Kamiyama Kenji says the alien threat driving his new “Gundam” anime is a direct metaphor for humanity’s uneasy relationship with artificial intelligence.
The director, known for “Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex” and “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim,” tells Variety he built “Mobile Suit Gundam RG XARX-ZERO” around that anxiety.
The series follows Ray Azumi (voiced by Takeo Otsuka), a war orphan who awakens on the lunar surface as the pilot of the experimental mobile suit Gundam ZERO. The story begins decades after humanity is forced to abandon Earth in the face of a hostile, self-replicating ecosystem born from an alien object’s three revelations: gravity control, faster-than-light communication and cognitive materialization. Humanity marks the years since in a calendar counted from that exile.
Kamiyama explains why he placed Ray in a world where that exile is simply the everyday condition rather than a recent trauma: “As I explored, at the setting stage, the idea that this world too has a time ‘before today,’ I came to feel that rather than spelling out the setting from scratch, it would enrich the story more to let viewers imagine and fill in for themselves what came before today.”
The new setting hinges on those three revelations turning catastrophic. Asked what that premise let him explore, Kamiyama says: “Can we truly master a technology we did not create ourselves, or will we end up being used by it? It is a metaphor for technologies that humanity is already beginning to struggle to handle in reality, such as AI.”
When it comes to moving between giant, established mythologies like “Gundam,” “Star Wars” and Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Kamiyama strives to put his own spin on things while also staying true to what the fans want. “I try to prepare surprises while taking the utmost care not to stray from that consensus,” he says. “When that goes well, the sense of sharing the moment with the fans becomes the motivation to keep creating — that’s what I believe.”
“Mobile Suit Gundam RG XARX-ZERO” also encompasses the companion video game, “Gundam Rogue Orbit.” “The project actually started from the game first, but the game side had no fixed setting in place, so I built out the world starting from the question of what Gundam fights,” Kamiyama says. He left the game’s mechanics to its own team, reasoning that “games have an appeal that only a game can deliver, the fun that comes from the gameplay and the controls.”
To prepare a backstory for “Gundam Rogue Orbit,” Kamiyama had to work out what the monsters were, what they did to Earth and humanity, and how long it took for either side of the coming war to develop a countermeasure like Gundam. “Creating these fine details is, I’d say, both the hardest part and the real thrill of building a science fiction work,” he says.
On what keeps pulling him back to stories about societies adapting to systems they can’t control, Kamiyama believes that “anti-war is a universal theme; even as the forms and meanings of war change with the times, it remains timeless.”
He extends that idea to the current moment: “The true nature of war looks different from one era to the next. Perhaps it is the unease of the wars unfolding right now.” Building an era untethered from Gundam’s Universal Century or 00 timelines gave him that freedom, he says.
On his approach to legacy IP after working with Tolkien and Lucasfilm’s properties, he says, “It was about choosing between what should be carried on and what should be built anew.”
Kamiyama also reveals the scale of the world he has built beyond what “RG XARX-ZERO” itself shows. “At the very least, it stretches from 50 years before the point where this story begins to the start of another possible future that could connect to the game’s world 100 years later,” he says.
For the science-fiction concepts underpinning that world, including gravity control, faster-than-light communication and cognitive materialization, Kamiyama worked with novelist Toh EnJoe, credited as SF setting supervisor, as an outside arbiter. “He is a master who rearranges words through mathematics, so whether or not to examine meaning became a source of creative inspiration,” Kamiyama says, describing EnJoe’s rulings on which ideas were plausible, needed more thought, or could be glossed over.
Asked what he hopes is the first surprise for viewers meeting this world, Kamiyama says: “Gundam’s place within a body of work that has always had giant robots as its protagonists.”
The director has spent two decades moving between franchises with devoted fan bases, from his breakout run steering “Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex” through its two seasons, to co-directing Netflix’s CG reboots of “Ultraman” and “Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045” with Shinji Aramaki. His theatrical foray into Middle-earth with “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim” reached screens worldwide in 2024, and he now oversees the “Star Wars: Visions” universe as supervising director on its 2026 installment, which extends the story he introduced in “The Ninth Jedi.”
“Mobile Suit Gundam RG XARX-ZERO,” produced by Bandai Namco Filmworks with animation from Sola Animation, launches in 2027.