The trailer for Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan’s Island came up just over a week ago. This version has English subtitles in the Closed Captions.
I have to give Bandai credit for taking a notoriously horrible original TV episode and rehabilitating it into a full feature film in this manner, up to and including using the original off-model depictions of standard models as field-expedient variatations- complete with (of course) official Gunpla releases meant to support the film's release.
They took the original TV script and put in the time to rewrite and expand it into a full feature-length narrative. That allowed the writers to take one-off Villians of the Week and make them into fully-realized characters with motivations of their own, and otherwise turn this into something ideal for the Gundam brand: a story simple enough for the primary audience (boys edging into adolescence) to appreciate, but complex enough to hold the attention of the legacy audience and the primary's parents, and thus hold its value over time.
That's because this film follows the style of Origin and Thunderbolt, and the art style is the tell. Will it be good? Likely so; this team has yet to disappoint, and the two immediately aforementioned did a lot to bring the brand to a new global audience of young adults, and I fully expect that the Gunpla sales will be satisfactory for the C-Suite figures in the company.
What does bother me is the absolute dominance of Gundam in the Real Robot space these days, but that's not Gundam's fault. I'll be seeing this film as soon as I can.
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