Gundam Creator Comments on Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse

Gundam is a series that has been present for decades, creating anime, movies, and figurines that fans can't get enough of. Recently though, the creator of Gundam himself, Yoshiyuki Tomino, moved his gaze from that of giant robots to a certain friendly neighborhood wallcrawler and his multiverse excursions. Using Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse as a goal post, Tomino lets Japanese animators know that the academy award winning animated feature raises the bar in terms of what can and should be done with animation moving forward.

Otaku USA Magazine noted that Tomino's comments on Spider-Verse came about thanks to his touring for the 40th anniversary of the Gundam series. Here's what Yoshiyuki had to say about Spider-Verse:

That's a very weird piece of animation. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature this year. It's an animation that looks like live-action at first glance, and it really does a lot of experimental things. I thought about why it won the Academy Award for about a week. For American movie people, for the average household, this was maybe the first animation that wasn't aimed at kids. I won't judge it, but including its technical aspects, I could really tell how much effort the people who made it put into it.

If you work in anime, you should try to overtake it, to surpass it. That's how I want people in anime to think. Like when I thought to myself, "I'm going to surpass George Lucas's Star Wars." If you made an anime that overtook [Spider-Man], I'd be really thankful.

Few would disagree that Tomino's comments here are on point. The recent Sony Pictures smash had breath taking animation and brought to life the world of Miles Morales, Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker, Spider-Ham and the rest of the Spider-Menagerie in a way we had never seen before. While the Gundam series have certainly evolved from its humble origins of "Mobile Suit", you would be hard pressed to find someone who thought the animation surpassed the levels of fluidity and motion that we saw in Into The Spider-Verse.

Gundam will certainly have the chance to catch up with Sony as it continues to create new animated series as the long running series shows no signs of stopping any time soon. In fact, Gundam even caught the attention of Hollywood, with Legendary Studios planning a live action version of the series as a feature film. Brian K Vaughn, creator of comic book series such as Y The Last Man and Marvel's Runaways, will be writing the script for Legendary. If you want a better idea of what a Vaughn mech story would look like, be sure to read his comic book mini-series, We Stand On Guard.

Do you think Spider-Verse sets a high bar for all other animation? Let us know in the comments and hit me up on Twitter @EVComedy to talk all things comics and anime.

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