So what do y'all think of Yoshiyuki Tomino's Mobile Suit Gundam franchise?

It's famously split into several alternate universe, with the "Universal Century" being the mainline and most popular setting, consisting of: 1979's Mobile Suit Gundam 1985's Zeta Gundam 1986's infamous ZZ Gundam the 1988 movie Char's Counterrattack and the mostly forgotten about F91 (1991) and Victory Gundam (1993), as well as several OVAs like the excellent 08th MS Team (1996).

Among the series set in alternate universes are Wing Gundam (1995), SEED Gundam (2004) and 00 Gundam (2007).

The series has always had critique of war and militarism as its core element, starting from the very early days of the series, (in the UC) focusing on a story of an ideological conflict between earth humans and spacenoids, the effects of continued human inhabitation of an ecologically very fragile Earth, as well as the rise of fascism. Basically, the story that Gundam tells is leftist from the start, though most people do miss that.

As for Tomino himself, I had heard he associated with communists and other comrades back in the day, but the ideological conviction of his isn't as clear as it is for example with Mamoru Oshii, nor has he been vocal about it as far as I know. I recently also discovered, much to my disappointment, that he disappointingly made some extremely antisemitic comments [Link contains Zeta Gundam spoilers] in an early draft of Zeta Gundam from 1984. Thankfully, none of that made it to the actual anime and Gundam has mostly been abandoned by Tomino himself, who basically attempted to kill off the franchise back in the 90s.

Regardless, I really enjoy Gundam from the content that I have seen myself (Mobile Suit Gundam 0079, the movie trilogy version; Zeta Gundam; F91; Hathaway's Flash and 08th MS Team), but idk what to think of Tomino and how much of his erratic quality of directing and storytelling and politics that I can't figure out can be attributed to his sadly pretty bad state of mental health that he had at times during his life.

Also, contrary to popular belief, Gundam is indeed an anime

  • Gosplan14 [any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    The antisemitism thing I really don’t know what to think of, certainly looks pretty bad but he’s never brought any of that stuff up since thankfully.

    Apparently there was a major rise in antisemitism in Japan in the 80s due to some garbage books about the topic full of tired tropes from the west being published and them becoming bestsellers (aided by the media in their pursuit of profit, of course), leading to a fad of antisemitic material being published in the late 80s. An alternative explanation I saw was that Tomino's exposure to leftist politics meant that some of the, um, more enthusiastic anti-zionist groups influenced him.

    Whatever the explanation, at least that garbage never influenced his work as far as I'm aware.