Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway

Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway is an animated Mobile Suit Gundam feature film that is completely disinterested in depicting its namesake powered armour in heroic or, really, even particularly exciting terms. Director Shukou Murase's film - adapted from a series of light novels co-written by series creator Yoshiyuki Tomino - relinquishes any sense that these towering machines are simply substitute, metal bodies for warring humans, preferring to depict them as the magnified horror of an international police state or a particular tempestuous form of aerial technology. When dealing with top-of-the-line suits, Murase's film obscures a relatable, human outline with layered designs that resemble an unholy mix of mythical predator and fighter jet. So, rather than build itself around futuristic armoured warfare, this flash of Hathaway leans much more heavily on the sociopolitical intrigue implied by the futuristic premise. 

We have an almost abandoned home planet slowly being bought up then fenced off by the ultra-wealthy while a cell of eco-terrorists busy themselves by attempting to assassinate members of this hoarder class ahead of an important cabinet meeting in Australia. Hathaway then is closer to a spy thriller or a police procedural than any familiarity with endless Bandai model kits might have you expect. Indeed, a pre-credit sequence set abroad a luxury passenger flight, that is shipping dignitaries between the Moon and Earth, is an opening gambit not just worthy of high-level James Bond filmmaking but exactly the sort of unassuming-then-explosive set-piece that should be utilised when introducing a new actor into the 007 fold. Hathaway Noa, our anchor in these events, foils this hijacking then (after introducing himself surname first to the audience) finds himself in the company of a young woman, named Gigi, who seems able to psychically intuit that which Noa would prefer not to share: rather than a post-graduate student of botany, Hathaway is actually a high-ranking member of the Mafty terror group. 

Hathaway lingers in Gigi's company, ostensibly to see if she intends to blow his cover, ending up as a vertex in an emerging love triangle. His competition? A Federation Colonel named Kenneth Sleg who is, actually, quite taken with Hathaway himself. Sleg threatens young, hot-shot Lane Aim - the kind of upstart character these narratives usually revolve around - that he'll happily replace this subordinate, as the pilot of the flight-capable Penelope, with Hathaway if Aim doesn't buck his ideas up. Hathaway, no stranger to human dynamics in which a tragic heroine is being pulled between ideological opposites, fixates on his role in this drama, almost seeming to contextualise the whole situation as something beyond his ability to influence. Hathaway though, through this romantic drama, finally allows himself to assume the role of an adult protagonist, rather than remain a child bystander. His longing is so despairing then as to be grimly metatextual. The abstracted and functionally useless persona that he has created for himself is commented upon, directly to him, by the few working class voices in the film as well. While Hathaway Noa strives towards a future in which the heavily polluted Earth is relinquished by mankind and left alone to heal, the taxi cab drivers and stall merchants struggling to make ends meet - with the threat of a forced expulsion by Federation jackboots hanging over them - would prefer it if he just did something about the fascists twisting the screws.