Autobiography of Yasuhiko Yoshikazu, the Designer of Gundam

Yasuhiko Yoshikazu is famous as the animator who designed the characters for Mobile Suite Gumdam. Readers of his autobiography titled Genten (Original Point) should be surprised that his success as an animator is just peripheral in his life.

In 1949 Yasuhiko was born in a city in Hokkaido, as a son of a mint farmer.  Then he went to Hirosaki University in Aomori, and became a leading activist of student movement in the university.  In 1969, he was arrested for forcedly occupying headquarters of the university.  He says, “I was chased off from Hirosaki University, so slipped into the world of animation film.”

After moving to Tokyo, Yasuhiko joined Mushi Puro as the animation production company established by Osamu Tezuka, but it went bankrupt soon.  In the other company, he participated as a staff in the production of Space Battleship Yamato (1974-75).    In 1979, he produced Mobile Suit Gumdam as a character designer and animation supervisor.  The success of Gumdam made him a top animator in Japan, however he suddenly abandoned the status and decided to devote himself to making comic arts treating historical themes.

Creators in the generation, who had grown in the 1960’s at the height of student movements, often educated themselves and cultivated  critical eyes toward the society in different ways of committing to the movements.   On the other hand, it is equally a fact that student movements in that time had some vacant and silly aspects.  Yasuhiko respectively describes the scenes of the student movement in Hirosaki University with a sense of desperate stagnation, partly as his own mood in that time.

In echoes of Yasuhiko’s experience, the story of Gumdum has a social philosophical theme as “desperate impossibility of mutual understanding among people.”  I, or a child born in 1976, just enjoyed building plastic models of Gumdum characters, without understanding the story.

Reference:  安彦良和・斉藤光政『原点』（岩波書店、2017年）

［E0009/170706=J0015］