The 28th Tokyo International Film Festival saw a special screening on October 23 of Gundam Reconguista in G(G-Reco), part of the Mobile Suit Gundam 35th Anniversary Project. A talk show was held at Tokyo Shinjuku Piccadilly, where director Yoshiyuki Tomino, who was involved in production of the series for the first time in 15 years since Turn A Gundam, and Yoichi Ochiai, who participated as media artist, talked about a variety of topics including animation theory, computer engineering, and energy problems.
The animation industry is now in a golden age of CG, however, this work consists of mostly hand drawn pictures. Director Tomino says the reason for this is “to talk it up a little, the 20th century has a culture of things being built on top of each other, and we thought, we’ll show them with G-Reco, something that will go down through the ages. We are showing off a little, although some consider that wrong.” He proudly said “it is said that hand drawn anime looks really ‘different’, and in light of this, I want this culture to remain as a separate genre.”
The story is an extension of Universal Century which is described in Mobile Suit Gundam, and inherits ideas like “Minovsky particles”, which can disable wireless communication. Tomino says “when making a drama, there has to be a struggle. I came up with the idea of “cutting off communication” to create struggle in space, without the use of long distance weapons.” He praised his work, saying “we still make these love-hate drama in which a struggle comes along, and in order to love one another we have to embrace each other where we can. In the sense that there is no way that we can change this principal, I think this is still a brilliant idea.”
Furthermore, he revealed that “I made the universe of G-Reco because I wanted the next generation of people to really think about the problem of consumption of resources on earth, as well as the space development.” Regarding structures like the orbital elevator that appear in the drama, Tomino asserts that “moving things of that scale using artificial power would be absolutely impossible with the green energy that we have now.” He made a strong appeal to his viewers, saying “I hope that today’s teenagers can come up with a method to overcome this issue. Today I have talked for the first time about how I made G-Reco in order to visualize how it is necessary for us to put more effort into research, especially space engineering. People who look at this universe as just robot-stuff might be surprised, but I want them to understand this idea.”
Ochiai also added that “when I was 14 years old, I watched Z Gundam, and I got really excited about how we could improve the human race”, thinking back over his own youth, and agreed that “it is really important that a strong message can be understood through the anime G-Reco”. Tomino also spoke of how, although he has not found the time to make anything for adults, he made G-Reco in order to plant the seeds of new thought in 10 to 15-year-olds. He gave a shout-out to all the teenagers in the audience- “keep it up!”
The news provided by eiga.com 
