‘s Gundam Mk-II, and in general the design tries to incorporate many elements of the main machines from the previous (to CCA) Gundam installments.
According to Izubuchi, due to their similarity, many people compared the Jegan to the Ingram in Mobile Police Patlabor, that was released in April 1988, around the same time as CCA.
The initial rough design (on the left of the picture, complete with Tomino‘s corrections) was somewhat heavily revisited, following the instructions director Tomino and producer Uchida gave to the designer. For example, Uchida asked to remove the waist armor, a decision that ended up making the suit feel more sturdy and solid overall (but also “more similar to the Ingram“). Director Tomino, on the other hand, asked to revise the head which originally made the mobile suit look “too much like a weakling”, and also directed to make the nozzles on the backpack bigger in size.
The Jegan‘s a “long-lasting” mobile suit, appearing in following works like Mobile Suit Gundam F91, and whose variants have appeared even in more recent titles like Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn and Mobile Suit GundamHathaway’s Flash. In this regard, Izubuchi believes it was a successful design for the Earth Federation‘s new “flagship” machine.
Sazabi
Not strictly related to its mechanical design, but much like what happened with the νGundam, the Sazabi too went through various renames during the pre-production phase of CCA. The very first name Char‘s new (and last) mobile suit was given was apparently “Nightingale“, as it was indeed referred to during the early stages of the project, when Nagano was still on board (and, as already pointed out earlier, as its counterpart in the Beltorichika’s Children novel ended up being called). The next name it was given (even though it’s not clear as to why “Nightingale” was changed) was “The Knack“, but ultimately this name too was changed to the final “Sazabi“, due to trademark issue. One thing that didn’t change in the process, unlike with the νGundam, was its overall design concept, that was most definitely solidly established ever since the early stages.
Izubuchi says that what he wanted for this design was for it to “inherit the Zeon-style traits” from the other mobile suits of the Principality. “Rather than being just a Zaku-type mobile suit” he intended it as “the successor to the Dom and the Gelgoog“, and this inheritance is seen in elements like the “wide skirt-like armor and the verniers on its shoulders and legs”. The head was instead inspired by the helmet Char himself wore during the One Year War, its design being replicated “as is”; the horn-like elements and the lines of the helmet were both incorporated in the head’s design. It was a motif intended “to make the impression upon people that the Sazabi was indeed Char‘s personal machine”.
A rather troublesome aspect of Sazabi‘s design, Izubuchi explains, was the placement of the cockpit. He initially thought it was placed in the mobile suit‘s torso as usual, but in director Tomino‘s boards it appeared to be placed on the mech’s head instead. The schedule was too thigh at the time, and Izubuchi says he regrets he couldn’t really think this through as much as he would have liked to: his original idea was to place the spherical cockpit directly inside the Sazabi‘s head, but it would have been way too smaller than it should have. Tomino then proposed to move it under the mobile suit‘s neck, but even in that case, Izubuchi says, the proportions didn’t really make full sense, and thus when towards the end of the movie the νGundam holds Char‘s cockpit in its hand, “it’s obvious that the cockpit’s size is wrong”.
A more detailed view of the Sazabi’s backpack, as well as other mechanical details. This sheet is dated May 26th 1987, and it’s interesting to note that the Sazabi was still called “The Knack” to this date.
Another interesting aspect of the design were the funnels. They were originally designed to be an evolution of the MAN-08 Elmeth and the AMX-004 Qubeley‘s remote-controlled bits, and as the name “funnel” suggests, they were also supposed to have an overall simple cylindrical structure. That would have been way too uninteresting however, so Izubuchi added a little “gimmick to them”, so that when launched, “their outer shielding would spread out like wings, making them look like cross-shaped objects from upfront”.
Lastly, various notes on the design sheets remark how, as opposed to the νGundam‘s, very few steps and corrections were required for the Sazabi‘s design, since its concept and design line were very clearly outlined from the beginning stages, and the first rough sketches were consequentially already really close to what ended up being the final design.
Jagd Doga
The Jagd Doga was initially supposed to be called “Pyscho Doga” (or “Doola“, as seen in Nagano‘s drafts). The reason its name was later changed to the on we know today is strikingly simple: Izubuchi says he “didn’t like the name Pyscho Doga at all”, so when he submitted his design proposal, he “submitted is as the ‘Jagd Doga‘ instead”, and that ended up being used as the final name for the Neo Zeon‘s mobile suit.
It was designed as a “Newtype-exclusive version” of the Geara Doga, and its image was to overall resemble that of a knight; its head’s shape was in fact meant to be similar to the the face guard of a knight’s armor. An interesting thing to note is that the Jagd Doga‘s colors, that look like yellow and gray in the final movie, were instead supposed to be gold and silver. As Izubuchi explains, “with today’s CG it would definitely be possible, but it was quite hard to recreate that effect at the time”. In this regard, he regrets that he could have made it look better overall.
This time too, the design hardly changed at all from the first rough drafts; aside from the head, the overall balance of the mobile suit was basically left unchanged. Around the same stage the head of the Jagd Doga was refined to look more like a knight’s armor, Gyunei‘s Beam Assault Rifle was also designed. The mech’s design itself wasn’t too difficult to put together (having the Geara Doga as its base), and the real highlight were instead its weapons, especially Quess‘ unit’s Mega Gatling Gun and the Heat Knife attached to its Beam Saber. The latter (“unfortunately”) ended up not being used in the movie, although “not very practical”, says Izubuchi, “it’s an interesting shape that was never quite used before” in Gundam, so it would have been fun to see how it could have worked in practice. The Mega Gatling Gun on the other hand was used in the story, and even though he didn’t know the extent of it (that is, the scene where Quess ends up killing her own father by blowing up the bridge of the battleship he was riding on), Izubuchi designed it as a flashy and brutal weapon. Unlike Gyunei‘s Beam Rifle, which wouldn’t have had quite the same impact, “making it a Gatling-type gun” allowed the scene to be even more brutal in its presentation.
Geara Doga
The Geara Doga is admittedly a mobile suitIzubuchi really likes. It was supposed to be the successor to the Zaku II, and it was quite successful in that regard, as the mechanical designer himself remarks. The whole idea was simply to make a “modern day Zaku“, and also embed in its design a little more of the “Spartan imagery” it already had.
As the Geara Doga is a mass produced, general-purpose suit like the Zaku II, a wide variety of weapons were designed for it to use. Another trait that extends not only to the Geara Doga and Zeon-side but also the the Earth Federation-side of mobile suits as well, that was conceptualized around this same time, was the idea for each side to have a distinct type of manipulator with peculiar differences on their mobile suits. For instance, the Zeonsuits having rounded fingers and the E.F.S.F.suits having squared ones also is a “trend” that started in that same period. Both the Geara Doga and the Jegan are “long-lasting designs” as Izubuchi says, “but in that sense, the manipulators’ designs are even more long-lasting”.
α Azieru
In Tomino‘s original scenario, Quess was supposed to pilot only the Psycho Doga (Jagd Doga) until the very end. Izubuchi however, wanted a “more impressive, gigantic and monstrous enemy to appear” in the movie, so he made and submitted the design in the picture. At that time, the name “Psycho Doga” was already replaced by his “Jagd Doga“, so he proposed this additional design to be the “new Psycho Doga” instead, even though its inspiration was clearly and integrally the MSN-02Zeong (whose name was also written on the first design Izubuchi submitted). Admittedly, he never thought a mech actually by the name of “Neo Zeong” would have appeared in later installments (it in fact appeared in the 2010 Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn first, and in its sequel, Mobile Suit Gundam Narrative later), but that was indeed the idea and concept Izubuchi had in mind when conceptualizing his α Azieru for CCA.
The α Azieru was designed to be a “last-boss-like monstrous entity”, and its silhouette was meant to look like a cross from the distance. Talking about silhouette, it was around the same time he was figuring out how it would look (or should have looked) from different perspectives that Izubuchi decided to add a mechanism to detach the long propeller tanks from below the suit and have its silhouette drastically change as a consequence. Although it wasn’t prominently featured in the movie, a lot of thought was put into designing the mobile armor‘s transformation mechanism, as many sketches and corrections seem to suggest, both by the mechanical designer Izubuchi himself and by director Tomino, who, I guess, ended up liking the idea of adding this enormous mech to his story.
Its funnels, unlike the Sazabi‘s and the Jagd Doga‘s ones, are not in the newly established cylindrical shape, and instead look like the more classical remote-controlled bits. That was because if he were to enlarge the cylindrical-shaped funnels to match the α‘s size, “it would have then been difficult to properly convey the right sense of size” overall.
Hobby Hizack
There’s not much to say about the Hobby Hizack; as Izubuchi points out, it’s basically just “an Hizack stripped of all its weapons”. All its hand-held weapons are gone, the spikes on its shoulders are gone, and it’s just the same mobile suit with its edges rounded and softened. Interestingly, Izubuchi didn’t directly trace the Hizack‘s model drawings, but instead drew it from scratch. He didn’t really understand what a “civilian-use mobile suit” was supposed to be like, so he went with a sort of “amicable and gentle” design. On a more fun note, he adds that the gaudy final color scheme for the suit really surprised him.
Med
The Med is a small mobile worker, that is, a machine whose primary purpose is work rather than combat. “As the name suggests”, says Izubuchi (“Med” apparently comes from “met” from “helmet“), “its whole designed is centered around its head”, or rather its cockpit, that makes up basically all of its body. It was based on a similar machine, the ZZ‘s Petit Mobile Suit, but instead of the focus being on the legs, it was on the “head”.
Designs by art director Shigemi Ikeda
Ra Cailum
When it comes to the designs for the battleships, many more artists were widely involved in creating them, and not primarily just Yutaka Izubuchi. Many of these “side” mechanical design works, including also elements like the space shuttle, the base jabbersetc. were handed off to Gainax.
The Ra Cailum design in the picture in particular was drawn by art director Shigemi Ikeda; he recalls producer Uchida directly asking him to clean up Mamoru Nagano‘s early designs for the ships. What Izubuchi ended up doing on his hand, was just drawing some really rough sketches which he explains he doesn’t even remember drawing at all, as he was so busy with the other designs at the time. If he had designed the battleships (and all the other mechanical objects) himself, as he admittedly wishes he could have, Izubuchi says he wouldn’t have had enough time for the mobile suits, which understandably were the most central part of his work.
The (Gainax) designers ultimately responsible for the Ra Cailum‘s design were Hideaki Anno and Shoichi Masuo. The details that were adjusted or changed from Nagano and Izubuchi‘s rough sketches following the instructions by director Tomino, include making the turret longer and the Mega Particle Cannon larger (a correction that the director has presumably drawn himself). The design then evolved to have more angular lines, reminiscing of the Earth Federation‘s Salamis-class cruisers, and was later slightly changed again with the lines around the bridge and the bow being more curved and gentle.
Designs by art director Shigemi Ikeda
Rewloola
A similar fate befell the Rewloola, with Ikeda (eagerly, as he recalls having had much fun drawing these spaceships designs) cleaning up Nagano‘s early designs under request of producer Uchida. Ikeda‘s drawing were then used as a reference by the Gainax designers to refine their own, more conceptual designs. For the Neo Zeon‘s battleship too, Izubuchi barely had the time to draw rough sketches; interestingly, he says that for both the Rewloola and the Ra Cailum, he hadn’t seen Nagano‘s early designs, and created his drafts totally on his own.
The Rewloola‘s design too was handled by Anno and Masuo; the design was likely inspired by Zeon‘s previous cruisers such as the Musai-class and the Gwadan-class ones. By the time the Gainax artists submitted their first rough drafts, ideas like the shape of the hull were already part of the design. Concurrently to the Rewloola, the Musaka-class was being designed as well, but contrary to the former’s design, which got changed a lot in the process, the latter’s one was basically left unchanged since its early stages.
To conclude this section on the mechanical design, I think it’s worth noting that all the design were made between late April and late June of 1987. A lot of roughs for the Neo Zeon-side mobile suits are dated sometime in April, which lines up with Izubuchi being tasked with them early, when everyone else was working on the redesign for the Hi-S Gundam. Several of those very rough designs (“sketches” would be a better word perhaps), including one for the so-called “Berge Doga” based on the WWII German tank “Bergepanzer“, ultimately didn’t make their way to the final product, but that’s most likely by design, as they were intended just as a conceptualization of the design vision for Char’s Counterattack as a whole. By the first half of May, all the drafts and rough designs for both the Earth Federation and Neo Zeonmobile suits were completed, and between late May and late June, all the designs (including the weapon’s) were refined and cleaned up. The latest design sheet is the Med‘s final one, and is dated June 26th 1987.
Character Design
This second major section of the article, dedicated to the character design, aims to explore some of the drafts that were drawn by character designer Hiroyuki Kitazume before the designs were ultimately finalized. Much like the previous section, this one too will feature a commentary by the artist himself, but it won’t be divided in sub-sections. Instead, I’ll present the various character designs and corresponding commentaries in one longer, continuous piece.
Amuro Ray’s earliest rough character design
In the Records Collection book, this chapters starts off with several different design sheets for AmuroRay, the last one dated as late as April 11th 1987 and, while the first one is not explicitly dated, based off some other early designs (notably, the earliest CharAznable one) we can assume it was made around March 13th of the same year. Rather than directly commenting on Amuro‘s design, Kitazume starts with talking about the “overall picture”, that is, the overall concept and vision behind Char’s Counterattack‘s character design. Director Tomino started by simply asking Kitazume to “try drawing Amuro and Char in a new way, not just as an extension of Yoshikazu Yasuhiko‘s work” in the previous installments. Despite how simple of a request this may (or may not) sound, “Amuro was still Amuro, and Char had to still look like Char“, so the point of several different designs for the main characters being made was to find the correct “style” and design line by a trial-and-error-like process. Kitazume‘s first work as a character designer (for Gundam, and second in general) was ZZ, but that time he was asked to do things quite literally the opposite way; the concept for ZZ‘s character design was to continue on the same line and legacy left by Yasuhiko, and not only that, but another core point of the whole show was to lower the age of the target audience, so Kitazume “deliberately created designs that were easier to understand”. As said earlier, Tomino didn’t provide any specific instruction for Char’s Counterattack‘s designs, but the overall concept he outlined was not to make the characters “look like manga’s”, since his goal was to depict a “human drama”. As Kitazume explains, the director requested the character designer to refrain from creating what he describes as “deformed” designs, with “big heads and eyes”; aside from Quess, who being the “heroine” was allowed to be slightly deformed, all the other (main) characters had to convey real “human expressions”. In this regard, Kitazume‘s design process (for Amuro in this example) involved imagining how the character would have looked like when acted by voice actor Tooru Furuya, how expressive would it have been and whether or not it would still have looked like Amuro.
Beltorichika Irma’s character design
Right next to Amuro‘s character design, there’s one you may be a bit surprised to find here, or perhaps one that you did expect to find, if you instead know something about the original scenario for CCA. I’m talking about Beltorchika Irma‘s character design of course, dated March 13th 1987.
For those of you who’re unfamiliar with this topic, let me digress from the character design to clear things up a bit here. When it was decided for Char’s Counterattack to finally become a movie, the first script director Tomino submitted was somewhat quite different from the one that ended up being adapted in the actual movie. Which might sound reasonable, as it’s not so unlikely to change a thing or two about a movie’s script this early in the production. However, when it comes to CCA, Tomino‘s initial script was completely rejected. As for why that was, a more thorough answer was given by Tomino himself in the interview I mentioned before (which, by the way, is also featured in the Records Collection book just before the “Making of” chapter), but in short, it basically comes down to the presence of Beltorchika as Amuro‘s love interest, or to put it bluntly, actual partner. The relationship between her and the Gundam pilot seemed unappealing and unsuited for the “hero of a robot movie” in the eyes of the sponsors at the time, and since her role was pretty relevant and quite central in the narrative, the original script had to be rewritten almost from scratch. Fortunately, you can still experience that initial version of CCA through the 1988 novelization I’ve brought up quite a few times up to this point, Mobile Suit Gundam:Char’s Counterattack –Beltorchika’s Children (or, if you prefer, its subsequent 2014 manga adaptation), but the takeaway here is that ultimately Beltorchika Irma didn’t make her appearance in the movie version. I thought it was interesting nonetheless to spend a few words to her character design, which was drawn in the earliest stages of the production alongside Amuro‘s and Char‘s as the date seems to suggest, even though the book doesn’t offer any comment on it.
Chan Agi’s rough character design
Following Beltorchika, there’s Chan Agi‘s design; a choice that feels rather deliberate, as she was the new character introduced to take Beltorchika‘s place in the story. Chan‘s very first design is dated April 3rd; this information allows us to place the revision of the script during the second half of March 1987, since Beltorchika’s design is dated March 13th.
As Kitazume explains, Chan‘s design direction was hard to put together at first. He’d drawn many different sheets like with Amuro and Char‘s designs, but none of them matched what the director’s wanted for the character. Tomino (presumably, as the character designer says he’s not entirely sure it was actually Tomino) then asked Kitazume to approach her design from a different direction: he suggested to use a “real, living person as a model” and “incorporate that aspect in the design”. Of course, he didn’t mean to simply copy the look of an actual existing person and draw it as is, but rather to integrate the image of a real person into the character design. As a result, around April 20th, Chan‘s design started to look like the one we know from the movie, and with some minor adjustments to the hairstyle and the eyes, by April 23rd Chan‘s design was completed.
In regard to all his character design work (for CCA) in general, Kitazume remarks how director Tomino warned him about the length of the character’s necks. “If you think of Hollywood actors, their necks are longer than the average Japanese person’s one”, so in order to properly convey the right proportions in the character design, even if the character was “wearing military uniforms with stand-up collars, their neck lines had to be clearly visible”. Kitazume payed much attention to these details when working on the designs, and since Tomino reportedly wanted this attention to details and precision to be present in the actual animation as well, Kitazume remembers warning the animation directors too about this particular request.
Bright Noa’s rough character design
Noticeably, one feature of Captain Bright Noa‘s earliest design that didn’t make it to the final product is his beard. And by “the final product” I specifically mean the movie and the movie only, since in the Beltorchika’s Children manga he does still feature a beard.
Anyways, Kitazume explains how his intent behind this choice (to add the beard, that is) was to “make his presence even more important considering the passage of time”, as Bright had always been a character with “great presence and dignity” since the very first Mobile Suit Gundam. The idea was to make him look more like Blex Forer from Zeta, with a beard and also a larger waist. Kitazume says he was “just a young man around 24” by the time he drew this design, and admittedly “didn’t understand what it meant to be in one’s ‘prime of life’ yet”. Bright was just in his thirties, and “had no business looking like an old man like this”, so in the final design he looks a fair bit younger. Kitazume admits that at the time he had little knowledge and didn’t know “finer techniques” to draw adult characters, so he ultimately used to simply add a beard or mustaches to achieve the effect of making the characters look older.
Hathaway Noa’s rough character design
This initial rough design for Hathaway Noa, dated March 19th, was drawn exceptionally early, when the general direction for the character design was yet to be decided altogether. It’s no surprise then that it looks nothing like the final, refined one. Quoting Kitazume‘s own words, “it doesn’t look like Gundam at all”.
To make Hathaway look more like Bright and Mirai‘s son in his later design, Kitazume tried to replicate and incorporate in his design some of the facial features of his parents, like the eyes being smaller than usual. Hathaway is by no means a new character, for he was introduced as early as in Zeta, designed by the then-character designer Yoshikazu Yasuhiko. However, aside from the overall concept of not strictly sticking to Yasuhiko‘s designs, “the age difference was too great” for Hathaway‘s original design to serve as any kind of reference when making this new one.
Char Aznable’s earliest rough character design
Char Aznable‘s initial design proposals, says Kitazume, were probably influenced by the ZZ character design style, that is, as explained earlier, a character design aimed to a younger audience. Evidence of that influence can be seen in the “Neo Zeon uniform or in the long hair”. “The character design in anime started with Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atom, 1963), then was developed further in Space Battleship Yamato (1974) and Mobile Suit Gundam (1979), and later evolved even further in Macross (1982) and Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam (1985)”. At that stage, character design in anime “had stepped up a gear”, as the demands and requirements for the designs for both the clothing and the characters themselves evolved significantly. That was “exactly what director Tomino wanted [for CCA]: to create characters suited to act out a ‘human drama'”.
Char Aznable’s second rough character design
Of course, that same concept and vision were applied when working on Char‘s character design as well, including his military uniform, which played an integral role in establishing the overall “sense of realism” in the design. The slicked back hairstyle that ended up in the final design, Kitazume recalls, was also one of his ideas. He thought it would have been rather odd for the leader and commander of Neo Zeon to have “long hair with a 7/3 haircut”. So, he proposed a hairstyle with a “more mature feel to it”, but that still retained some semblance of wildness. The final design ultimately featured an even more slicked back hairstyle, as the goal was to “get totally rid of the anime-like impression” in it, and since it was common back then for adult men to expose their foreheads more, it was decided for a more mature and dignified design for Char.
Nanai Miguel’s rough character design
Mirroring the arrangement of the designs for the Earth Federation side of the characters, following Char there’s his lover, Nanai Miguel. Much like what he was suggested to do with Chan‘s design, Kitazume used a real person as a reference for Nanai‘s design as well; he recalls using Japanese actresses as models for Chan‘s design and Hollywood actresses for Nanai‘s. Since he already established this very design direction when creating Chan, Nanai‘s design was pretty easy and straightforward to work on.
Quess Paraya’s first rough character design (left) and second rough character design (right)
The amount of drafts and how different the character looks in each of them clearly shows how much Kitazume struggled with Quess Paraya‘s character design. Director Tomino didn’t give him any specific instruction, which in a sense made things worse for the character designer, as he admits he “didn’t really know what kind of person the girl called Quess was”. In the very vague instructions the director gave to Kitazume, there was no mention of her appearance nor of her personality whatsoever.
“She’s not like Lalah, nor like Four, nor like Ple, but she’s a newtype girl”, that was pretty much it. Therefore, the very first rough design (on the left) Kitazume drew gives off a faint impression of a mix between Four and Ple; what’s not faint in the slightest is the “vivid depiction of how lost” he was. He’s not sure it’s something he purposefully intended to depict at the time, but Kitazume thinks “the asymmetry in Quess‘ design was a way to convey her dual nature”. Looking at it now, the asymmetrical hairstyle and clothes serve really well to express her inner instability, but at the time he probably drew it just as an aesthetic quirk.
Quess‘ clothing changes a lot every time she appears, so it was especially difficult to come up with all the design variations. Her clothes are “often frilly” which, looking back, may have been a way to convey “Quess‘ elusive girly side”. When working on the character design for ZZ, director Tomino often scolded Kitazume and told him to further study clothing design, advising him to use western children’s clothes as a reference.
Grave Guss’ first rough character design (left) and Gyunei Guss’ more refined character design (right)
GyuneiGuss‘s name in the original script was Grave Guss, the same name that (unexpectedly at this point) was later used in the Beltorichika’s Children novel, but his role and status in the story remained unchanged (for instance, he was always meant to be a cyber newtype from the start). Like with Char‘s, Gyunei‘s initial design (on the left) was somewhat reminiscent of the ZZ‘s style; “he had a villain-like feel” to him that was no good for CCA. An advice (or direction) director Tomino gave Izubuchi in this regard was that “bad guys shouldn’t have a bad face. Just because they play the role of the bad guy there’s no need to make them look bad”; the Zabi‘s faces in the original Gundam were those of bad guys, and it was fine at the time, but it ultimately “ends up making the design look too much anime-like”. So, consequentially, Gyunei‘s designs changed fairly drastically.
Towards the end of the animation process, Kitazume recalls a small talk he had with producer Uchida, who told him how his designs “were generally hard to draw”, seemingly in terms of consistency, “but Gyunei looked like Gyunei no matter who drew it”. In that sense, he believe it was a successful design, and personally he also thinks Gyunei‘s appearance really matched the voice and acting of voice actor Kouichi Yamadera, an aspect that consequentially greatly helped the character leaving a strong impression overall.
Kitazume describes Gyunei, Neo Zeon‘s Rezin Schnyder and the E.F.S.F.‘s Kayra Su as characters with “different vectors” that were all clearly outlined in the designs. Gyunei‘s a “cyber newtype, a rival-like character impulsive and ambitious at his core”. Rezin is a “professional fighter”, even though she’s an oldtype, she’s not too wary of the little things and gives off the impression of being a real “warmonger”. Lastly, Kayra too is a soldier and a pilot, but she’s “the polar opposite of Rezin“, being more of a naive girl. “She deeply values the greater cause” and moral aspects of war, while Rezin “cares solely about the combat”. Although they’re both highly skilled pilots, their stances are in complete opposition, and Kitazume believes he was able to reflect this aspect of their character in the designs.
A more refined Adenauer Paraya’s character designs
Concluding the character design section, there are a few comments on the remaining side characters’ designs. In Quess‘ father, Adenauer Paraya‘s early designs, he appeared either “too wide or too thin”, since the initial idea was to draw him as being at either one of the extremes. In the end, Kitazume settled with a more average build, he explains, as “it would have been out of place for a minor bureaucrat like him to have a body too well-built”. The other supporting characters weren’t at all difficult to draw, as the overall design direction had already been well established by that time. For characters like Cameron Bloom, who’d already made their appearance in previous entries, there was little to no trouble either. Kitazume admits that when it came to side characters, he’d exhausted his “design repertoire” with the Gaza Squadron trio in ZZ, but “older characters appeared all the time” and thanks to the experience he got drawing them in different ways, he became “more confident when it comes to designing supporting characters like these”. It’s generally hard to portray each character’s peculiar traits in their design, but thank to how much director Tomino had trained him in designing characters with specific roles, Kitazume says he hardly had any trouble with drawing all the different variations.
All the character designs were drawn starting early March of 1987 with the designs for the main cast, to early June for the supporting characters, the latest one being a cleaned-up and refined sheet for Cameron Bloom. The “oldest” character model included in the Collection is a variation of Nanai‘s design, in which she’s wearing a shirt instead of the usual uniform. This sheet is dated August 13th 1987, but as Kitazume explains it’s not, in fact, the “final design” (that was instead already refined by late April), but rather just one of the specific variations.
Other Designs
Besides mobile suits, battleships and characters, many other designs were necessary to support an immersive depiction of the Universal Century. Rough designs for elements like the normal suits, small props, and the display interfaces are featured in this section. Providing the commentary for this section, there’s again mechanical designer Yutaka Izubuchi.
Some rough sketches by Yutaka Izubuchi
A huge amount of sketches and roughs for the normal suits were drawn by various artists, but as Izubuchi explains, he doesn’t really remember under what circumstances each of the designs was used. Gainax artists by the likes of Shoichi Masuo were appointed to design the normal suits, but their initial results were “too realistic”, whereas the expectation (likely of the producers) was for the designs to have “more character to them”. Consequentially, Izubuchi tried to incorporate elements reminiscent of the designs generally used for the “heroes in tokusatu“, and upon being approved by director Tomino, the new designs were then used for Char‘s and Quess‘ pilot suits.
In the final product, many different types of normal suits were used: those for the Earth Federation soldiers and pilots, those for the Neo Zeon soldiers and pilots, Char‘s and Quess‘ ones, and even the shuttle suits for the civilians. The majority of the rough designs were drawn by Gainax members, remarkably including the name of Yoshiyuki Sadamoto.
Sketches of the firearms by Yutaka Izubuchi
Other elements that needed to be designed were the firearms carried by the soldiers, Izubuchi recalls, since Amuro and Char used them in the story. All the rough designs in the picture were drawn by Izubuchi himself; he remarks how there was no actual final design sheet for the rifle, as it was just carried by a Neo Zeon soldier guarding Beverly Hills Station in the Sweetwater space colony around the halfway mark of the movie.
Some other “minor” designs he worked on were the ones for the marks and logos for both the E.F.S.F. and Neo Zeon, specifically the one that ended up on the Sazabi‘s shield.
Some of the many reference drawings for the displays and interfaces
The images displayed on the monitors of both the spaceships and the mobile suits were drawn by hand instead of being made in CG like they are today, so reference drawings and concept designs were necessary to ensure a proper level of consistency throughout the movie.
Background Art
This last major section features rough sketches and preliminary drafts for the background art and setting, as well as some of the material and drawings used for the three-dimensional model of space colonies. Char’s Counterattack was the first Gundam entry to feature space colonies in CG. Art director Shigemi Ikeda provided the commentary for this section.
The Sweetwater space colony and a sketch of its internal landscape
The Sweetwater space colony, base to Neo Zeon, has an irregular shape clearly “outlining the unstable condition its inhabitants are forced to in”. With this premise, art director Shigemi Ikeda opens his commentary on the background art for Char’s Counterattack. The space colony is divided in two sections, the “open-type” one and the “close-type” one. The close-type part, as the name suggests, is a closed cylinder in shape, with just one line in the middle that serves as the main light source. The open-type one, on the other hand, to let the outside light in, has three giant mirrors on the outside wall, which can be opened and closed to simulate day and night. Give its peculiar appearance and functioning, Ikeda had to draw even specific parts and elements of it, like its mechanical joints.
The art director is personally “really fond of things like the space colonies”, so he recalls having had much fun drawing it. Director Tomino explained to him how in order for people to live inside of a space colony, which is an enclosed and thigh space, “it’s necessary to scrupulously recreate the scenery of Earth”, and a considerable “cost” is spent to achieve such a result. The reason why the inside of a space colony has to look somewhat old-fashioned, is because “people [living inside of it] would go crazy” if that wasn’t the case. Thus, Sweetwater inside looks like a “slightly old-fashioned New York cityscape”, a scenery Ikeda was able to depict only because he had actually traveled to America to do some research. He believes he wouldn’t have been able to recreate such a scenery, like the monorail and the train station, if he “hadn’t seen them with his own eyes”.
The Londenion space colony
Londenion, on the other hand, is a typical “open-type” space colony. What helped Ikeda the most while designing it was “a miniature model someone in the studio had made”. It wasn’t too sophisticated of a model, rather, it was something very simple, made out of a rolled up piece of animation cel with cut-outs corresponding to the mirrors. Still, it made “the way the inside of the colony was reflected on the mirrors” much easier to understand. Unfortunately, pictures of this miniature model aren’t featured in the Collection, but it remains a “very useful reference”, whose impact was then reflected in the final designs for the space colony, as well as in the movie’s actual visuals.
Rough sketches for the mass driver installed on the moon’s surface and the shuttle pad in New Hong Kong are also featured in this section of the Collection; all of these minor designs that blend between mechanical and art direction, were made by Gainax artists.
The Ra Cailum’s internals design
Back then, the internals of mechanical objects like the battleships were not part of the mechanical designer’s work like they are today, but rather it was “common sense” that “the mecha designer would draw the exterior, and the art direction team would do the interior”. Perhaps it was considered background art as it’s used as such in the final product, explains Ikeda, but since he particularly likes drawing battleships anyway, it was a fun work for him to create this kind of designs.
The overall image for the interior of the Ra Cailum (and the other Earth Federation ships in general) was for it to be “straight-lined, regular and symmetric”. This visual theme was present not only in the bridges, corridors and civilian-use rooms, but also in the design for the seats.
The idea to have not just one, but two bridges – a regular one and a combat one – inside the Ra Cailum came directly from director Tomino, who, according to Ikeda, is actually knowledgable about the “real military”, and thus requested him to add the combatbridge in addition to the regular one used for navigation.
The Rewloola’s internals design
When it comes to the internals of the Neo Zeon‘s ships, the visual motif is opposite to the one for Earth Federation, prominently featuring curved lines. This visual trope was actually present since the original Mobile Suit Gundam, with the Zeon‘s Musai-class battleships. Ikeda explains how working on Gundam was something he wanted since the very beginning of his career, so perhaps he put “everything he wanted to do” in his work for CCA.
The Rewloola is characterized by the use of vertical space in the bridge, and the mobile suits deck features a more “organic” design as opposed to the “straight-lined one of the Earth Federation-side” of battleships. Coming up with these kind of differences for each military side was reportedly a “fun task”.
Lastly, Ikeda concludes his commentary talking about the realization of one of the last scenes towards the end of the movie. The scene he’s referring to is obviously the one where the T-shaped “psycho-frame sample flies away, leaving behind a trail of light”, with a 3D earth rotating in the back. As many of you may already know, that 3D model of the earth wasn’t in fact a 3D model at all, instead it was an actual sphere that was rotated and filmed on set. Ikeda had peeled off the surface of an actual, roughly 20cm wide, earth globe, then painted the sky, clouds and land on it himself. He’d been taking care of that same earth globe until “recently” (that is, sometime around 2020 or 2021), keeping it with him in his personal office.
Notes
An additional document full of notes and warnings about the various aspect of the production, including mechanical and character designs, backgrounds and animation itself, is also part of the production material collected in the Making of chapter of Complete Collection. Animation director Hidetoshi Omori explains some of the main points discussed in this document.
One interesting note director Tomino left specifically addressed to Omori himself was to stop using solid black shadows since as a result, the shape of the mecha itself becomes invisible or hard to grasp. Such a style of shading is just the “preference of adults”, and wasn’t allowed in Gundam, which was intended as a product aimed at all ages. Despite the warning, Omori ended up using solid shadows in Char’s Counterattack, but just in one scene, admittedly because it was indeed his own “preference”. The scene he’s referring to is the one in the second half of the movie, when the propeller tanks are detached from the α Azieru, and a shadow, outlined with solid-blacks, falls on the Jadg Doga.
Notes on how the explosions should look like by animation director Hidetoshi Omori
Animation director Omori contributed in writing some of the notes in the document himself, especially (and unsurprisingly) the ones related to the animation itself. An aspect he particularly focused on were the explosions. He explains, he’s always admired the explosions in the original Gundam, and when he had the chance to inquire Yoshikazu Yasuhiko on how they came about, the former character designer and animation director said that on his hand he really liked the explosions in Lupin the Third to the point he wanted to try something like that for himself. Up until that point, the explosions in anime were just a simple “boom-like” effect and Yasuhiko didn’t like that, so he tried to do something different. In a similar fashion, Omori wanted to create his own proper effects for the explosions, so he left some notes specifically in that regard.
Notes on how the fin funnel’s beams should look like by animation director Hidetoshi Omori
Always concerning the animation, but this time coming from director Tomino instead, are some notes about the difference in speed between the mobile suits and the funnels. The director wanted to emphasize and highlight the dynamism of the funnels, so Omori took care of all the scenes where the funnels appear himself. He explains, the finfunnels in particular have a different shape, and the position of their thrusters, being all “concentrated in one place”, greatly alters the way they move. The animation director was also very particular about the change in direction and how the funnels moved consequentially to firing a beam. Another important point Tomino put special attention in, was the fact that the finfunnels are a beam weapon, not a laser weapon, hence he wanted to emphasize the mass of the particles that were fired by the funnels. To achieve this kind of emphasis, Omori thought of casing a shadow on the muzzles of the funnels every time a beam was fired, since particles, as opposed to lasers, do cast a shadow. To highlight the fact that the beam of light traveled in one specific direction, as well as to further emphasize the beam’s speed, he had the opposite, outer side of the muzzle in the dark. However, Omori believes that at the time not many people understood his choice in this regard.
A note on how the clash between two beam sabers should look like by animation director Hidetoshi Omori
One last note, again written by Omori himself, is that when two beam sabers clash, the impact forms a sphere of energy. That is to show that the beam saber with the greater power between the two is canceling out the opponent’s beam. This is exactly what Char meant when he said “my saber is weaker than his?!” while fighting Amuro during the final sequence of the movie, and this same effect was used in the animation.
Before wrapping up, I’d like to write a sort of bibliography, listing all the sources (both internal and external) that I’ve used while writing and researching for this post.
One “internal” source was the aforementioned interview with director Tomino, and another one, as obvious as it sounds, was the Complete Collection of Official Records itself (which, by the way, I believe you still can get a copy of yourself if you look in the right places).
Lastly, a major source of both information and inspiration was The animation of Char’s Counterattack from Animétudes, a post I’ve made extensive use of especially to check the consistency of what I reported with the timeline of the production, specifically when writing Mamoru Nagano‘s section.
This concludes “The Making of Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack“; as I mentioned at the very beginning, it was my first time working on a project of this scale, and (expectedly) it’s the post that took me the longest to make on this blog, as well as the longest one to date in terms of word and characters count. That’s to say, I’m pretty satisfied with how it turned out. I hope this comes across as a useful and informative article to every fan or enthusiast, or everyone in general who’s researching on this movie.
Original interview from the 1988 MOVIC Cinemabook, transcribed from “Char’s Counterattack Complete Collection of Official Records —BEYOND THE TIME—” (2022).
This translation is pretty outdated and may contain some inconsistencies or inaccuracies! It might get a revision sometime in the future…
~ It became a story where I didn’t like Beltorchika to appear in any way, so I chose to leave her out. ~
— “Mobile Suit Gundam” is, as of now, composed of three series; where is this new movie “Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack” placed in relation to the aforementioned shows?
Of course it’s not unrelated to them. It’s the successor to “Mobile Suit Gundam” and “Mobile Suit Z Gundam”. However, it does not inherit “everything” from them, “Char’s Counterattack” is a story that was constructed step by step. “Not everything” means things like why Beltorchika Irma, a character introduced in Mobile Suit Z Gundam, is not present in Char’s Counterattack. Basically, I can’t say it inherits everything in terms of how the characters were arranged.
Why doesn’t it? Originally, it should have inherited everything, but when I initially wrote the script that way, it was rejected. If I had more freedom with that, and Beltorchika would have appeared as Amuro’s significant other, the two of them would have ended being married. Basically, if they were married, perhaps they also had lived together for a long while, and at that point the sponsoring company was doubtful that a protagonist like that could have worked in a robot movie. I thought it was a very reasonable doubt. But while I was actually working on the plan and writing the script for “Char’s Counterattack”, I couldn’t think of that much myself. Basically, because I imaged “Char’s Counterattack” to be the sequel to “Z Gundam” which was the sequel to the first “Gundam”, I was sure Beltorichika had to be there. However, when I realized it wasn’t appropriate to make her appear in this movie due to the aforementioned developments, I removed her from the story, and I also made sure not to mention any information about her character. If I still included things like that in the movie, it would have quickly exceeded the 2 hours limit.
However, that wasn’t the only reason I stopped her from appearing in this movie.
When I finished writing the first script, I realized there was another major problem: it ended up becoming a story where the human power was so strong that Mobile Suits weren’t needed anymore. This too would have been a critical issue for the affiliated company that kindly sponsored “Char’s Counterattack”. And for me as well, it was something I didn’t like. After all, it is “Gundam” because it has mobile suits, like the Gundam itself.
Eventually, it became a story where I didn’t like Beltorchika to appear in any way, so I chose to leave her out.
— It sounds like the result of really hard work.
Nevertheless, on the other hand, it’s also natural to wonder why I had to leave her out of the story for a reason like that. However, to me, a movie should fundamentally be a one-episode self-contained story. You might ask what the previous “Mobile Suit Gundam (I, II, III)” movies are then, but the difference is that they’re the remaking of the tv series. So, if you ask me if it’s ok for movies like that to exist, since I too make them, I’d say it is (laughs). But it’d be a problem if every movie was like that. Also, for me personally, I wouldn’t like people to think that even if, for example, I divided “Char’s Counterattack” in “Part 1” and “Part 2”, it would have still been profitable, and since I was making a movie to be the conclusion to the first “Gundam”, I wanted it to be a one-shot episode no matter what.
In other words, if I had those claims on my part, and the affiliated company that invested in the project acknowledged them, I instead think that the story I proposed, in which Amuro may be married and the Mobile Suits are not needed, must have been suppressed. This isn’t a give-and-take situation, rather a requirement that must be met in order for the movie to succeed.
I fully accepted all these things as I was realizing them myself, and I’m glad it turned out to be a lighter movie this way. If Beltorchika made her appearance in order to have more natural-feeling dialogues throughout the movie, it would have been a little different from the kind of movies you simply watch and enjoy, it would have been something more true-to-life. However, there are two editors currently publishing the novel versions of “Char’s Counterattack”, and I know that there already are a lot of opinions that the version of the story in the novels, where Beltorchika is present, is better. I think it’s a good thing. Now you might ask why I didn’t forcedly do it then, and that is because if I did, “Gundam” as a product wouldn’t have been able to go on. It’s not just for practical reasons like investors not putting their money in it; if I possessed the power to do that myself, and actually made that happen, I would have become unable to write anything about Mobile Suits at all after that. If you’re wondering whether a story that denies the role of Mobile Suits would still be good or not, after all, the answer is no. Basically, what needed to be included in the novel adaptation was the first version of the script I wrote.
After all, a movie should not be made solely based on the ideas from a single staff member. For a movie, first you have to think of the audience, then come the investors and the director. Then many more people need to be involved, like animators, art directors, voice actors, and the people who took the recordings. If it was to be based on the preferences of only one person, then creating a movie wouldn’t need to involve that many people. But even so, ultimately, a movie is still influenced by its director’s intentions, so it can be said that it does belong to the director. The work of balancing these aspects is what makes a move so interesting.
— You’re saying it’s the result of the intentions of many people, but it must also be the result of one single person’s will.
There’s often debate about whether it’s right for directors to convey their egos into their movies or not, but the answer is no. If you look at successful movies, they’re made with the collective effort not to let individual egos shine. Those movies feel like actual movies because they’re made oppressing the director’s ego and accepting many different opinions. It’s when movies are made that way that I think they’re successful, and I believe “Char’s Counterattack” is like that too. At least, I believe it didn’t turn out to be that kind of heavy and painful works that just conveyed their director’s ideas.
That’s why, in my case, I can only say that I couldn’t think of “Char’s Counterattack” as something to watch after the previous tv series, but I could only create it as a one-shot story that just inherited something from them. It’s not something to compare to the tv series, and at the same time it does not have incongruences with everything that has happened until now. It’s the only result of all these things.
— New characters, like Quess Paraya, made their appearance in “Char’s Counterattack”, can you say something about them?
After deciding Beltorchika wouldn’t have appeared in the movie, I thought it was necessary to add something to spice up the film, and after all, a female character to shoulder the protagonist was what was needed, that’s why I made Chan Agi to be Amuro’s partner.
Also, since “Char’s Counterattack” is the story between Amuro and Char, the characters are arranged in a very particular way so that they’re not simply divided into enemies and allies. In order to achieve that, when I was thinking of Char and the antagonist-side, I thought a character to form a connection between the two sides was necessary. When I was thinking of that character’s disposition, I couldn’t think of anything different than someone like Quess Paraya. So I made her a supporting character, so that even though the parties are divided into allies and enemies, there’s a connection between them. For that reason, if Beltorchika was to appear in the movie, she would have ended up covering the roles of both Chan and Quess by herself. Under such circumstances, a new character had to be introduced. And what I came up with after that was “Char’s Counterattack”.
— Besides Beltorchika, what about the other characters from the previous “Gundam” and “Z Gundam” that didn’t make an appearance?
While making “Char’s Counterattack” I didn’t think at all of the other characters. As for why I didn’t consider other parts, this is also my personal opinion but, movies should have a good pacing, and if I had to expand on other parts as well, the pacing would have gotten worse, and on top of that, considering I knew for certain that drawings and animation wouldn’t have been completed in time, I removed most if not all of the parts that felt superfluous.
Well, the running time of the movie was exactly as I planned. The cuts that got removed were about 300, all originally prepared because they were necessary to explain things like the human relationships between characters in the movie, there was no element [that got removed] other than that.
~ I believe that if they work hard and get their job done, and gain experience from that, truly amazing animation can be produced. ~
— What do you think about the production staff?
The fact that there are seven animation directors who worked together is clear to anyone who watches the movie. As for why there were seven of them, it’s simply because no animation director alone was able to do as good as Yoshikazu Yasuhiko did with “Gundam”. At the same time, creating something like “Gundam” after Yasuhiko, would require a tremendous amount of strength. The reason for this is that “Gundam” has a certain volume to it. Expecting people who are barely 25 years old to be able to handle that kind of work would be a pretty cruel thing. As the production process continued, what made an impression on me was that especially in the first four months, to put it bluntly, not a single cut was completed. Supposing things were going smoothly, over these four months I believe even the after recording and dubbing processes would have been completed to a good extent.
As for why it ended up like this, there are many other reasons. Anyways, regarding only the “Gundam” part, it had a “certain volume” to it, meaning it was pretty demanding work, and because of that the staff must have been nervous and even if they tried their best, they couldn’t make it. That one cut took a lot of time and even when it was finished, the end result wasn’t really great.
In short, the desire to work harder made them waste more time. It’s the same thing I said earlier, when I wrote a version of the story in which Beltorchika appeared as the first script. I wanted to do my best and I had to, so I ended up writing a story in which Amuro had become like an old man, all to be told in the end that that kind of thing couldn’t have worked in the movie; in this exact same way, everyone was burdened with that cut and couldn’t move on at all. In other words, this proves that wanting to do your best only by yourself will never bring good results.
If that wasn’t the case then, someone experienced like me should have seen this situation coming and prevented it, and I deeply regret I didn’t. As a result, I felt that young people were put under undue pressure. I am sorry for what happened. When I saw all those young staff members of today being stuck trying to do their best, I thought they must have been all very nervous. However, feeling this nervousness when doing business is extremely troublesome. It becomes a negative factor. All this nervousness creates is a loss in terms of time and money, and these inconveniences end up affecting even other aspects like the post-recording and dubbing, creating even more inconveniences to other people. My message to all staff members is to try to maintain a good balance in this regard.
And also, when it comes to work, it is also a problem to take things too seriously. In other words, I think that all the staff needs to be trained in order to become able to skillfully handle this middle-of-the-road aspects, and if they got trained like that, most of the staff members that worked on “Char’s Counterattack” would become able to effectively utilize their skills in the field to complete their works. There are some exceptional individuals, but most people already possess really good skills and understanding of the fundamentals of animation. I believe that if they work on two or three more projects like this one, and gain more experience, truly amazing animation can be produced here in Tokyo. This isn’t just cheap flattery. That’s why I want them to take real care of the power they have right now.
— Moving on to another topic, did you as the Director draw designs or rough sketches for this project?
No, I don’t do that kind of work anymore. That’s because it’s no longer at a level an amateur can handle, so I don’t get my hands on it anymore. However, as I said earlier when we were talking about the staff, the main trouble was that, although the skill level of each individual has improved greatly, unfortunately, they neglected the more fundamental issues and focused only on the less relevant and smaller details. That’s no good. Because of that, they had hard times especially with the mechanical design. To the point they felt genuinely angry.
I recognize that the animation, or rather, the drawings that form the animation are really good. But the essential thing is that this is animation, you don’t have to draw with an illustration-level finish. That’s not animation, that’s illustration. You can’t make drawings like that move. That’s why they’d come to a point where almost no one could think of the action lines for the animation. Moreover, even if you know how to depict the movements that have been popular in tv animation for the past two to three years now, that’s not animation. There are a lot of people who, in order to learn just that technique, have forgotten how to do ordinary animation.
Even when it comes to mechanical design, I know they’re supposed to draw mobile suits and mechs with a new and fresh feel to them, but when I look at the designs, I feel I’ve already seen them somewhere before. The details on the exterior are drawn in a cool and meticulous way, but in the end if you remove everything on the surface, it’s just the copy of another character. That’s why I want people to understand not to let details fool them, and that a design detailed like an illustration can’t be made to move around in animation.
The end result is that the animation of the last few years, especially the one that comes out of the world of video editing software, all looks the same. It’s not an independent work.
However, I’m not doing any design work myself. It’s all done by the individual designers. Anyways, because we had to spend so much time just to get to that point, the finish ended up being a bit sluggish, and the fact that it wasn’t really an independent work was painful.
— Going back once more to the work itself, it looks like “Char’s Counterattack” brings a breakpoint in “Gundam”, did you feel something in this regard?
Unfortunately, after finishing editing this film, I realized I didn’t really hit a breakpoint with it, so I don’t have that kind of feelings about it. To be honest, now that the prologue is finally over, I’m just looking forward for “Gundam” to start all over again.
I’ve come to the realization that I myself have been living inside of “Gundam”.
— What do you want people to see in “Char’s Counterattack”?
The reason I made this movie is that I wanted the audience to see it and I had something to tell them through it, so all I can say is please watch it. And whether they like it or not, it’s not just the audience’s business. As the creator, I can only ask “I made the work this way, what do you think?”. If it was just to say “I made the work this way, so please understand it”, I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to make a whole movie, I would have just written a publication or a novel, and a pamphlet with dozens of pages explaining what I meant to write in the movie. But if I did that, there would have been no reason to make the movie at all, and if there’s no movie, there’s no pamphlet either, so that would have been a contradiction (laughs).
Also, those who have already watched “Char’s Counterattack” will understand, but I really don’t know whether the things I did in the movie, like withdrawing Beltorchika or the last scene with Amuro and Char, are good or bad. I’m not saying I just summed it up and made it that way. The screening time was limited to at most two hours. If I wanted to add more details, it would have exceeded that time limit. It might have been possible to create a great work even exceeding the time limit, but I didn’t have the self confidence to do so.
Anyways, it’s not related to the main body of the work, but there’s something on a technical extent I would like people to notice. My approach in direction for this movie was to make it look like a regular animation movie. I can say with total certainty that there’s no basis to say this is a just regular movie, however, I thought this kind of baseline would have worked, so I made “Char’s Counterattack” this way. This type of technical attention, like how the drawings are connected to each other, should be reflected on the screen.
If possible, it would really be educational if, instead of thinking “why does it look like this?”, you thought “what did the director do to make it look like this?” and tried to figure out the answer. However, this is something highly technical that cannot be really put into words. Even if I explained it, it would be really hard to understand, instead I would really like you to learn it by looking with your own eyes. If, while watching “Char’s Counterattack”, you felt something was strange, like how it looked or didn’t look like a regular movie, that’s what I’m talking about. Also, if you wondered how the story of the movie seemed to fly by so quickly, if you pay special attention to it, you will understand how to connect the moving drawings together [to make it feel so quick T.N.]. When you’ll have the chance to make a movie in the future, that will become some very remarkable knowledge to have.
~ If I were offered to make a live action robot movie, I would want to create a work that doesn’t let the animation say anything. ~
— Except for your own works, what kind of other works do you like?
Speaking of movies, I don’t like them to a point I can actually say “I like it”. However, if it’s just a matter of preference, I would say I like the black-and-white version of “King Kong” that was produced in the United States in 1933.
— Did “King Kong” have any influence on you as a movie creator?
I wouldn’t say so. And that’s because it’s a movie with a low degree of perfection. However, I like it because it conveys something that makes me feel like saying “I love King Kong”. I guess that’s what movies are all about, that feeling of having fun. Also it’s because I think the stupidity of the people who created such movies, still in black and white, at the time when talkies (vocal films) began to spread before World War II, might be the true spirit that animates filmmakers at their core.
Accordingly, that’s why I really hate the color version of “King Kong” that was shot on 70mm film. As for why that is, [in the b&w 1933’s version] their true intentions were unusually apparent and the unhinged nature was on full display, if it were me I would think that was great, and their attitude towards their work was totally positive. In other words, now that color film has become commonplace and anyone with the right financial backing can set up such a large location, arrange a 70m camera and do it, I can’t stand hearing the staff from that movie saying that was the real “King Kong”.
— Is there a recent movie that caught your attention?
I told you, I don’t really like movies, so I think that last year (1987) I haven’t watched a single one…
Oh, I forgot to mention, when it comes to movies, horrors are absolutely a no go for me.
— Is that because they don’t personally suit your personality?
Rather than not suiting my likings, I just can’t bear them. So when I accidentally went to watch “Alien”, I was so scared that I closed my eyes for about an hour (laughs). I’m just that kind of person (laughs).
— There’s quite the difference in genre between “Alien” and “Alien 2”, the latter being more of an action movie. What’s your opinion on “Alien 2”?
“Alien 2” is kind of a stupid movie (laughs). At least I’m glad it wasn’t that scary. The first one was really scary… I want to whack whoever makes it air on tv. Don’t you think? But when it’s broadcast on TV, it’s not that scary. Isn’t that callous approach the same as the callousness of the color version of “King Kong”?
Anyways, I really don’t watch many movies. Of course I do have interest in the ones I work on and I’m glad if they do well, but generally I hate even my own films. That’s because if I end up liking my own movie and get absorbed into it, I always have the fear somewhere in my heart that I won’t be able to come up with the next one.
And yet, when I watched “Mobile Suit Gundam III: Encounters in Space” about four or five years after its release, I was moved (laughs). “There really are people who can make such great movies out here, that’s remarkable”, I thought (laughs). Basically it’s because I hate them for a while, that somehow I don’t see them as my own work. In that sense, I am a relentlessly forgetful person (laughs).
— Lately, “RoboCop” has been a hot topic when it comes to movies, it’s a shame that robots, a speciality of animation, has been stolen by live action movies, don’t you think?
I knew this was going to happen three or four years ago already. I’m angry at myself for not making “Live Gundam”. Perhaps if the talks for “Live Gundam” had been concluded well, it could have been released around fall of last year.
— Do you think animated robots can break out of the current difficult situation?
No, they cannot. There’s no clear reason why. But it’s definitely the case. For example, if I were offered to do a live action robot movie, I would want to do it. If that happens, I would like to create a work that doesn’t let the animation say anything. I think I’ll have that kind of opportunity sometime before I die (laughs).
There’s a part of me that foolishly believes that. It’s also true that I would like to believe that even right now, from a practical standpoint. I would like to think about what the mechs would be like in such situations. Maybe not right now that “Char’s Counterattack” just got released, but when summer comes I would love to forget about my current job and think more about that. Maybe this joke will turn out to be true in the future (laughs). Even though I don’t know how far in the future it may be, since I believe it, I’m already starting to make plans.
In that sense, if the staff who helped with “Char’s Counterattack” works on several other animation products over the course of, say, three years from now, and doing so also learns the skills to create real animation, and becomes able to make a real movie, then, when that time comes, it’d may be possible to create an [animated] movie that can silence the live action robots produced by Hollywood.
Actually, I do believe that’s possible. In fact, I would love to make an animated movie that even makes people want to see a live action adaptation of such a movie instead. And this means that if you don’t believe in this like the joke I talked about earlier, you have to seriously plan a route to this end. If you just have a vague idea to do something, you’ll get nowhere. I believe it can be done.
— After all, if you don’t start thinking about it, it’s not fun.
It’s not that it’s not fun, it’s that you won’t be able to take it seriously unless you think about it. It is because we believe in this that we are able to create things.
~ If Char was really a lolicon, he would have teased Mineva and it would have been a rotten story. So, let’s assume he forgot about her. ~
— Let me change the topic back to “Char’s Counterattack”; I would like to hear something about the voice actors.
Well, I had no freedom in that regard anyway. I mean, some of the voice actors were already an obligatory choice, right? A lot of them, actually. As a filmmaker, when creating a new movie I want to refresh things a bit. And first of all, there were a lot of characters that appealed to me in that sense. On top of that, to select the voices for the new characters, I had to listen to about 80 audition tapes, but I had the impression that the new aspiring voice actors sound all the same, they all act the same way. But for this movie, we had no choice but to use this kind of cast. It really bothers me from the bottom of my heart.
However, this does not mean there is something wrong with the people who performed in “Char’s Counterattack”. On the contrary, there isn’t anything wrong at all with the people who played the roles. What I’m trying to say is that new options have become so narrow. Also, I would have loved to work with a young, fit-looking girl (laughs). However, I couldn’t abuse my authority to that extent (laughs). In other words, the pool of voice actors has become narrower. It’s the same thing I talked about before regarding the animators. Well, it made me realize that the nature of various things has become narrower nowadays, and also that we need to create a world where we can work with people with different tastes and characteristics. Compared to about 4 years ago, it seems like there are fewer options, and it really came in as a surprise to me.
After all, the cause of this are the new tendencies like to have a predetermined image of what animation is, or for production companies to bring in cute girls, and I would want this to stop immediately. I would like to say that animation is not a place as narrow as this. Anyways, this is not a problem for the individual voice actors to solve, but for the animation industry as a whole.
— It’s similar to the idol singers being all the same type of cute girls, isn’t it?
Yes, it’s exactly the same. Whether they’re good singers or not is a problem that comes after. This kind of thing depend on the horizons and personal fondness of the people at the top who select these girls.
— For this movie, the dubbing process lasted for three whole days, right?
If you ask me, three days were not enough. But there are many practical issues regarding budgets and guarantees in the Japanese television and animation industry, so we could not ask for any more than that. That’s the current state of things, and I hate it. However, I also think I understand that everyone else too isn’t working under ideal conditions.
— Not to ask about the parts of the story that weren’t depicted this time, but I’m really curious as to why Mineva Lao Zabi wasn’t there alongside Char. She would be already 14 years old, so she should be old enough to express her thoughts on her own now, right?
Well, about that. I didn’t make her appear because of my personal preference, so I didn’t mention anything about her. If I did that, it would have ended up becoming the story of Char and Mineva. And that’s an entirely different story. If Amuro were to interfere in such a story, it would have only become more complicated. It would have ended up in a similar fashion as that feeling of intricacy and confusion when Haman Karn appeared in “Z Gundam”. So I instinctively avoided writing a story like that.
So then, in response to the question of what kind of relationship is there between Char and Mineva in “Char’s Counterattack”, ultimately, Char solved his issues with the Zabi family, so even making him kill Mineva wouldn’t have made sense as any kind of vengeance story at all, so think that he just let her be or forgot about her. Otherwise, the story would have easily focused on how tragic of a character Mineva is, and I didn’t want to dive into that kind of thing.
It’s briefly mentioned in the movie, but if Char really is a lolicon, for better or worse, he would teased Mineva. She would have been harassed and tormented, or even molested. But either way, it would have been a torture for her. I personally don’t like stories like that. This kind of desire to portray the inherently sadistic side of humans doesn’t really suit robot stories. So, let’s assume that Char forgot about her. Otherwise, it would be a rotten story…
Obviously, I completely understand your interest to know about the story of the two of them. Maybe it’s because “Char’s Counterattack” has finally left my mind, but the truth is that I could create another story about both Mineva and Char.
— Mineva too is a character with a considerable weight in the story, isn’t she?
For this very reason, isn’t it okay for at least one little girl to be forgotten for once? In Beltorchika’s case, I had plans for her but then withdrew them, so it’s fine. I guess it’s because this aspect of choosing which character to pick up is an inherent trait of “Gundam” as a work. That’s why I think I shouldn’t always use every single character. I feel like if I did everything too methodically, it would become an unhealthy practice. I think I’ll definitely include Mineva in the extra edition and deal with her… no, I won’t (laughs).
Anyways, if I were to deal with her, I would probably do it with an adult Mineva. Otherwise it’ll end up naughty and I’ll feel bad, so I’d wait for her to come of age and not be a child anymore. Once you become an adult, it’s okay for you to decide things by yourself. Now that I have this idea in my mind, I’ll use it for the next “Gundam”… (laughs).
~ Even if Amuro and Char died in “Char’s Counterattack”, their existence will never disappear. ~
— Well then, lastly, I wanted to ask about Amuro and Char in “Char’s Counterattack”, which of these two characters do you personally prefer?
Well… as their creator, I shouldn’t answer that; I know them both very well. Anyways, Amuro is an ordinary character, while Char is more like a recipient for the desires and ambitions of many people. However, everyone knows that to become something like Char is highly dangerous, so I have the feeling that if I have to choose which one I prefer, Amuro would be my choice. Also, Char as a person is what I tried to become myself, and since I couldn’t, sometimes I feel like I can’t stand that bastard. This is just a comparison between the two, but I really cannot say which one of them I like the most in my heart.
However, as a deep emotion I feel towards both of them, I do feel both Amuro and Char did a great job until now. I also think there is some problem with the meaning of “Counterattack” in this movie.
— I believe that at their core, their personality is the same for both of them. Did you make them with this in mind?
If that’s what you feel, there’s nothing I, as the creator, can say. But it’s not like I made them with that intent in mind.
— There have been moments when I figured it wouldn’t be strange if the two of them were swapped.
I see, I too totally understand that. That’s why Amuro and Char should be able to become good friends. Yet, people with the same “character” can never become one. Especially in a community, whether it’s a nation or a company, only one person can stand at the top. The remaining people have no choice but to become their assistants or subordinates. But Amuro and Char are both men who stand at the top. And that’s exactly why they can’t exist simultaneously. To make that possible, it would take the world to change.
Ultimately, “Gundam” is a war story because mobile suits are there; if I were to depict only Amuro and Char in a different way than the others, it would no longer need to be a war drama. That’s right, “Gundam” has created a world that led to characters like those two to appear, in other words, it gave life to characters whose personality even I cannot change. In that sense too, it was impossible for me to deliberately mess with them.
— It often happens that characters become independent from their creator.
Yeah, it’s like that. It’s not as easy as it sounds on the surface, but it’s definitely as you said. They exist as humans with actual personalities. That’s why even if Amuro and Char died in “Char’s Counterattack”, their existence will never disappear.
SHINSEIKI 