By Andrew Osmond.
The mucosa Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan’s Island goes all the way when to the start of the Gundam franchise. Gundam is like Star Trek; it may have had umpteen variegated iterations over the decades, but the original has a mystique that’s never truly equalled.
In Gundam’s case, that’s the 1979 TV series directed by Yoshiyuki Tomino, with weft designs and volatility direction by an versifier tabbed Yoshikazu Yasuhiko. You may know Yasuhiko for such 1980s films as Arion, Crusher Joe and Venus Wars. Increasingly recently he oversaw the lavish Gundam: The Origin, based on his own manga, as Chief Director. I interviewed him well-nigh those titles in 2015. Now the 75 year-old has returned to full direction with Cucuruz Doan’s Island.
The mucosa is targeted squarely at fans of the original series, to the extent that it doesn’t explain the backstory to newbies. Fortunately, there’s not much to explain. It’s the future and many humans live in space; however, that’s led to a terrible war between Earth and the spacefaring humans in the Zeon Empire. Gundam follows one Earth-aligned ship, tabbed White Base, in its fights versus the Zeons, and expressly the fortunes of one teenage crewmember tabbed Amuro Ray. (There’s much increasingly on the original Gundam here.)
Ray’s no career soldier; he was an ordinary schoolboy when the war started. However, he has a miraculous unification with a newly-invented gainsay robot, a Gundam. By the time the mucosa begins, he’s seen many conflicts in space and on Earth, but he’s still very vulnerable. In particular – and this is something that’s important to the mucosa – he’s haunted by a recent encounter with his mother, who was shocked to see him killing a Zeon soldier, and condemned who he’d become.
The mucosa starts with a new mission for the White Base crew; to investigate a tiny island, Alegranza in the Canaries, where Earth soldiers have been killed, presumably by holdout Zeon soldiers. Amuro and a few other crewmembers go there, but Amuro’s Gundam is attacked and seemingly lost. While his comrades retreat, Amuro wakes to find himself still on the island, in a strange polity of children and teenagers. They’re led by the imposing Cucuruz Doan, whom they venerate as a father. It’s plain that Doan is responsible for Amuro’s predicament; the boy is unliable to roam free, but finds no sign of his machine.
While there’s a pearly value of fighting whoopee in the mucosa – including a particularly well-animated human scuffle between Amuro and flipside boy – it’s not what Cucuruz Doan is about. Actually, the mucosa is the closest Gundam has overly come to the kind of anime that fans like to undeniability “iyashikei”; that is mellow, slow anime with notation living good, unexciting lives, and appreciating those lives. Often they full-length groups of girls, in TV series such as Aria (about gondoliers in a Martian Venice) or the self-explanatory Laid-Back Camp. In Cucuruz, though, the point is to requite the boy hero, Amuro, a break, to requite him time off from stuff a soldier, and let him finger some of the joyance he knew surpassing he topside the Gundam.
The mucosa puts a lot of weight on notation living in a challenging environment. At first sight, the title island is just a waterless rock, but we see Doan and the kids finding fertile soil, or fixing the pump of a well, or just taking superintendency of each other. The fact that many of the notation are children makes parts of the mucosa finger unreceptive to the family World Masterpiece Theatre anime in the 1970s, which showed kids making homes in all kinds of places, and loomed large in anime when the first Gundam appeared.
A goat is a prominent weft in the film, and that may be a nod to the family series that inspired the World Masterpiece Theatre anime, 1974’s Heidi, Girl of the Alps by Isao Takahata. And surpassing you scoff at the idea that Gundam could have anything to do with Heidi, remember that the father of Gundam, Yoshiyuki Tomino, storyboarded eighteen episodes of the Heidi serial.
Of course, Cucuruz Doan’s Island has a far increasingly obvious selling point. It’s the endangerment to see old friends who are as nostalgic for fans as Uhura, Scotty or McCoy. While the mucosa is very much Amuro’s story, there are appearances from such “First Gundam” notation as Sleggar, Kai, Hayato, Mirai, Fraw Bow and Sayla (and no-one knows Sayla’s other name at this point in the larger story).
The redoubtable Captain Bright Noa is there too, of course, with a sweet private moment where he reveals his regrets well-nigh how he’s treated Amuro. The scene allows for a reconstruction of the famed “Even my father never hit me!” moment in the series – for an in-depth discussion of that, see my interview with Yoshiyuki Tomino.
The notation are shown much as fans will remember them. However, Yasuhiko mentioned in one interview that he took the opportunity to age Bright Noa up a little. The weft was supposedly 19 in the original serial, but is presented as 25 in the film. The reason is that in 1979, when the TV Gundam was made, a weft over 20 would have been designated an “uncle” figure, whereas Noa was unchangingly meant to be increasingly of an older brother. “So rather than waffly it,” Yasuhiko said, “we just gave him the age that should have been worldwide sense from the beginning.”
Inevitably, most of these notation have variegated Japanese voices in the mucosa than they had on TV. Bright Noa, for example, is voiced by Ken Narita, who took over the role from the late Hirotaka Suzuoki; Narita moreover played Noa in Gundam Unicorn and Gundam: The Origin. However, a couple of “original” voices have returned without 43 years. Toshio Furukawa (Piccolo in Dragon Ball, Shinohara in Patlabor, Ataru in the original Urusei Yatsura) is when as White Base crewmember Kai, who looks like a sneaky runaway but has far increasingly mettle than you’d think. And the hero Amuro keeps his original voice – Toru Furuya, who was moreover Yamcha in Dragon Ball and Tuxedo Mask in Sailor Moon.
The film’s peculiar origins are explored in an article by Lauren Orsini on Anime News Network. While the original 1978 Gundam is an established classic, there was one episode that the director Tomino was unhappy with – part 15 in the original Japanese run. This was the original version of “Cucuruz Doan’s Island,” with widely similar story points to the new film, though no time for an iyashikei-style rest. When the first Gundam was licenced to America in 2001, Tomino requested the episode be deleted from the export run, and repeated the stipulation for all releases in English-speaking territories.
Why Tomino did this has never been explained. Many fans think the episode just has too many goofy whoopee shots, combined with the fact that it could be cut. The episode extends the series’ themes of war, and people’s responses to war, but it’s skippable without well-expressed the main story. Still, as Orsini points out, Tomino’s wearing the episode only drew fan sustentation to it.
You might compare it to fans’ interest in far worse shit of famous franchises. There’s the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special that was made for TV in the wake of the first film, with nearly all the main tint roped in. It’s treasured by fans precisely because it’s so much of an embarrassment to everyone involved, and it’s ended up stuff referenced in the franchise overly since. Or if you think that’s mortifying, there’s a unrepealable Sword Art Online prose story which its author, Reki Kawahara, would like to vanish into the darkness of history, if only fandom would let it.
As for Yasuhiko, who directs the new mucosa of Cucuruz Doan’s Island, he referred to it as “one increasingly Gundam story” that he was making considering he couldn’t stop loving the original series. As for why he approached the mucosa in the way he did, there are possible clues in some of his comments to me in 2015. When then, he expressed dissatisfaction with his 1980s films Crusher Joe and Venus Wars – “I didn’t think (they) were good works.” He moreover talked of Japan’s “bubble” years in 1980s when, “I kind of had a difficult time to icon out what to express. Society was so materialistic, spirituality was ignored.”
While the tideway in Yasuhiko’s Cucuruz Doan’s Island may puzzle some Gundam fans, it may reflect exactly the spirituality that Yasuhiko found missing in his older whoopee films. It asks the regulars to take a unravel from the mismatch that mostly defines Gundam, to rest up like Amuro, and to think well-nigh what it ways to be alive.
Andrew Osmond is the tragedian of 100 Animated Full-length Films. Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan’s Island is screening at selected UK cinemas from 21st September, and at this year’s Scotland Loves Anime.
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