CG Gaiking Pilot & American Shogun Warriors Movie Announced

Jules Urbach, CEO of Hollywood digital animation studio Lightstage, has provided Ain’t It Cool News (AICN) with a copy of the 94 second full CG Daiku Maryu Gaiking pilot animation created for Toei Animation. Toei has announced plans to develop full CG anime movies based on Gaiking and Captain Harlock for international release in 2012 or later.

Furthermore, Urbach has informed AICN that he’s presently in negotiations for the rights to produce his own live action American Shogun Warriors movie series using many of Toei’s vintage giant robots (Reideen, Mazinger, Danguard Ace, Voltes V, Combatter V, Daimos, Grendizer, etc.). The exact robots that will appear in the American film is not yet known, but Urbach said, “We are building the robots life size… The teaser we have now is CG for the robot. It is to give the fans a taste of the design we are going with, but it is not a true reveal given what we are going to be doing… The real deal is going to be mind blowing.”

Tentatively the first American film will be titled “Gaiking” and hit in 2012. The sequel will be tentatively titled “Shogun Warriors.”

Here’s my take on this:

Not yellow enough. I appreciate that the pilot footage is aiming for a gun metal realistic approach, but that only works with real robots, not super robots. No one builds a “realistic” and practical military battle machine with a jack-o-lantern face on its chest and giant ram horns on its head. The visual aesthetic of super robots is fantastical by nature and can’t be made otherwise. So if the physical design is being retained, keep the original color scheme too. Likewise, an interior cockpit of display panels may make sense in a practical battle machine, but I fail to see how Gaiking could pummel opponent robots when the pilot can’t actually see the opponent robots. Super robots are unavoidably unrealistic. Trying to make them too realistic only creates its own problems. Getter Robo Go, for example, tried to apply a bit more “realism” to Getter Robo, but even it knew that it could only take its “realism” so far without destroying the fundimental super robot concept.

Now the possibility of American live action Shogun Warriors movies that use some real, practical effects could be amazing. The “Holy Trilogy” built life size machines, and those 30 year old films still look better than most contemporary sci-fi movies. Regardless of how tentative American Shogun Warriors movies turn out, the very concept of building 1:1 scale replicas as reference models is simply awesome nearly beyond words.