Gundam Director Kenji Kamiyama Says His New Anime Is a Metaphor for AI Fears
Blasting ChatGPT with a giant robot sounds pretty good right now
With artificial intelligence-related anxieties at an all-time high, it appears that the next Gundam anime will weigh in on this topical issue. Mobile Suit Gundam RG XARX-ZERO creator and director Kenji Kamiyama said in an interview with Variety that he based the new spin-off series on his concerns about AI.
RG XARX-ZERO is set in a post-disaster world where humanity was sent into exile after a hostile alien artifact began to alter Earth’s ecosystem. The series follows war orphan Ray Azumi (Takeo Otsuka), who, like many unfortunate teens before him, is forced to pilot an experimental Gundam. The survivors of the catastrophe attempt to use the extraterrestrials’ weapons against them, presumably in the form of Azumi's Mobile Suit. “Can we truly master a technology we did not create ourselves, or will we end up being used by it?” Kamiyama said. “It is a metaphor for technologies that humanity is already beginning to struggle to handle in reality, such as AI.”
As for other pertinent topics, Kamiyama said, “Anti-war is a universal theme; even as the forms and meanings of war change with the times, it remains timeless. The true nature of war looks different from one era to the next. Perhaps it is the unease of the wars unfolding right now.”
Kamiyama is a veteran at reinventing beloved existing worlds. He directed The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and the Star Wars: Visions short “The Ninth Jedi” (which was recently turned into a full series with Kamiyama as supervising director). He said that the key to approaching an existing franchise is “choosing between what should be carried on and what should be built anew. I try to prepare surprises while taking the utmost care not to stray from that consensus. When that goes well, the sense of sharing the moment with the fans becomes the motivation to keep creating — that’s what I believe.”
As for how he tackled the world-building for RG XARX-ZERO, he explained why he chose to set the story after a cataclysmic event rather than during. “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.”
Kamiyama worked with science fiction author EnJoe to lay out the world’s sci-fi logic. “He (EnJoe) is a master who rearranges words through mathematics, so whether or not to examine meaning became a source of creative inspiration.” RG XARX-ZERO lays the groundwork for the accompanying Gundam: Rogue Orbit video game, which takes place decades later in the same setting.
Over the last 47 years, Gundam has become well-known for engaging with weighty subject matter. With Mobile Suit Gundam (1979), series creator Yoshiyuki Tomino shifted from telling stories about fighting aliens to focusing on human-versus-human brutality and the cost of war. Considering that RG XARX-ZERO will follow a human-versus-alien conflict, it will be fascinating to see how Kamiyama uses this distinct setup to explore the series' evergreen themes.