Beyond Gundam and Eva
Kazuya Tsurumaki, director of Gundam GQuuuuuuX and longtime lieutenant of Neon Genesis Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno, recently gave an interview that set off alarm bells in Japan’s animation industry.
His warning was stark: mecha anime might not survive the next ten years; not even Gundam itself.
Screen cap: Sunrise
Coming from a man who not only helped forge Evangelion but has now helmed one of Gundam’s most ambitious entries, the statement carries serious weight. Tsurumaki’s point is simple. The generations who grew up idolizing bikes, cars, and, by extension, giant robots, can’t support mecha forever. And their successors don’t share the same frame of reference. Kids no longer daydream about jumping into the cockpit of a larger-than-life machine piloted by hand. Instead, they dream about intuitive, immediate power like magic, psychic abilites, and video game-style control schemes.
Related: Anime Ground Zero
This insight dovetails with the phenomenon I call Anime Ground Zero.
The fact few otaku want to face is that Anime as a medium never recovered from a sudden loss of institutional knowledge in the late 90s. That implosion created a recursive loop wherein every attempt to reinvent mecha boiled down to Gundam-aping war soap opera or riffs on Eva-style psychological deconstruction. Sometimes both.
The Gundam/Eva dialectic has locked the Eastern mecha genre in a hall of mirrors. No matter how experimental a new mecha series looks at first, it usually resolves into one of two scripts:
Kids caught in endless war
kids paralyzed by angst and existential dread.
Tsurumaki is right to notice that these scripts no longer strike a chord with younger audiences. But Western mech fiction hasn’t fared much better.
Image: Catalyst Games
From Battletech games to grimdark mil-SF novels, the Western mechanical behemoth can usually be reduced to a stompy coffin. Its function is to showcase the inevitability of attrition and the crushing futility of war. Instead of heroes, we get statistics lumbering into a galactic meat grinder. Wonder is replaced with spreadsheets and casualty rates.
Combine Japan’s recursive loop with the West’s obsession with mechanized doom, and you see why mecha as a whole has lost its spark. Both sides forgot the foundational element that once made the genre compelling.
And that key element is awe.
Screen cap: Sunrise
If Gundam; if mehca, is to survive, it must break free of both prisons. The solution isn’t to double down on digipaint, sterile CG, or yet another subversion of superior precursors.
Instead, the solution is synthesis.
Related: Why the Anime Industry Should Return to Hand-Drawn Cel Animation
From Japan, take the visual bravura, the emotional intensity of character-driven stories, and the meticulous craft once delivered by cel animation. Give us machines that feel heavy, tangible, and alive as only hand-drawn artistry can convey.
From the West, import robust worldbuilding, mythic themes, and rich lore. Give us stories in which the machine isn’t just a weapon or a trauma metaphor, but a fully realized character that pulls its weight to drive the plot.
The fusion of these elements could transcend the Gundam-Eva feedback loop and the Western meat grinder to secure mecha’s relevance for another fifty years. Imagine a series that weds the operatic intensity of Macross to the mythos of Warhammer 40,000, or one that delivers the scathing commentary of Starship Troopers with the punch of Zeta Gundam.
We don’t need to convince kids that piloting a robot matters. Instead, we need to show them the power of connecting to a greater source of strength.
Mecha has always been about more than steel and firepower. Done right, it is a canvas for exploring humanity’s place in the cosmos, our relationship to technology, and our thirst for transcendence.
Tsurumaki is right that our concepts of giant robots must be updated. But that doesn’t mean discarding them, it means restoring the awe and wonder that’s been hard to come by since Anime Ground Zero. That’s how you give the audience a cause worth fighting for instead of another meaningless battlefield or pop psychologist’s couch.
The Gundam franchise can survive another ten years and more if it dares to break the feedback loop. And if the mecha genre as a whole can embrace this East-West synthesis, it won’t just survive, but flourish.
For a unique action-adventure that busts through the dead end of twentieth-century mecha by merging the best of East and West, read my military SF epic Combat Frame XSeed!
Brian Niemeier is a best-selling novelist, editor, and Dragon Award winner with over a decade in newpub. For direct, in-person writing and editing insights, join his Patreon.