‘RG Xarx’ Anime Director Wants to Rewrite the Legacy of ‘Mobile Suit Gundam’ From Zero

Back at San Diego Comic-Con, Bandai Namco Filmworks unveiled the newest Gundam anime in the storied mecha franchise ( with a decidedly convoluted name ), Mobile Suit Gundam RG Xarx-Zero . With its announcement came the double whammy that it has a video game tie-in set a century after the events of the anime and that the show is being helmed by Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex director Kenji Kamiyama . TLDR : Gundam fans are eatin’ good .

Although we’re still a ways away from the Gundam anime’s release, we’ve got plenty of info about the show to wet fans’ appetites with regards to what this flavor of mecha has in store. For starters, its titular mech adheres to the anime rule of cool by sporting a tattered cloak. We love to see it.

Bandai Namco Filmworks didn’t just flex the new Gundam anime’s hype moments and aura—as the kids say. It also popped the lid on its story. Here’s the show’s official logline:

The three revelations delivered by the Autonomous Interstellar Object from another galaxy ushered in an age of unprecedented prosperity, allowing humanity to expand across the entire solar system. Gravity Control. FTL Communication. Cognitive Materialization. Yet less than ten years after its discovery, the Object that had delivered these three revelations suddenly ran rampant, spawning an aggressive, self-proliferating ecosystem. Humanity came to see this unknown ecosystem as the Apocalypse. For three months, humanity fought the Apocalypse to a standstill in orbit above Earth. Forced to abandon the planet, humanity marked that year as A.A. 1—the first year After Apocalypse. By A.A. 45, children born on the Moon and in space colonies have never known life without the Apocalypse. And on the lunar surface, a boy named Ray Azumi awakens—

io9 got a chance to speak to Kamiyama via email to talk about how he became the anime’s director, his affinity for the series, and how it’ll evolve the long-running franchise’s core themes.

Kamiyama is no stranger to penning large-scale but intimate sci-fi worlds. Ask any anime fan off the street, and they’ll tell you that Stand Alone Complex is up there not only as the best iteration of Masamune Shirow ‘s ahead-of-its-time cyberpunk manga , but it’s also one of the best anime series, period. According to Kamiyama, the secret sauce of each of his works is a deeply lived-in world with compelling characters that draw fans in from one project to the next. For Kamiyama, this phenomenon doesn’t just pertain to his own illustrious resume but to Gundam’s mass appeal over the past 47 years. While being “the guy who directed Stand Alone Complex ” comes with the hype that the new Gundam anime would carry over elements that worked for the former re-fashioned in a Mobile Suit Gundam shell, Kamiyama instead assembled RG Xarx-Zero out of the elements that Gundam has built up for nearly half a century.

While we’ve waxed poetic about now being as good a time as any to get into the original Mobile Suit Gundam , it, like One Piece , has an intimidating mountain of content to watch, made all the more complex by the existence of alternate timelines .