No mention of giant robots, let alone robots of the more “realistic” persuasion, can hardly be made without mentioning Mobile Suit Gundam. It is arguably the most prolific franchise with animation productions, comics, novels, toys, models and untold other numbers of merchandise that fans will invariably spend their money on for almost three decades now. In fact, trying to cover the entire franchise in one article is awfully ambitions and, I’m afraid, cannot be done to do it justice. So, we’ll consider this the first of three parts.

Mobile Suit Gundam solidified the “real robot” genre which didn’t involve aliens from space, spirits or gods embodied in robots or wacky bell-bottoms. The real robot genre features robots as the tools of war, human conflict in said war and, particularly in Gundam’s case, the stench of death that permeates through war. It keeps some tropes of the genre - the idea of teenager pilots - and puts spins on them that aren’t entirely unrealistic (in most cases).

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There are a lot of stereotypes about Japanese animation. First, there are the big eyes and small mouths. More negatively, people immediately think of schoolgirls being raped by giant tentacle monsters. But if there are two stereotypes about Japanese animation and comics that are almost unique to the respective mediums, it’s magical girls and giant robots. And here is your weekly dose of said robots.

If one were to speculate as to why robots became popular in Japanese animation, I’d argue that it was because of market successes from shows like Tetsuwan Atom and Tetsujin 28-gou (each known respectively as Astro Boy and Gigantor in North America) in the 1960s. One could probably argue that hokey science fiction films, especially those of the 1950s that were exported to Japan, could have also nurtured a few ideas to spin themselves into an entire sub-genre of science fiction animation, which would further break itself down into sub-sub-genres over the next four decades.

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