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Yoshiyuki Tomino, the man who created Mobile Suit Gundam and in doing so accidentally founded one of the largest plastic-kit economies on the planet, is 85 today. Born in Odawara, Kanagawa, on 5 November 1941, he has been working in Japanese animation since the early 1960s, and X is currently awash with birthday messages and photographs of Gunpla, which seems about right. Few people get to mark their birthday with thousands of strangers holding up little robots they’ve assembled with a pair of side cutters.
He started at Osamu Tezuka’s Mushi Production, drawing storyboards and writing scripts for Astro Boy. In 1977 he directed Zambot 3, the series often credited with earning him the fan nickname “Kill ‘Em All Tomino” for his habit of thinning out his casts. Then, on 7 April 1979, came Mobile Suit Gundam, which took the giant-robot show away from superheroes in tin armour and made it a war story about frightened teenagers in mass-produced weapons, with supply lines, politics and people who didn’t come back. Combat Armor Dougram and a small army of “real robot” shows followed in its footprints.
Tomino kept going long after most people would have settled for one revolution. There was Space Runaway Ideon, whose ending remains one of the bleakest in anime, then Aura Battler Dunbine, Heavy Metal L-Gaim, Zeta Gundam, Char’s Counterattack, Victory Gundam, Brain Powerd, Turn A Gundam, Overman King Gainer and Gundam: Reconguista in G. He has even written lyrics for his own shows under the pen name Rin Iogi, presumably so that the theme tunes couldn’t be blamed on the man killing everyone off.
His prose is still working too. The Hathaway’s Flash novels, which he wrote in 1989 and 1990 as a sequel to Char’s Counterattack, are being filmed as a trilogy. The second film, The Sorcery of Nymph Circe (trailer above), opened in Japan in January, reached American cinemas in May and has since gone to Netflix.
The establishment has caught up with him at last. He was named a Person of Cultural Merit in 2021, and this spring he received the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, a rare honour for an anime director. Characteristically, he used the moment to point out that the staff make the work by hand and that he is basically in a background role. He’s less modest about the fans. In an Animage interview this spring he grumbled that plenty of Gundam fans say things “a far cry from anti-war”, a reminder that the man who sold the world model kits of war machines always meant the war part to hurt. Back in 2021, closing in on 80, he told TV Asahi he had no problem declaring that he would crush Demon Slayer and Evangelion. Retirement, evidently, is for other people.
Gundam itself turns 50 in 2029, when the Tokyo National Museum plans an exhibition devoted to Tomino. In the meantime, Legendary’s live-action Gundam film, with Sydney Sweeney and Noah Centineo, went into production in Australia this spring. The odds of Tomino having something pointed to say about it are roughly the same as the odds of a Zaku exploding in the first reel.
Here at SFcrowsnest we’re raising a mug of tea to the old man. Happy 85th birthday, Tomino-san, and please, nobody kill off anyone on the cake.
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