Production Reference
Magmix is a website focused on manga, anime, and games, and one of its regular features is a series of behind-the-scenes columns by longtime Sunrise staffer Yoshie Kawahara. For more details about Kawahara's career, you can consult her ongoing Coelacanth Kazama's True Stories feature in Great Mechanics. Her Magmix columns are archived here and I've translated a handful of them below.
The following text is copyright © Mediavague Co., Ltd.
Translator's Note: The text below is the standard introduction repeated at the end of each of Kawahara's Magmix columns.
Hiroshi Kazama (Yoshie Kawahara)
Joined the anime production company Sunrise, Inc. (now Bandai Namco Filmworks) in 1975 as a part-time student employee, working at the production studio for Reideen the Brave (Tohokushinsha). After graduation, she became a regular staff member, working as a setting assistant on Super Machine Zambot 3 and a script setting manager on Robot King Daioja, Blue Gale Xabungle, Aura Battle Dunbine, and Giant Gorg.
She debuted as a scriptwriter on Heavy Metal L-Gaim under the name Yoshie Kawahara, and was also involved in the planning and development of Metal Armor Dragonar, Mashin Hero Wataru, and Yoroiden Samurai Troopers. In 1989, she became an independent writer, and went on to write novelizations of the company's works, original fiction, scripts, content for mooks, and columns.
Since 2017, she has also been a researcher for the certified non-profit organization ATAC (Anime Tokusatsu Archive Centre), where she works on their animation archives.
Translator's Note: The original Japanese text of this column is available here.
Char, who appears in Mobile Suit Gundam, is known as the "Red Comet," and the mobile suits he pilots have a red coloring. However, strictly speaking, this color looks more pink than red. What could be the reason?
In Mobile Suit Gundam, the protagonist has a rival named Char, known as the "Red Comet." Wearing a crimson uniform and a white helmet with a face-concealing mask, and attacking at what's said to be three times normal speed, he's the greatest hero of the Zeon forces and boasts many accomplishments in battle.
The personalized Zaku mobile suit that Char pilots, however, is more like pink than red. Why is it pink when he's the "Red Comet"?
There's been a lot of speculation about this among fans over the years. In particular, there's a plausible-sounding rumor that's circulated like an urban legend, saying that they used this pink color because they had leftover paint.
Until the middle of the Heisei era, TV animation was produced through analog manual labor. The in-betweens drawn in pencil were copied onto thin cel sheets with a specialized "tracing machine," and then they were painted one by one, using dedicated "cel paints" applied with a brush.
Roughly a hundred colors were used in Gundam, but these paints were naturally being used in the works created before it. Some colors were used more frequently, and some less. The pinkish red used for Char's "Red Zaku" certainly wasn't a color that had been used all that often in the works made by the Sunrise production company (then Nippon Sunrise). But the production of TV animation programs is never that simple, and that color was chosen for sound reasons.
Imagine it if you will. If Char, wearing red clothing, were standing in front of a mobile suit in the same color... The background wouldn't be a three-dimensional color gradation like those used now, but the single color of the mobile suit's exterior. And of course, Char's clothing would be the same single shade of red. With nothing but black outlines on the screen, Char's clothing might make him seem completely invisible. We had to avoid that risk as much as possible.
There was another reason, too. By its nature, the color red turns very dark when it's converted to black and white. You don't really see them anymore, but when Gundam aired in 1979, it wasn't unusual for households to still be using black-and-white TVs. At some point, you might also be using a monochrome monitor. In those situations, the "Red Comet" would literally become a "Black Comet."
And for example, when introductory features were published in the black-and-white printed pages of newspapers and magazines, if you had a picture of a dark mobile suit against the black background of space, it would be hard to tell what you were looking at. As the machine of the protagonist's rival, this mobile suit would be getting a lot of coverage.
There was one color that gave the same impression as red, but would allow the foreground characters to be easily seen, and be clearly visible even against a black space background. That's why it became that shade of pink.
For TV animation in those days, without publicity media such as smartphones and personal computers, colors had to be chosen with these kinds of factors in mind. And besides, each of the finishing companies (the specialized companies that painted the cels) ordered their own cel paints in the quantities they needed. If one of these finishing companies had a large amount left over, that was no concern of the production company that had hired them.
Even if gossip about anime production might sound plausible for a moment, when you consider its particular characteristics and the nature of the era, you can tell the truth from a mere urban legend.
Translator's Note: The original Japanese text of this column is available here.
What color are the antennas of the Gundam that appears in Mobile Suit Gundam? They're normally white, but the toys that were released when it was on the air had yellow antennas. Why was that?
As a child, perhaps you bought an alloy toy of the Gundam. Thinking back on it, you suddenly wonder, huh? Its horns weren't white...? Could that be a mistake by the toymaker? There's actually a deeper reason for it.
Like other robot show TV anime of its time, the original Mobile Suit Gundam, which began airing in 1979, was planned as a program aimed at boys between infancy and the lower grades of primary school. Back then, robot anime merchandising primarily consisted of releasing toys rather than plastic models. The playing style, with its combinations and transformations, was tailored to the respective anime. Perhaps for this reason, they were sometimes a little awkward compared to plastic models.
Gundam toys were an example of this. Like Super Machine Zambot 3 and The Unchallengeable Daitarn 3, which Sunrise (then Nippon Sunrise) had made before it, Gundam was sponsored by the toymaker Clover Inc. But when you look again at the Gundam toys, something feels off. It's the fact that the V-antennas, or horns, that symbolize the Gundam are yellow. The horns of the original Gundam should be white, just like its head and body. Even it can't be helped that the toys differ from what we see onscreen, why were the colors different? And why just the colors of those conspicuous horns?
Toys and plastic models may look similar, but they're actually very different as products. While toys are playthings for children, plastic models are hobby goods that adults and children alike can enjoy building. The change in the color of the horns was the result of this difference.
For toys aimed at children, strict safety standards have been established. For example, you can't include small parts that a small child could put in their mouth if they came loose. This is why the "Tomica" minicars that every boy knows don't have fender mirrors. Tomicas may be minicars, but they're products in the category of children's toys.
Hard, sharp protrusions are also prohibited. Pointed parts have to be made from soft materials like rubber, so they won't pierce the skin if somebody bumps into them. This includes the Gundam's V-antenna parts. However, there are a limited number of soft materials that can precisely maintain their shape when used in small parts, and due to the nature of these materials, their colors are limited as well. That's the reason for the yellow color.
Please look again at the Sunrise robots that were turned into toys back then. On the Zambot and Daitarn, the horns, wingtips, and other sharp points were almost always colored in yellow. That's because we had the toys in mind. Products that satisfied these safety standards always had a printed "ST" mark (or sticker) on their packaging. On the other hand, plastic models that were considered hobby products didn't have this "ST" mark (although some plastic models were also ST toys).
The Gundams that were printed on household goods for children, such as handkerchiefs and cutlery, also had yellow horns. This is because they were using so-called "copyright use" merchandising artwork that matched the toys, created separately from the art used in the program itself. In those days, robot anime programs owed their existence to the toys. Gundam, too, was originally planned for little children. Those yellow V-antennas are evidence that the merchandise was made with child safety as the first priority.
Translator's Note: The original Japanese text of this column is available here.
The surprising inside story of why the Gundam, which was supposed to be a sturdy robot, was given a shield as a defensive item.
The robots featured in Japanese TV animation, from Mighty Atom onwards, have always been positioned as combatants. They come in many varieties, from radio-controlled ones to piloted ones with human passengers, sentient ones with artificial intelligence, transforming and combining ones, human-sized robots, and giant robots dozens of meters tall. Particularly in the anime programs of the late 1970s to the 2000s, there were countless "humanoid combat robots."
Among these were many giant robot works produced by Sunrise (now Bandai Namco Filmworks), where the robots wielded swords and firearms just like human beings, employing them in dynamic and flamboyant action sequences. Some of these robots also carried so-called "shields." It seems strange, though, that robots that were supposed to be so sturdy would have shields to protect themselves from enemy attacks.
The Gundam, the main robot in Mobile Suit Gundam which was considered realistic at the time, also carried a large shield. This "Gundam shield," which resembled a surfboard, was almost large enough to cover its entire body. It was originally created as an accessory item to expand the varieties of play possible with the toy, but its size and design image were apparently based on the shields carried by riot police in actual incidents at the time.
In the story, the shield provides protection against enemy bullets and attacks from striking weapons like heat hawks (weapons used by Zaku mobile suits), and is sometimes used as a cutting tool or in crude ways such as throwing at the enemy. When the machine enters the atmosphere from space, the shield also serves to protect it from the intense heat generated by atmospheric entry.
The scriptwriters and episode directors came up with these kinds of uses based on the drama in the moment, but in fact this shield had another minor purpose aside from creating these kinds of scenes. When the shield is held in front of the body, you don't have to draw the parts it's covering. The larger the shield, the more parts it conceals, and the fewer the number of lines you need to draw and paints you need to apply. You might think that's a petty reason, but in animation production, these kinds of tricks are really important.
In those days, at Sunrise, they were usually drawing 3000~5000 frames for each episode of a 30-minute TV series. The more complex the artwork, the more time it took to draw each frame, so to speed up the work as much as possible, it was desirable to reduce the number of lines in the animation. Compared to today's animation, anime drawing at the time of Gundam was fairly simple, without as many lines. But in those days everything was made by hand, so when you were producing a year-long series at a weekly pace, anything that could reduce the workload a little was tremendously valuable.
For that reason, it was very common that completed design drawings wouldn't be animated as they were. Instead, animation directors would draw "animation use" model sheets (character sheets) that omitted any unnecessary lines, to make them easier for the animators to draw. In fact, many such things that took the production situation into account went on behind the scenes of a TV series. Skillfully incorporating and handling these in the story and on the screen was a professional skill required of staffers working in TV animation.
Hearing this story might make the Gundam shield sound like a "corner-cutting item." But the production staff turned these constraints to their advantage, not only increasing the variety of the battles but also using the effect of the robot hiding behind its shield to create a sense of the danger and terror of the battlefield. Thus it also helped with the realistic depiction of the Gundam as something different from previously sturdy and indestructible super robots.
Translator's Note: The original Japanese text of this column is available here.
The broadcast run of Mobile Suit Gundam was an irregular 43 episodes in ten months. Learn about the sorrow of a production site disrupted by an abrupt reversal.
Experts on Mobile Suit Gundam will probably know this, but its broadcast ran for ten months, for a total of 43 episodes. Back then, most programs ran for a year (12 months) or half a year (six months), and it's commonly said that it was canceled due to poor audience ratings. Indeed, these weren't good, but in fact it wasn't that simple... Let me give you the inside story.
Nowadays, there are many different means of distribution for TV animation, and it's no longer unusual to produce an irregular number of episodes. But when Gundam was made, there was a kind of convention for the broadcast runs of weekly TV programs. This was the unit of three months, 13 episodes, or one cours.
Since each month has four or five weeks, if a program continues for three months, you'd multiply 4 x 3 = 12 and then add one to get 13 episodes. This unit is referred to as one cours. A half-year, or six-month, program would have 26 episodes (two cours). A one-year program would double that to 52 episodes (four cours). Most TV animation at the time ran either half a year (two cours, 26 episodes) or a full year (four cours, 52 episodes).
Gundam began with the expectation it would be a year-long, four-cours program. But in fact, as previously noted, it ended up with an irregular broadcast run and episode count that was neither two nor three cours.
Back then, the general rule was that TV anime was contracted on the assumption of a half-year broadcast, with an initial two cours or 26 episodes as a basis. During that half a year, the sponsors and others would decide whether they'd continue to support the program. I believe longtime fans will know that many anime back then changed the enemy boss around episode 25 or 26, and the robot would often get a power-up. This was because a program that had started out with a half-year contract had been extended for another half-year. In other words, the contract had been extended to 52 episodes.
The production side was always urging the sponsors to continue the contract. But if it didn't meet expectations, for example if the products didn't sell once the program had actually started, it was hard to get the contract extended. Thus the content of the work had to be reconsidered.
The difficulty here was that there was a gap of almost half a year between production and broadcast. Producing a 30-minute anime ideally required six months, and three or four months at the very least. Even if it was determined that there were revenue problems after the broadcast began, for example around episode 10, by that point the production site would already have started making episode 20 or so. From the sponsor's perspective, they had only two months to decide whether to continue past the second cours.
In the case of Gundam, due to the toy sales of the previous Unchallengeable Daitarn 3, production began with the intention of doing four cours. But when it actually began airing, the results weren't good. Sunrise swiftly began preparing to add a support mecha for the Gundam with separating and combining systems, serving as a "power-up mecha," and mobile armors that children could easily understand as disposable enemy mecha. The "G-Armor system" had already been added to the story by episode 23. Meanwhile, the production site naturally became hectic as they had more and more things to prepare.
Nonetheless, the decision was made that it would be difficult for Gundam to continue for a full year, and the decision to end it with the third cours was conveyed to the production staff. In short, it was canceled. Since the schedule had been so difficult, some of the production staff say they honestly cheered when they heard this.
But this is where Gundam became amazing. With the addition of the G-Armor system, the toys began to sell, and then the sponsors panicked. If it ran three cours, then a program that started in April would end in December. But in the toy industry, the biggest earnings come from the shopping season between Christmas in December to New Year in January, so they'd be losing money if the program itself had ended by that point. Thus a new order was handed down, saying that the broadcast would be extended through the end of January.
Since the planned 52 episodes had already been reduced to 39, and the content and structure had inevitably been changed, it was certainly tough for the director and the series structure writers when they were told to extend it again to 43 episodes. And for the production staff, who were finally starting to relax, the punchline was that they now had to struggle even harder in a frenzied rush.
In this sense, too, Gundam is a TV anime that's difficult to describe in straightforward terms. It can't simply be called "a program that was canceled." And its extension, which would normally be a good thing, left the production site dealing with an abrupt reversal due to grown-up matters. As someone who's had similar experiences in the workplace, I'd like to express my heartfelt thanks to the staff for their hard work on this program.
Translator's Note: The original Japanese text of this column is available here.
A previously nonexistent "white" was created especially for the Gundam. Why was it made?
The Gundam series includes numerous works, and recently it's even been turned into a full 3D work by overseas creators. At this point, it could perhaps be considered a national anime. Mobile Suit Gundam, the ancestor of all these various Gundams, first appeared on TV screens in 1979. Even 45 years later, it's still surprising.
As we all know, the image of Gundam mobile suits (robot weapons), especially the ones used by the protagonists, is basically "white." But many Gundam fans are aware that this isn't just white, but a color called "blue-white" (BW), a very pale sky blue with a slight bluish tint. So why wasn't the Gundam simply plain white?
The Gundam was designed by Mr. Kunio Okawara, who also worked on Science Ninja Team Gatchaman and the Time Bokan series, and was the person who first established "mechanics designer" as an occupation in Japan. But a design like this isn't necessarily created by just one designer alone.
In the case of Gundam, the character designer Mr. Yoshikazu Yasuhiko provided various idea sketches and contributed to the design of the Gundam itself. As Mr. Yasuhiko and other core staff pondered how to create an unprecedented new kind of robot anime, they were also considering colors different from the so-called "super robots" that were mainstream at the time. The test colors that had been presented, however, were strongly reminiscent of existing robot heroes. So Mr. Yasuhiko himself traced the final design onto a cel, colored it with cel paint, and submitted one that was almost entirely white.
In fact, I personally witnessed Mr. Yasuhiko working on this. He showed me the finished product and asked "How's this?" I remember wondering whether the white might make it look weak, but Mr. Yasuhiko smiled and said "That's fine." The Gundam wasn't in the same category as previous super robots. Thus "white" became the Gundam's basic color, but this created certain problems in terms of video and merchandising.
TV images are created with light, not paint. The "white" created with light is basically just light itself. It's the same thing as when the sun is at its zenith, and it looks white rather than red. When you have white on the screen, it will sometimes be overlaid by lighting effects that make it invisible, so as much as possible, you need to avoid using it over a wide area.
At the time, it was also common for manga characters to be printed on household goods for children, such as cups and handkerchiefs. These already had an underlying white color, and manufacturers would be reluctant to simply print lines on them.
Thus a special order was placed with Taiyou Color, the company that made the cel paints, to create a new color for the Gundam. This was seldom permitted due to the expense and extra labor it required. The color was white with just a little blue mixed in, and this became the Gundam's blue-white.
Mr. Hiroshi Hasegawa, who was responsible for the main color coordination on Gundam and later went on to found Studio Deen, was the one who came up with this color. There's also information to the effect that Mr. Yasuhiko chose this blue-white, but this can't be accurate since it didn't exist when he was originally painting the Gundam.
Speaking of which, it seems there's still persistent misinformation like "Char's Zaku was pink because they had leftover paint" or "the color was created just for Char's Zaku." But these are both outright lies.
As far as I know, the pink of Char's Zaku, numbered "R50," was already on the color chart of Reideen the Brave which was made at the same studio four years before Gundam. It's a color that had been continuously used at Sunrise. And the paint was ordered from Taiyou Color as needed, so there was never any leftover material that had to be used from one series to another.
In monochrome depictions, such as the program listings in newspapers and the black-and-white TVs that were still found in many homes back then, red would look like black. Blue, on the other hand, became white. So the heroes looked white, and the bad guys looked dark. Children were the main target in those days, so these considerations were also important factors in deciding the colors.
The blue-white of the Gundam, and the R50 of Char's Zaku, were chosen by color professionals taking a variety of factors into account. In the production of programs broadcast over public airwaves, great pains were taken behind the scenes.
Mobile Suit Gundam is copyright © Sotsu • Sunrise. Everything else on this site, and all original text and pictures, are copyright Mark Simmons.
