DURING THE PLANNING STAGES, WUFEI WAS ORIGINALLY AN AFRICAN BOY?!

――What was Gundam Wing like in its earliest planning phase?

Sumizawa: To be honest, neither Director Ikeda nor I had actually seen Gundam before. So before diving into Wing, we sat down and marathoned everything from First through Victory Gundam to study up. But when you sprint through them like that, you don’t really come away understanding “what Gundam is.” Ikeda, though, declared, “I’ve got Gundam figured out!” (laughs), and drew up a structural outline. At that point, he already had a plan for over forty episodes. His idea was to reproduce every Gundam from First through Victory within this one series. But Ikeda is the kind of person who changes as he works. By the time we’d produced episodes one through five, his thinking was already evolving. So when we reached the point of airing episode ten, it was like, “Whatever happened to those original forty-episode plans?” (laughs).

――And how did you approach the concept for the story and scripts?

Sumizawa: After watching all the previous Gundams, Ikeda and I agreed on one thing: “The one that feels best to watch is First.” First Gundam works even just as a “journey story,” following the protagonists as they move from place to place. When you look back, the later series from Zeta onward leaned too far into the psychology of their teenage boys. The dialogue and the stories became uncomfortably introspective, even off-putting. So we decided: in our Gundam, we’d strip away that unpleasantness. We wanted something clean, like First. That’s why the lines in Wing have that bold, flamboyant flavor, they were written with First’s cadence in mind.

――Zechs, especially in his relationship with Relena, calls Char to mind.

Sumizawa: That’s right, he was modeled on Char. But here’s the twist: Heero was also Char. In fact, all of them were. The idea from the start was, “Let’s have every character deliver the kind of striking lines Char would say.” In the proposal stage, we actually wrote down “signature lines” for each character. “Because this character believes this, he’ll act this way in this situation.” That was how we built them. As a result, the characters began to move on their own from their respective positions. It wasn’t that we calculated every action, Heero and the others simply started to live and act by themselves. That’s why I don’t remember struggling much to write their dialogue.

――What were the original concepts for the characters, back at that stage?

Sumizawa: From Ikeda’s initial outline, one thing was clear, “Five boys will pilot Gundams.” But Ikeda never bothered with names at first. He’d just jot down things like, “Boy 1 pilots Gundam 1.” At the beginning, there wasn’t even a Wufei.

――So he was a completely different character?

Sumizawa: Yes. “Boy 5,” the pilot of Gundam 5, was originally conceived as an African Newtype. His ability was to read people’s hearts, and if he sensed someone was evil, he would kill them immediately. Ikeda described him as a Newtype who could discern good and evil. But then Bandai told us, “Gundam 5 has to be a dragon-type.” So Boy 5 became a Chinese character instead. His design drew inspiration from a character in Kazuo Koike’s manga Crying Freeman. Meanwhile, Boy 1 was imagined as someone with suicidal tendencies.

――And that became the prototype for Heero.

Sumizawa: In Ikeda’s notes, there were no names or illustrations, just “Boy 1.” And his concept was: “Always ready to self-destruct.” (laughs) His catchphrase was, “Life is cheap, especially mine.”

――What about Duo, Trowa, and Quatre?

Sumizawa: Boy 2 was inspired by the violin-playing boy from the anime Nobody’s Boy: Remi. A character who cracked jokes, light-hearted. Boy 3, I think, came from when The Nightmare Before Christmas was being promoted. Ikeda loved Tim Burton, so Boy 3 became a kind of Pierrot figure, drawn from Burton’s aesthetic. Even his surname, Barton, was a nod to that. Boy 4 was originally conceived as Middle Eastern. But I was the one who suggested making him Caucasian. I remembered a comic that featured a wealthy Arab character who was white. Historically, there had also been blond, blue-eyed Aryans in the Middle East, so we modeled him that way.

――And the idea of giving them numbers in their names, did that come from those early “Boy 1” notes?

Sumizawa: Exactly. And also, remember, Zeta Gundam had Quattro, meaning “four.” So we thought, “Maybe it feels more Gundam-like if they have numbers in their names.”

IKEDA’S NATURAL DIRECTION CAPTURED WOMEN’S HEARTS

――Each character ended up with a large female following. Was that a conscious goal from the start?

Sumizawa: Not at all. At the time, we weren’t thinking about attracting female fans in the slightest. We just wanted to make our version of Gundam. Honestly, I had no idea women were watching in such numbers until I saw it reported in anime magazines. Of course, Murase’s artwork was incredibly stylish, so my assumption was simply, “It’s the visuals that are pulling them in.”

――So you weren’t aiming for women at all? That’s surprising.

Sumizawa: Not in the least. We never thought, “Let’s pander to women.” We didn’t study female psychology or deliberately work it into the direction. If anything, lines like Wufei’s “I won’t fight women or weaklings” are downright insulting to women (laughs). Because Ikeda had directed Ronin Warriors, people assume he was calculating in how he appealed to female fans. But the truth is, there was zero calculation. He didn’t have any sense for what women might latch onto in a doujinshi-style way. I’d worked on Yu Yu Hakusho, so I had some idea how female fans interpreted, say, Kurama and Hiei’s exchanges. I tried explaining those dynamics to Ikeda, but he never got it. He just didn’t think that way. Which is why, I believe, women responded so strongly: they loved what he created simply by being himself. That’s the fascinating part.

――I always assumed that because the female characters were so numerous, and so relatable, women must have been the target audience from the outset.

Sumizawa: Not at all. With the female cast, Ikeda and I simply wrote the kinds of women we liked. We hated the cliché of the shrill, chattery “comic relief girl” who showed up in every robot anime. We wanted women who were poised, grounded, and real. And we consciously tried to break from past Gundams by introducing the kinds of women Tomino would never write. Though ironically, I once heard that when he made First Gundam, Tomino’s hope was to win over female fans (laughs).

――Really?

Sumizawa: According to what I heard, “At first, the only people supporting First were women. Then the male maniacs piled on, and the show got pulled toward the military side.” Maybe Tomino actually wanted to make something closer to Wing all along (laughs).

――Speaking of women, the TV ending animation had a cute, almost girlish feel. That seemed like a deliberate attempt to appeal to female fans.

Sumizawa: You’d think so, but no, that ED had nothing to do with the main story. It was Ikeda’s idea, and he even titled it “Relena’s Africa School Trip Arc.” We were all like, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” (laughs). And what’s more, before we settled on that, Ikeda had an even wilder proposal. He wanted something in the style of the old Tiger Mask ending: Heero carrying a dead puppy in his arms, walking all the way to its grave. Naturally, the song would have been dark, with lyrics like, “with a bitter heart, I glared up at the stars.” That’s what he was hoping for. But the record label wanted something bright and upbeat. So we ended up with a cheerful song, and Relena was brought in to fit. Still, the image of Heero carrying that puppy lingered in all our minds, and that’s why you see a trace of it in one of the scenes in Endless Waltz.

NIHILISM AND THE SENSE OF APOCALYPSE,
REFLECTING THE SOCIAL CLIMATE OF THE TIMES

――Throughout the series there are surreal, almost absurd flourishes in the direction. What was the intent behind those?

Sumizawa: That was Ikeda’s sensibility, what you might call flamboyant showmanship. Even in meetings, his ideas were wild. For example, when Zechs, as Milliardo, arrives at a colony, Ikeda suggested: “He should disembark from the shuttle riding a white horse.” The hatch opens, and, clip-clop, clip-clop, the horse trots down (laughs). As a writer, if the director says it, you write it. Then, by the time it reached the storyboard stage, that scene would be cut. And yet, things like Dorothy’s eyebrows, endless monologues, the clinking of a sword sheath, the “Elegant, my lady” gestures, those all stayed in and made it to air. With Ikeda, you could never quite tell if he was joking or dead serious. He was also the kind of director who constantly rewrote scripts and storyboards as he checked them. As a scriptwriter, my job was basically to chase after Ikeda’s instincts and keep up. After he left the project, what we did was dig up the original forty-episode outline he had drafted, trying to reconstruct what he might have wanted, and desperately stitch it into a narrative.

――That must have been difficult, rebuilding the story without Ikeda in the second half.

Sumizawa: It was challenging. The show was already drenched in flamboyance, so the only way to write was to become “Ikeda-ized” yourself. And then there was Katsuhiko Chiba. He was outrageous (laughs). Toward the end, he suddenly turned in a script where the Peacemillion launches a kamikaze attack and Libra falls to Earth. That had never once come up in meetings.

――So that wasn’t planned from the start?!

Sumizawa: Not at all. Chiba just wrote it. Same thing back in episode ten, Heero suddenly shouts “Mission accepted!” and blows himself up, boom! Everyone panicked, “Ikeda, the Gundam just exploded!” And Ikeda shrugged, “I’ll draw the storyboard. The Gundam’s totaled.” Producer Hideyuki Tomioka groaned, “How the hell are we going to explain this to Bandai?” (laughs). Self-destruction just became the norm. Nobody stopped it. The thinking was, if the development is exciting, then it’s fine, even if the protagonist blows himself up and the hero mecha gets wrecked. That was the atmosphere. It created a real tension, even we didn’t know what was coming next week. Every script left us on edge, hearts pounding.

――Even episode one had an outrageous structure. Many viewers were stunned.

Sumizawa: The internal Sunrise preview for episode one was hilarious. In the first half, during the space battle, the executives watched calmly, as though this was just another Gundam. But then Gundam Unit 1 suddenly sinks into the ocean, and they start looking puzzled. By the time Heero infiltrates a school, they were aghast. And then it ends on “I’ll kill you.” No robot action in the finale at all. The room was buzzing, “Is this really okay for Gundam?!” Watching that reaction, I thought to myself, “This is going to work.”

――There’s a decadence, almost a nihilistic air running through the whole series. Was that intentional?

Sumizawa: I think it was the spirit of the times. 1995 was the year of the Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyo gas attacks. It felt like the collapse of every foundation. Prosperous cities could crumble overnight. Educated elites could be duped into madness. The old belief, “If you work hard, your dreams will come true”, was shattered. And remember, it’s laughable now, but back then, everyone still half-believed Nostradamus’s prophecy of apocalypse. “The world will end in 1999.” Which meant, we only had four years left. Beneath the surface, people were really thinking, “We may not live to see the 21st century.” That doomsday sensibility soaked into the work. Heero and Trowa surrendering themselves to OZ? That came straight from Ikeda watching Aum leaders, one after another, surrendering on live TV. He was inspired by that reality, and transformed it into the story.

IF FANS STILL WANT IT, MAYBE I’D WRITE A NOVEL

――For fans revisiting Wing today, what do you see as its highlights?

Sumizawa: Each episode of Wing is packed with far more material than a normal anime. Usually you’d build one story line per episode. In Wing, we’d stuff in three or four. That meant the scripts ballooned into massive page counts, so we pared the dialogue down relentlessly. As a result, the transmission of ideas, of themes, of intent, often didn’t fully come through (laughs). The attitude was, “Forget the logic, just enjoy it on a gut level.” Viewers had grown used to anime spelling everything out in dialogue, so this approach, cutting lines away, felt new and fresh. So if you’re rewatching today, try imagining the cut dialogue that never made it onscreen. It makes the experience richer. And when it comes to the characters’ backstories, don’t take everything at face value, use your imagination. I wrote about some of their pasts in the novelizations, but even those don’t cover it all.

――So what, in your eyes, defines Wing’s appeal?

Sumizawa: Even during the broadcast of the first half, Ikeda was already envisioning “Wing Part 2.” In that plan, all the Gundams had been reduced to grunt machines. The boys would build new mobile suits and bring the Gundam era to an end. But it wouldn’t just be a small change, like the end of the One Year War, it would depict a historical upheaval on the scale of the Meiji Restoration or the French Revolution, overturning humanity’s entire value system. In that vision, Gundams would become relics, like samurai after the Restoration. It would have been the total negation of Gundam. Of course, such a project could never have been realized. But the very fact that Ikeda could even imagine it tells you something: he was questioning the Gundam tradition stretching from First onward. That spirit remained in Wing. The whole series carries a rebellious undercurrent. After all, the protagonists are terrorists fighting outside any organization.

――Almost every Gundam before then had its heroes tied to a military or formal group.

Sumizawa: Wing was about breaking from that pattern. Think about the old mecha formula: the enemy sends one monster per week. In Mazinger Z, Hell only built a single machine at a time. But why wouldn’t he take a few weeks off, build a dozen, and overwhelm the Photon Power Lab in one strike? Even in First Gundam, the enemy attacked in units but never just swarmed with sheer numbers to crush the Gundam. It didn’t make sense. Our solution was to make the Gundams terrorists, acting alone. Then no matter how many enemies there are, the fight boils down to one-on-one encounters. That shift gave the show its own logic, its realism. For its time, that felt new.

――So what does Wing mean to you personally?

Sumizawa: 1995 was, for me, a year of endings. I had debuted as a writer, worked on Dragon Ball, Yu Yu Hakusho, even Sailor Moon. I’d just finished Macross 7. I felt like I’d done it all. Honestly, I didn’t want to touch Gundam. But then I did Wing, and it forced me to realize: “I’m not capable of as much as I thought.” Until then, deadlines were sacred. With Wing, I started missing them. The process was sheer agony (laughs). But at the same time, it gave me purpose as a writer. With Wing, I could finally make a statement, however faint, about questions like “What is war?” I don’t see myself as a pacifist, nor as right-wing, but Wing let me grapple with those contradictions. Whether I conveyed it all? I honestly don’t know.

――Then how about making “Part 2” now, to bring it all to a conclusion in a form you’re satisfied with?

Sumizawa: Ehh, (makes a troubled face)! I actually tried once before. But… do I still want to? Hm. Maybe as a novel, that I could do. If there are still fans out there, maybe. If I announced, “If fans want it, I’ll write it!”, do you think I’d start getting fan letters (laughs)?

Souce: Perfect Archive Series: New Mobile War Report Gundam Wing (pages 186-189)