THE DAY THAT ANIME CHANGED Jonathan Clements on the day that Gundam marked the start of a new era.
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e knew that there would be trouble when the 10,000 giveaway posters ran out. The crowd was already way too large to fit into the Shochiku Cinema, and risked spilling out into the street to block the traffic near Shinjuku station. One misplaced surge, thought Yoshiyuki Tomino, and the press would be reporting unruly thugs and broken bones, not the release of a sci-fi cartoon. He had to do something, and fast...Gundam’s original backer, the toy company Clover, declared it a failure. The ratings were not impressive, barely scraping a 5% audience share, back when 5% was nothing to write home about. The complex storylines were thought to alienate many young viewers. Not long after the first episode aired, 41 years ago on 7th April 1979, the sponsor called for radical changes, but the next six months were already largely locked in and coming down the pipeline. Clover cancelled the show with two months still to run of its contracted 52 weeks, and there it should have ended. Gundam only started to take off in re-runs, after the Bandai company found success in July 1980 with 300-yen model kits, the GunPla, based on the show’s war machines. “It was,” wrote Toshio Okada, “not really Gundam that became a social phenomenon, but GunPla.” By the beginning of the 1980s, there were Gundam fan clubs in schools and colleges – a demonstrably older audience of model-making consumers was enjoying the show alongside the kids who were supposed to be watching it. Gundam was a feature of nascent costuming culture; sequel shows began to continue its mix of drama and tragedy alongside relentless mecha product placement. In an attempt to
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capitalise on the new-found love for the show, its makers re-cut the original TV series into three movie-length features. The director, Yoshiyuki Tomino, promised to be on hand at the first film’s premiere, where he promised to make a “declaration of a new anime century” (anime shinseiki sengon), on 22nd February 1981.When Tomino’s plane got in from Osaka at nine in the previous evening, he faced a delegation from the Shochiku publicity department, reporting that 300 fans were already camping outside the cinema.“I get it now,” said someone. “Fans are amazing.” Tomino didn’t give it much thought. He was half-expecting the hard-core to turn up early, and busied himself with the plan for the day, which would involve taking to the stage after lunchtime, and making his “proclamation of anime’s new century”. This was what the press releases had been promising, and it amounted to Tomino’s evangelistic challenge to the industry to accept what fandom had become, or was about to. It had been eighteen years since the broadcast of Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy. The kind of nutcases who were camping out overnight in Shinjuku had been kids then, but now they were on the cusp of adulthood. It was time, thought Tomino, that anime itself grew up, and admitted that there was an adult audience. He had watched them, he wrote in his memoirs, grow through the 1970s, from primary school to middle school, to high school. Now they were going off to college, and that was fated to change the kind of anime they wanted to see. He would, of course, be proved right. The video era was only a couple of years away, and with it would come the technology to distribute more mature works direct to these newly adult
