With Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan’s Island, a sci-fi anime film is now playing in cinemas that makes Transformers look like a child’s birthday party. Some fans have been waiting 44 years for the film’s storyline.
Huge fighting robots, crashing explosions and a war for the fate of mankind: long before Michael Bay created Transformers blockbusters with these ingredients, the anime series Mobile Suit Gundam told a dark sci-fi story about trauma and guilt. With Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan’s Island, a new film based on the series is finally playing in selected cinemas. The plot of the film is notorious among many fans of the series.
Sci-fi war with Transformers inspiration: Gundam movie based on banned anime episode
In the Gundam universe, the world is at war between the so-called Earth Federation and the Principality of Zeon. Armuro Ray (German voice: Marco Eßer), as a soldier of the Federation, leads a huge, new type of combat robot model called Gundam into battle. An order leads him to a supposedly deserted island where he meets the deserter Doan (Florian Hoffmann). He has made it his mission to protect a group of children and their guardian on the island. But the war soon catches up with the island.
The plot of the film has a scintillating history. Originally, the story about Doan and his island was the content of the 15th episode of the anime series. According to the will of series creator Yoshiyuki Tomino, it was never released outside Japan. According to a report by Anime News Network, this was due to the comparatively inferior animation, for which the media site cites some bizarre examples.
Nevertheless, Tomino and art director Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, who directed the feature film over 40 years later, were rightly convinced by the episode’s story. Cucuruz Doan’s Island offers various battle scenes for action fans on the one hand, but also questions the nature of war with a story in which there are no clear good-and-evil schemes. The film portrays bloodshed as a kind of disease that plagues the combatants. And it continues to do so long after they have laid down their weapons.
