Sunrise unveiled the first trailer for the Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan’s Island, giving us a glimpse of how the film will adapt the series’ classic hand-drawn art style into 3D animation.
First announced in September, the new film will revisit Mobile Suit Gundam’s infamous fifteenth episode. While it aired in Japan on July 14, 1979, it was excluded from the series’ original U.S. broadcast at series creator and director Yoshiyuki Tomino’s request. Yoshihisa Araki wrote the original script, and production was supervised by unit director Minoru Onoya and animation Director Kazuyuki Suzumura, in addition to Tomino.
Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan’s Island will be directed by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko (Arion, Venus Wars), chief animation director and character designer for Mobile Suit Gundam. Yasuhiko is the mangaka behind Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin, an adaptation of the original series he worked on. Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin MSD Cucuruz Doan’s Island, an Origin spin-off manga by Oono Junji, was released in 2016 and first revisited the episode and film’s titular character.
Yasuhiko previously directed a 2019 serialization of an OVA adaptation of his manga, Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin – Advent of the Red Comet. All the changes over each step of adaptation amount to a shifted focus on Char Aznable during the events leading up to the start of Mobile Suit Gundam.
Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan’s Island will feature a script by Macross, Ultraman, and Iron-Blooded Orphans writer Toshizo Nemoto, with credits to Yuuji Kaneko (Kill la Kill) as art director and Takayuki Hattori (Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin) for composition.
There’s always new Gundam on the way, but 2022 feels like an especially busy year for the series with Kong: Skull Island director Jordan Vogt-Roberts’s live-action feature for Netflix, featuring a script from comic author Robert K. Vaughn (Saga), in production at Legendary.
Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan’s Island will be released in Japan this summer. There is no word on international distribution at this time.
