Display MoreEveryone in the Wing Commander movie club seemed to be very excited to watch Mobile Suit Gundam with friends! And that's certainly something to be happy about. For something made from television episodes, the film looked incredible. Colorful and vibrant. And the story holds up maybe better than it ever did as what seems like a teenage fantasy about flying a robot to save the world (and your mom) meets the grim realities of war. Another one of those wonderful anti-war stories that it's too easy to convince yourself isn't.
We talked a lot about the influence Mobile Suit Gundam had on the style of the Wing Commander I concept art. Here's a good look at White Base and the Snakeir whose look it touched!
And here's a quick comparison of our Newtype heroes…
The movie's story opens at a human colony located at an Earth Lagrange point. The Wing Commander IV novel seems to reference this Gundam backstory exactly at one point… and it moves the space station seen in the Wing Commander IV intro, Orion, to L5!
The presence of the battle station at the Lagrange point surprised him. He knew that the Orion had been in low earth orbit as part of Terra's last line of defense and that the Kilrathi had severely damaged it in their attack. He tapped the cup against his teeth as he tried without success to recall a newsfax or tape-delay broadcast reporting the move. He doubted that it had been reported, a lapse he found curious given the station's size and the tremendous expense of boosting it up Earth's gravity well.
Why the sudden interest in L5? he wondered. A body placed there would remain indefinitely, courtesy of the offsetting tugs of gravity of Earth, Luna and the sun. He knew that in Earth's ancient history there had been an attempt to use L5 and the other Lagrange points as construction sites for huge metal colonies, but the discovery of the jump-drive and the plethora of main sequence stars with Earthlike planets had nixed that. Now, it seemed someone was taking a step back in history.Finally, I'm curious about this one but haven't found out exactly what it is. There's a technique that anime like Mobile Suit Gundam and shows following the style like Wing Commander Academy where a ship might have a beautiful painted background in close up and then a completely different look from further out the next shot. It's more than just the difference between a painted background and a cartoon cel, it's a delibrate choice where the closeup has a very distinct style and the wide does not. The jump between the two seems like the point! Here's the White Base and the Tiger's Claw with exactly this transition:
Sully is roughly as tall as a Gundam.
