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No Spoilers Thoughts on the new Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway Film

Finally had a Gundam film showing at a theater close to where I live after like 30 years of watching this franchise

Key art for Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway - The Sorcery of Nymph Circe; a brown haired man in the center of the frame with a blonde woman and a man in a military uniform taking up the right hand of the frame, and a ridiculously clunky Gundam Mobile Suit on the left

Thursday night I saw Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway: The Sorcery of Nypmh Circe in theaters.

It's a weird experience seeing a new release from a franchise that's meant a lot to you throughout your life in theater for the first time. I don't wanna retread old posts too much but but growing up incredibly poor in the 80's/90's, one of the few TV channels I could reliably watch with an on-top-of-the-TV antenna was my local PBS station, KTEH which had been spearheading a project to get anime that had never been aired in the states before. Many franchises had their US-first debut on this small, arguably "lesser" PBS affiliate (KTEH was a 'joke' compared to KQED in San Francisco) most notably Evangelion and Serial Experiments Lain but also the original Mobile Suit Gundam, aka 0079.

This means I have got into Gundam early in its Western availability but watched predominantly in release order. This is not the common experience with Gundam for people my age specifically in the US because we generally did not have access to the original Mobile Suit Gundam until after Toonami had aired both Gundam Wing and G Gundam. Plus, when 9/11 happened they stopped airing 0079 out of some network mandate; it was right around the battle at Loum episode so even people who did watch it on Toonami didn't often get to see it to the end.

Yet here I am, having kept up with effectively all Gundam (Build included) and due to where I've lived or schedules, there's never been a time where seeing a new release in a theater was an option until now.

But man. How to even talk about this movie

For starters, this is a 2026 film that is:

  1. A sequel to a film from 2021 (Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway)
  2. ...that was adapted from a series of books released in the late 1980's (Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway's Flash)
  3. ...serving as a continuation of the character arcs from a seminal 1989 anime film (Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack)
  4. ...of which that film has two different novelization adaptations by the same author (Mobile Suit Gundam: High-Streamer and Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack - Beltorchika's Children)
  5. ...and the story told in any of the above 3 forms is a 'final arc' of the characters and world state from several preceding full-length anime series' (Mobile Suit Gundam - 43 episodes, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam - 50 episodes, and Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ - 47 episodes)

The theater was mostly empty which I kind of expected going in; when I bought the tickets online a few hours before the showtime, only 3 seats had been reserved and by the time we were in our seats that had not changed. Surreal experience. One of the other theatergoers had a shirt with the Wing Zero Gundam on it. Hell yea.

There's a like 2 minute "Previously on Gundam Hathaway" at the start of the film that at least explains quickly the events of the previous entry, but that pales in comparison to actually understanding why the world is in the state it is or who any of these characters are and what they want. Trying to imagine the poor soul who wanders into this film without ever having seen a Gundam property, or better yet - Wing only.

I really enjoyed the pacing of the film - the restraint in a lot of franchise-specific tropes, and (not a spoiler but) someone actually having an on-screen discussion of how Minovsky particles (the series' "this is why mobile suits are needed" scifi magic handwaving) actually works was objectively funny as hell even if it felt out of place.

The animation is a mix of gorgeous and somewhat...uncanny valley? I'm used to anime using drawn character foregrounds and more phototrealistic backgrounds but some of those backgrounds are 3D models and there's some bizarre incongruities. A standout example of this being one of the final shots from the first film that's reprised at the beginning of Hathaway 2; the titular character walking on the deck of a boat with the CG background and camera movement outpacing the rate in which his drawn feet are moving. I get that this feels like a massive nitpick but it highlights how weird some of the 'style mixing' is.

I also appreciate how mostly true to the books they are; there are plenty of direct lines and a sense of "it's ok if you don't know what we mean by this" handling of proper nouns in a way that feels natural. And that's saying something for material originally penned by Tomino even if he wasn't involved in these films at all.

There's sadly a lot of gender nonsense and "men writing women" / "attack of the male gaze" at work which sadly is par for the course but surprisingly a fair amount of dignity is given to Gigi, a character who I think a lesser anime would spend more time being abjectly creepy about. Like yea, they make sure to get her bathing and in a swimsuit multiple times but it's significantly less gross than I would have expected.

The only other elephant in the room for this particular series of entries in the Gundam franchise is how absolutely fucking awful the Gundams look to me; I get that this is not a popular opinion and I'm very picky about how mechs look which many people don't care about - but the designs of the Ξ (Xi) Gundam, the Penelope Gundam and the Alyzeus are these bloated, over-designed chonky fucking nightmares that I find incredibly unpleasant to look at and (probably more importantly) hard to properly clock during combat sequences - especially since the latter tend to happen at night in darkened scenarios1.

The Ξ is bad enough:

Mechanical design for the RX-104 XI Gundam; an incredibly beefy design with massive shoulders and looks like it would crumble under its own weight As always, thanks to MAHQ for being a solid repository of mech media resources

The 80's powersuit shoulders feel like they'd massively limit the range of motion of the arms, etc etc

...but what the fuck are going on with the Penelope and the Alyzeus??

mechanical design for the RX-104ff Penelope gundam; it looks like a mech wearing its dad's clothes and a large mechanical dragon head sticking out the top
Mechanical design of the TXff-104 Alyzeus; an escher drawing of a mech with bird feet

The bird feet is the only thing the Alyzeus (right) has going for it; you can see there's a normal-ass gundam hidden in there under all the layers of escher-like nonsense slapped on it, but man.

There are lore reasons why this era of mobile suits are bloated, overdesigned hubris machines and I get that but I'm very happy knowing that in-universe, Mobile Suit designs will eventually simplify, reduce in size and we'll get smaller suits like the Victory Gundam (15m tall compared to the Ξ's 26).

So should you watch it?

I mean, I had a blast and the only real downside of the film is having to wait likely 4-5 years before the final installment is out. I've read the books so I know how it ends, but seeing it animated and on the big screen is different, y'know?

If you've ever interfaced with Universal Century Gundam, you have a way to watch at least Hathaway 1, and 2 is in theaters near you? Go for it, dude. The end credit song had me cracking up.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Here's a cat - her name is Selmers

A tortioseshell cat sitting on a cat mansion, bathed in light from outside

  1. I saw it at an AMC and have heard anecdotally from others that AMC is really bad about screen calibration? I take it with a grain of salt but there are some DARK scenes in this film that it was really hard to make out - but the major mobile suit fights of the first film were ALSO set during the night and hard to watch on my home screen, so who can say.↩

#cat named selmers #gundam #hathaway 2 #mechs #mobile suits