Gundam Always Finds Another Child

Before Neon Genesis Evangelion existed, before Hideaki Anno had worked through whatever needed working through, the Gundams were already flying. The original Mobile Suit Gundam series aired in 1979, and what it set in motion has never really stopped: TV series, films, comics, action figures, a life-size Gundam statue standing outside a shopping center in Odaiba that you can walk up to and touch. The franchise became the connective tissue of a certain kind of Japanese pop-cultural identity in a way that’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t grow up adjacent to it.

The Universal Century timeline is where the serious Gundam lives—the one with actual stakes, colonial politics, the grinding horror of extended space war, and giant robots serving as the machinery of all of it. Mobile Suit Gundam: Endless Waltz, Unicorn, Iron-Blooded Orphans each found something new to do with the formula. The formula, for the record, is this: take children, put them in mobile suits, make the children do terrible things, make the audience care about the children before the terrible things happen.

Mobile Suit Gundam Narrative is part of something called the UC NexT 0100 Project—the franchise’s attempt to push the Universal Century timeline forward from where Unicorn left it. Children, again. Pulled into a space conflict, again. Unfamiliar mobile suits that may or may not cooperate with whoever ends up inside them. The specific appeal of Gundam has always been this combination of scale and intimacy: a kid with no business being in a cockpit, in a cockpit, deciding whether to keep going or not. Narrative, which arrived in Japanese cinemas in late 2018, understood that combination well enough to make the formula feel, once again, like it had something left to say.