The Greatest Robot Anime Is Back With Something to Prove

For all of the new Gundam anime film’s hulking mechas and speaker-bursting ordnance, it’s a quiet moment of exposition that draws a red line under its politics. As the blonde clairvoyant Gigi Andalucia, the mistress of a very rich old man, sits in the back of a limousine, her cabbie idly observes how quickly the elites of society have returned from space colonies to their futuristic Hong Kong — a place once ravaged by pollution, war, and financial ruin. But he catches himself. He doesn’t want to risk getting in trouble for saying the wrong thing while chauffeuring someone above his station through a rich neighborhood.

The Earth of Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway: The Sorcery of Nymph Circe is a place where aristocrats can gobble up prime real estate while working-class folks get killed or deported to space colonies by an ICE-like secret police force. Directed by Shūkō Murase, Nymph Circe understands what Gundam diehards have appreciated for nearly 50 years: Despite its balletic robot throwdowns, its most powerful stories are anti-war parables that reflect a real world where the privileged pillage the planet, then consolidate power by keeping the population under the heel. In Nymph Circe, we follow Hathaway Noa, the tormented leader of a terrorist group named Mafty and pilot of an advanced weapon, the latest mobile suit called Gundam, to fight back against the corrupt Earth Federation.

Now, for casual moviegoers, as massively lucrative as the franchise is globally, this new Gundam anime and its nine-word title probably don’t scream “four-quadrant blockbuster,” even with the wins that anime has scored at the American box office lately. It adapts a novel by franchise creator Yoshiyuki Tomino and is a sequel to the Covid-era Hathaway, which was itself a sequel to Char’s Counterattack, a 1988 film that served as a finale to the original Mobile Suit Gundam TV series and two of its TV sequels. Nymph Circe does its best to make itself accessible to newbies through exposition, not to mention needle drops by SZA and Guns N’ Roses, but it is your daddy’s Gundam. It’s not an alternate timeline, and it’s definitely not Netflix and Legendary’s long-gestating live-action project starring Sydney Sweeney and Noah Centineo. If anything, its biggest achievement may be that despite the baggage that comes with continuing Mobile Suit Gundam’s original story, or perhaps because of it, Nymph Circe totally rips, both as a modern political thriller and as a Gundam story.

The action largely plays out along the islands and coasts of a photo-realistically animated Southeast Asia, where Hathaway conducts strikes against the Federation and his nemesis in the region, Colonel Kenneth Sleg. Carnage is never far, and Murase often depicts it through the lens of grainy footage of massacres and news reports of protests that devolved into mass-casualty events, all of it embittering Mafty and their fellow insurgents more against the Federation. Like Hathaway, the film moves deliberately; there are far more scenes of people talking through tactics or the conflict’s state of play than there are of battles.

When robotic forces do eventually clash, the struggle is explosive and largely plays out at night, lit by the muzzle-flash of green laser weapons. Murase’s goal for the combat, he told Vulture in a brief interview ahead of the film’s release, was to avoid the blue tones typically used to depict night scenes in anime and to, instead, shroud the film’s action in a “pitch-blackness” inspired by the nighttime of the real world. Doing that, he felt, would better capture the dread of not being able to see one’s enemy: “There are some elements that I myself couldn’t control, and so some scenes are even darker than I wanted them to be,” he said.

It isn’t that Murase wanted to make the film look like live action. Much of the film visually emphasizes what animation can achieve that live action cannot. This doesn’t apply only to the mobile suit battles but to the film’s emotional crux, the relationship between Gigi and Hathaway. They’re Newtypes who possess extrasensory cognitive gifts that heighten their empathy and supercharge their yearning for each other. Between sorties, Hathaway can’t stop thinking about Gigi, who is dating Sleg, while Gigi finds herself being radicalized against the Federation by her time on Earth. The climactic combat sequence triggers Hathaway’s trauma, making way for a mental crashout spun into a visual feast: The muted realism gives way to the ’80s colors and designs of Char’s Counterattack, then intercuts Hathaway’s first-person memories with a conversation with ghosts. Murase could have chosen a more photo-realistic style again here, but portraying his anti-hero’s mind breaking as he floats into a vortex of purple haze just looks cooler. It’s a reminder that Gundam’s Newtype magic still looks best in 2-D animation (in this case, enhanced by a healthy dose of CG). Likewise, Hathaway’s reunion with Gigi afterward, flying on a giant robot over the skies of Australia, would look preposterous in live action — especially if it were filmed with the kind of flat soundstage lighting that’s become all too common these days.

With a film like Nymph Circe arriving on the heels of a live-action Gundam film’s cast announcement (after years of development hell), it’s hard to get all that excited about what a film made outside the medium of anime can offer. Gundam has dabbled in live action before, with the TV-movie disaster G-Saviour. When asked about the Sweeney picture, Murase and his team at Sunrise and Bandai Namco Filmworks chose not to comment. “We focused on bringing to life the novel,” he said. “That was the goal.”

He did comment on another issue that’s dominated conversations in animation circles lately, though: the use of generative artificial intelligence. Murase denied using any AI tools to make Nymph Circe but did express curiosity, tempered by caution, in using them in animated films going forward: “I do have a desire to use it at some point. When you think about AI, the source of where the knowledge base that the AI is built on is not very clear. So from a production standpoint, we need to be very careful,” he said. He pointed out that it’s probably becoming more cost-efficient to use AI rather than the CG used to bring films like Nymph Circe to life, “but whether or not we’re going to use AI for the third chapter of Hathaway, probably not.” (He was careful to disclaim immediately afterward that his stance on AI might differ from “the official standpoint of Bandai Namco.”)

Onscreen, the results of crafting Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway: The Sorcery of Nymph Circe with human hands are clear. The film suggests that there is still plenty of life in a giant-robot IP rapidly approaching its 50th birthday even if other recent franchise entries have felt like a mixed bag. Murase and his team delivered aggressively on exactly what longtime Gundam fans crave: strikingly animated duels between menacing metal giants, political commentary in dialogue with the real world, and a meditation on the ’70s and ’80s characters and ideas that established the franchise. For now, it’s carrying the Gundam torch as less exciting entries loom in the dark.