Kamiyama Kenji says the alien threat driving his new “Gundam” anime is a direct metaphor for humanity’s uneasy relationship with artificial intelligence.
The director, known for “Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex” and “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim,” tells Variety he built “Mobile Suit Gundam RG XARX-ZERO” around that anxiety.
The series follows Ray Azumi (voiced by Takeo Otsuka), a war orphan who awakens on the lunar surface as the pilot of the experimental mobile suit Gundam ZERO. The story begins decades after humanity is forced to abandon Earth in the face of a hostile, self-replicating ecosystem born from an alien object’s three revelations: gravity control, faster-than-light communication and cognitive materialization. Humanity marks the years since in a calendar counted from that exile.
Kamiyama explains why he placed Ray in a world where that exile is simply the everyday condition rather than a recent trauma: “As I explored, at the setting stage, the idea that this world too has a time ‘before today,’ I came to feel that rather than spelling out the setting from scratch, it would enrich the story more to let viewers imagine and fill in for themselves what came before today.”
