Gundam anime creator’s greatest sadness is not being able to “crush Hayao Miyazaki”

Father of anime’s real robot genre expresses desire to destroy/deep appreciation for Studio Ghibli directors Miyazaki and Takahata.

You’d think that Yoshiyuki Tomino would be pretty happy with his 56-year career in the anime industry. As the creator of the Gundam franchise, he’s basically the father of anime’s “real robot” genre of realistic mecha drama, and also a prolific contributor to the category, with his non-Gundam works including Ideon, Dunbine, and Xabungle.

And yet, Tomino remains dissatisfied. On May 5, he gave a special lecture at Takara University’s Tokyo Media Department, in the capital’s Shinjuku neighborhood, offering advice to the assembled students who one day hope to work in the animation field. “Anime production is an industry in which people with various roles work together,” the 77-year-old director explained. “So you shouldn’t be an abrasive kind of person like I am. Being the kind of person who can be part of a harmonious ensemble is what will lead you to happiness.”

However, Tomino doesn’t seem to have been able to take his own advice. “I am still not happy,” he told the students. “Even when I think I’m going to be able to crush Hayao Miyazaki, I can’t. This is the thing that makes me the most unhappy.”

▼ With Gundam’s feet being so big, you’d think crushing one dude would be easy, but apparently it’s not.

That said, Tomino’s comments seem to stem more from professional competitiveness than actual spite of the Studio Ghibli co-founder and director of the Academy Award-winning Spirited Away. He smiled as he spoke of his desire to “crush” Miyazaki, going on to say “Once you join the anime industry, you’re surrounded by deeply talented people…If there’s someone you want to crush nearby, it inspires you to chase after your dreams to a ridiculous extent…I was able to make something like Gundam because I met Miyazaki and [fellow Studio Ghibli director Isao] Takahata.”

Tomino also had nice things to say about Hajime Isayama, manga artist and creator of Attack on Titan. “No matter how cool an anime’s visuals look, that anime will never be as good as an anime with a good story,” Tomino insisted, adding that many successful stories have come from creators’ thought and experiences from their teen years. He specifically mentioned how Isayama took inspiration for Attack on Titan’s giant, unspeaking Titans from an incident during his part-time job at an Internet cafe in which he was completely unable to communicate with an agitated, drunken customer. “Making a story with aspects that symbolize real things, like Attack on Titan has, is a way of telling a realistic story, even if it doesn’t appear like a realistic one at first.

It’s a stark reversal from how Tomino felt about Attack on Titan a few years ago, and his new opinion ties into another important part of his lecture. “There are new ideas and discoveries to be found in the everyday world. You can’t become a creator just by studying anime production,” which, ironically, is remarkably similar to the sentiment held by Hayao Miyazaki, the very man Tomino wants to crush.

Source: Yahoo! News Japan/Mantan Web via Jin
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