AWN’s anime columnist Andrew Osmond dives into not one but two huge science-fiction franchises.
This week, I’m shouldering the modest job of discussing the science-fiction anime Gundam and Macross. These aren’t just series but epic franchises. They’re like the (mostly) live-action Star Trek and Star Wars, with umpteen iterations through the decades. Both nearly 50 years old, Gundam and Macross are newsworthy now, for separate reasons.
First, there’s a new Gundam film out in Japan, with an American release date already set. Its title – and I can’t believe it either – is Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX – Beginning. GKIDS will release it in America on February 28. As “Beginning” suggests, there’s more to come – the film’s a taster for a forthcoming TV serial, broadcast date TBC. I’ve seen the film, which I’ll say more about at the end of this column, though anyone expecting a rave or rant will be disappointed.
As for Macross, the big news is that the franchise, or most of it, has become far easier to see in America. The Hulu streaming site has added multiple Macross serials (originally made for TV or video), as well as several films and spinoff oddities. It’s big because, while Macross started in 1982, it’s been mostly blocked from American distribution for decades.
Macross and Gundam: The Basics
Macross and Gundam are action-SF franchises. You could call them space operas, though Gundam’s stories alternate between outer space and Earthbound conflicts. Both franchises feature spaceships, space battles, and the amazing war machines that serve as knightly steeds for the humans riding them. Macross was created by the anime Studio Nue, though multiple studios have worked on it (the 21st century Macrosses were by Satelight). Gundam has been handled for decades by the Sunrise studio, though the new film’s a joint effort.
A personal confession. Having watched dozens of hours of Gundam and Macross, I’ve never gotten very interested in the machines themselves. That’s no knock against the anime, but an assurance that you don’t have to invest in the tech in order to enjoy the shows, in the way you don’t have to know a TIE fighter from an X-Wing to like Star Wars. There was a funny incident during the 2021 Tokyo Olympics when Britain’s BBC managed to mistake a life-sized Gundam statue for a Transformer, bringing down fandom’s wrath. But honestly, I’m not much better.
At a sweeping level, Gundam tends to have its characters piloting huge bipedal robot power suits. Macross also has bipedal robot power suits, except that… wait for it… the Macross ones can transform into fighter planes called Valkyries, as well as a hybrid form looking like a robot chicken (no relation to the stop-motion show). Mandatory trivia: the transforming Valkyrie was designed by Shoji Kawamori, a creative mainstay of Macross. But before that, he designed a Japanese toy called Battle Convoy. This was a robot that turned into a truck, and it was rebranded in America as a “Transformer” called Optimus Prime; that Optimus Prime. The BBC wasn’t far out after all.
Honestly, though, Gundam’s and Macross’ most interesting differences aren’t their robot designs. Macross has humans fighting aliens, though there are often aliens helping humanity as well. The Macross anime often involve interstellar journeys on city-sized spaceships that make the Enterprise look like a trinket. Another central Macross idea is the fantastical power of song. Through the franchise, humanity’s encounters and conflicts with aliens are resolved by songs and the girls who sing them. That’s itself linked to how both humans and aliens have a common origin in Macross, shaped by the ancient, long-vanished “Protoculture” civilization.
Gundam’s vision is bleaker. Aliens seldom figure in Gundam, which is instead about human warfare. These wars are often between Earth and those humans who’ve moved to space and claim independence. The first Gundam series was created by Yoshiyuki Tomino, who wanted to show both sides of a human conflict. He told me that, “Up until the 1960s, I was collecting information about the war which the Japanese had experienced 20 years previously… War is something where millions of people meet and fight each other, each believing in justice… Considering war objectively, I thought I should describe war from both sides.”
Newbies Welcome
Both Macross and Gundam look daunting, because there are so many different iterations. But they’re mostly newbie-friendly. While different iterations reference each other, or have crossover guests, the stories almost always set up a main cast of brand-new characters, fresh to the adventure.
Admittedly, a few basic story points are perhaps not repeated as often as they should be. In the Macross franchise, for instance, one of the most important alien races is the militaristic Zentradi, comparable to Star Trek’s Klingons. They fight Earth in the original series but have a more complex relationship thereafter. Some Zentradi live with humans, using technology to shrink from their natural giant size to a human scale.
Gundam has a confusing continuity which I wrote up elsewhere, but newbies can ignore it. Both Gundam and Macross are less about continuity than recurrence. Story ideas and tropes recycle endlessly, such as the Macross girl singers or the Gundam heroes forever stumbling into robot suits and finding a techno-rapport. I’ve not even mentioned Gundam’s endlessly recurring character, a rebel in a metal mask. He’s called Char Aznable in the first Gundams, but pops up with different names, agendas and backstories through the franchise.
Getting Into Gundam
As with Star Trek or Doctor Who, the earliest TV versions of Macross and Gundam may seem unwatchably crude to viewers now. Yet I found it easy to immerse myself in the old versions when I saw them in the 2010s. Take the very first Gundam series, made in 1979. It’s one of several Gundam anime available on Crunchyroll; others are streaming on Netflix and Hulu.
When I first saw it, I had to adjust to the crude character movements; the bits of recycled animation; and the colors that seemed shockingly dull compared to the shininess of today’s space operas. And yet Gundam’s action felt so fresh, thrilling and serious together. It’s high adventure with added grit, between Star Wars and the vintage fiction of Robert Heinlein. There are childish elements – cartoony comic-relief kids, a cute ball-robot called Haro who’d become Gundam’s enduring mascot. But the show’s underpinned by Tomino’s adult mindset.
I’d certainly recommend at least trying the original 1979 Gundam and seeing if you can tolerate ye olde anime. The same series was also compiled into a film trilogy (trailer above) which you can find on Blu-ray or streaming on Netflix, but it curtails the journey too much. Of the newer, far more sumptuous Gundams, my favorite is the gorgeous, quasi-mythical Gundam Unicorn, made between 2010 and 2014, like a seven-hour blockbuster movie with an intensely romantic heart. It’s streaming on Hulu; I reviewed it elsewhere.
The 1995 series Gundam Wing has a devoted fanbase, but I found its plotting too preposterous. I prefer the exciting 2002 series Gundam Seed, though it draws so heavily on the 1979 original that it’s practically a remake. The 2022 film Gundam: Cucuruz Doan’s Island is embedded in the continuity and characters of the 1979 series, but it’s a simple, charming fable that stands alone, of a soldier forced to take a break from battle and live again. As of writing, the film’s on the Roku Channel platform.
Navigating Macross
On the Macross side, there aren’t so many individual titles to get lost in. The most celebrated is the 1990s Macross Plus, available to stream on Hulu and as a Blu-ray from Anime Limited (available via the Crunchyroll store). Whereas Macross is a generally lighter-hearted franchise than Gundam, Macross Plus is the exception. It’s an extraordinarily bitter – but pungently compelling – drama about three former best friends, two men and a woman. Their story has planes shredding clouds in lethal Top Gun test flights, and the woman’s AI double who’s a pop star and a threat to humanity. Like several Macross anime, Macross Plus exists in multiple versions; I much prefer the film.
Of the other Macross anime, I still have yet to get into 1994’s Macross 7, but I enjoyed two later series, Macross Frontier (2008) and Macross Delta (2016). Fans seem to mostly prefer Frontier, which certainly looks better. It starts and ends splendidly, and has many gloriously kinetic space battles, but I was irked by the often-silly middle episodes. Delta is preposterous from the start, with a band of super-singing girls out to save the galaxy, but I found it more consistent, with beautifully-envisaged alien planets and a plot allegorizing the trauma of the A-Bomb.
Again, both anime are available in alternate versions (the above trailer is for the second Macross Delta cinema film). I’d strongly recommend seeing the TV serials first. The Frontier films play especially well as “what-if?” riffs on their source series, starting with The False Songstress, continuing through The Wings of Farewell, and ending with a brief postscript in Labyrinth of Time. Of the other Macross titles on Hulu, it’s worth saying Macross Dynamite 7 comes after Macross 7, while two more titles are really just for the deep-cut fans: Macross Flash Back 2012 and Macross Fb7 Listen to My Song!
Macross and Robotech
I mentioned earlier that nearly all the Macross franchise is on Hulu. The exception is the original 1982 Macross series (or to give its full hefty title, Super Dimension Fortress Macross). The show's export history is, to put it mildly, convoluted.
Briefly, the 1982 Macross series was released in America in 1985, but in much-altered form. The company Harmony Gold USA licensed the series and combined it with two other science-fiction anime series of the time, Southern Cross and MOSPAEDA. The original series’ stories were unrelated, but the American dub version reworked them into a three-part multi-generation saga, called Robotech. For sci-fi fans, imagine if Japan loosely dubbed the first Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica and Space:1999 and said they were one story.
The original Macross episodes comprise the first 36 episodes of Robotech, and they’re currently streaming in that form on Crunchyroll (English voices only). I’ve only seen the 1982 Macross in that form myself. I found the early episodes charming, but the breathlessly energetic American dub eventually magnifies an increasingly silly story into all-out camp. I was intrigued, though, by the last few episodes. They show a character love-triangle in a post-catastrophe world, with some thematic foreshadows of Macross Plus. Robotech’s last “Macross” episode (part 36) upends convention by being harsher than its anime source; it kills several major characters who survived in the Japanese Macross.
The reworked Macross would lead to intractable legal tangles for decades, catching up the Macross sequels made since and mostly blocking them from having an American release. That impasse has now been resolved, leading to the flood of Macross titles on Hulu, as well as the new Macross Plus Blu-ray. Ironically, so far Hulu isn’t streaming the original 1982 Macross series, nor its acclaimed cinema remake, the 1984 film Macross: Do You Remember Love? At present, the closest thing is the Americanized Robotech on Crunchyroll.
The New Gundam
Moving to Macross’s rival franchise, I mentioned earlier that I’d seen the new Gundam GQuuuuuuX – Beginning film, in an IMAX cinema in central Tokyo. It’s made me interested enough to try more of the series when it’s available, but I’m not as thrilled as the hype made me hope.
Minimizing spoilers, the film’s a Gundam anime, and does many of the things that numerous Gundams have done before. Some of the attention has centered around the new film’s design and look, as seen in the trailer above. By Gundam’s standards, it’s a youthful glow up, but it’s nothing outstanding beside other current anime. The style advertises newness, but it might be just recursively advertising itself.
The anime has also drawn attention for the new names attached. The production is credited jointly to Sunrise, which made Gundam from the start, and Khara, which is known for a rival robot franchise, Neon Genesis Evangelion. Khara made the four Evangelion cinema films between 2007 and 2021, collectively tagged “Rebuild of Evangelion.” Hideaki Anno, Evangelion’s creator and Khara’s founder, is credited on the new Gundam as a co-writer. Its director is Kazuya Tsurumaki, who helped direct all the “Rebuild” films.
The film’s big trick is squarely aimed at long-time Gundam fans. The early trailers concealed plot secrets that link the film to much older Gundams, and which had audience members buzzing as I left the cinema screening. You can find the details in the review on Anime News Network by Richard Eisenbeis, who was more enthused by the film than I was. For me, the “big” secrets felt dramatized in a dismayingly stolid way, sapped of the visceral adventure of the first TV Gundam.
Indeed, the new film feels ominously like a retreat to the past, as its story tricks will mean nothing to any newcomer trying Gundam for the first time. I found it a relief when the more youthful style takes over midway through the film, but that’s no compliment to the overall any. Maybe the continuing Gundam GQuuuuuuX TV series will roll out legitimately delightful surprises. But so far, this anime with an unspellable name doesn’t begin to challenge the best of Gundam and Macross’s epic heritage.
