Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX, the latest anime in the long-running Gundam series, offered viewers a nostalgic throwback to the events of the original 1979 Mobile Suit Gundam anime, but with a bold parallel-universe twist. And according to the anime’s director Kazuya Tsurumaki, the production process itself was quite chaotic.
In a recent interview with Zero NiGo, Tsurumaki shared some insights into his “go-with-the-flow” approach when directing Gundam GQuuuuuuX. Apparently, the anime didn’t follow a strict plan during production, and many of the scenes and story elements that ended up in the final version were actually made on the spot, as a way to spice things up.
“When creating the anime, I just went with the flow. Of course, I did have a clear structure in mind for the whole show, and I wanted to try to follow it while making the anime, but I ended up making one episode at a time – if that makes sense,” Tsurumaki commented. He suggests that, instead of having a comprehensive plan for all 12 episodes, he tackled each episode individually, leaving gaps for new plot developments to happen during the production process itself. “It’s not like there’s no structure at all, but most of the scenes depicted around climactic moments were thought up on the spot, and a lot of them ended up not following the plot we had originally planned out,” he explained.
Although this proved to be successful, as Gundam GQuuuuuuX has been recognized as a major commercial hit, Tsurumaki wasn’t so confident about his pantsing approach initially – in fact, at the start, he was actually determined to stick to a plan, but in his pursuit of “something more interesting,” production took a completely different path.
“I did believe that we’d be able to make a good anime if we started out with a proper plan and stuck to it till the end, and that is what I initially intended to do, but as we were producing the anime, I started feeling like I want it to be more interesting,” Tsurumaki explained. “For example, if we had a set plan about where and how something happens in a certain part of the story, thinking I could make it more interesting, I’d just ditch the original plan completely and attempt to turn it into something much more amusing. That’s how the anime ended up like this.”
Apparently, Tsurumaki created the pitch for Gundam GQuuuuuuX thinking that many wouldn’t be happy with his decision to go with a “go-with-the-flow” approach, but to his relief, that wasn’t the case at all. Evangelion creator and writer of Gundam GQuuuuuuX, Hideaki Anno, was quite thrilled when he first heard the proposal, and was fueled with motivation to work on the project.
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