One of the more amusing ongoing memes in anime fandom is telling people that the next big adaptation will be helmed by Michael Bay. In typical form, the satire anime news site Anime Maru managed to fool people into thinking that the Hollywood action director will be supervising the latest Gundam series, Iron-Blooded Orphans.
Despite the fact that this is obviously not true fans probably bought into this likely down to the change in tone for this new Gundam show, as it is more ground based and appears to focus on gritty warfare. This is not to say that the original Gundam didn’t handle war in a somber way but this new series looks a lot more explosive (as shown below), which would fit Bay’s approach somewhat.
In reality we already know that the director for the series is Tatsuyuki Nagai, so there’s really no need to worry about Bay getting involved.
Now before anyone in Hollywood starts getting any bright ideas about having Bay do some Gundam movies in the same vein as Transformers; take a few steps back and think.
Transformers was a fun kids show where the conflict was a simple good versus evil affair. What’s more the mecha were sentient and so could function as characters in their own right. While the new Transformers movies have clearly awful mecha designs and almost incomprehensible CG, the basic kids show dynamic still comes through and broadly works.
It’s likely why the movies have been so successful, admittedly they have visually diverged from the host material to a large degree but the core narrative and general approach is fairly close to the original.
Gundam, on the other hand, is a very complex civil war set across Earth and various orbital colonies. No one side is “good” in the strictest sense and the mecha are simply machines piloted by very flawed people. It’s a complex and nuanced series, which are things that Bay doesn’t really have in his repertoire.
As for Iron-Blooded Orphans, the series starts airing on Japanese television this October and by all accounts it could be quite good indeed.
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