Cucuruz Doan’s Island isn't the best Gundam movie, but it may be the best Gundam movie to start with

The backstory behind Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan’s Island is arguably more interesting than the movie itself, but that’s not as much of an indictment of the film as it seems to be. It’s an adaptation of an episode of the original Mobile Suit Gundam anime from 1979, specifically an episode that came out so infamously poorly due to time and budget constraints that Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino has effectively disavowed it—its story beats are left out of pretty much every retelling of the original Gundam storyline, including the excellent Gundam: The Origin manga adaptation, and it is left out of most U.S. releases of Mobile Suit Gundam.

That puts it in a uniquely brilliant position for a tie-in movie, since it’s a canonical part of the original storyline with all of the old characters that people know and love (well, there is a notable absence that may disappoint Gundam fans, but he does get a vocal cameo), but it’s not so indebted to the original canon that it’s impenetrable for newcomers or frustrating for diehards. It’s not, for example, Disney+’s Obi-Wan Kenobi show, which can’t possibly have much appeal for someone who hasn’t seen at least two Star Wars movies.

Actually, to keep the Star Wars comparison going (and Gundam has never shied away from Star Wars comparisons, since the anime does prominently feature laser swords and starship battles), Cucuruz Doan’s Island is more like if Lucasfilm went back and remade the Star Wars Holiday Special but actually made it good. Luke and Leia and Han and Chewie would all be back, just as you remember them, and they’d have an adventure that doesn’t necessarily require you to know what happened to them previously or what will happen to them next.

The reflection falls apart if you poke at it too hard (Cucuruz Doan’s Island is missing a Bea Arthur musical number, for one thing), but it does make a point to highlight as many of the best things about First Gundam (as the original series is often called) as possible. In broad terms, the original series is about the One Year War, a destructive conflict between an increasingly fascistic global Earth government called The Federation and an explicitly fascistic union of space rebels called Zeon—and if the two uses of “fascistic” there don’t make it clear enough, neither side in the war is really The Good Guys.

That’s the key theme of Gundam: War is bad. Always. But the people who fight in war aren’t necessarily all bad, no matter which side they’re on, and the only ones worth rooting for are the people who use whatever power they have to make the universe a better place.

The protagonists of Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan’s Island are two such characters: One is Amuro Ray, the pilot of the eponymous Gundam (a humanoid war machine on the side of the Federation that, at this point in the larger Gundam storyline, has won so many battles that the average Zeon soldier knows and fears it). The other is Cucuruz Doan, a Zeon deserter hiding out in the Canary Islands (the movie takes place on Alegranza, a real place, and the lighthouse seen throughout the film is also real).

The movie wisely doesn’t belabor the point of Doan’s desertion, giving just one flashback and letting context clues (and the way the plot unfolds) handle the rest, and it similarly doesn’t double-back to make sure that you understand that the war itself is the real villain in all of this. Gundam has a tendency to be on-the-nose with its pacifistic leanings, at least when it’s not sacrificing its ideals for TV shows that are just extended commercials for model kits, and this movie is no different—Federation and Zeon officers literally have a conversation about what their tactics for the next big battle will be before joking about whether or not Zeon will have an “Is Paris Burning?” moment, explicitly underlining that the war is a game to everyone but the people actually putting their lives on the line.

There is one moment, though, that goes harder than this franchise usually does. Amuro is separated from his Gundam for most of the movie, but when he finally recovers it, it’s not treated as triumphant victory. It’s presented from the perspective of a Zeon soldier and staged like a Friday The 13th movie, hitting on a message that the original series never made all that explicit: Even our hero, plucky little wide-eyed teenager Amuro Ray, has been completely fucked up by this war, and his Gundam is more of a mass-murder machine than a simple cool robot.

For a movie that makes sure to check off all of the number-one-hits of a Gundam story, Cucuruz Doan’s biggest failing, arguably, is that—beyond reforging the story into one that directly foreshadows some plot points that come later involving secret nuclear missiles—it’s not really revealing anything especially new about Amuro and his friends. Even the story of a soldier abandoning his comrades to protect war orphans is a beat that has happened before (in the epilogue to 08th MS Team, the high point of this decades-old franchise) and its one big fan-service moment has more to do with selling merch than anything (they tweak the canon a tiny bit to give one character a special new toy that quickly gets trashed).

But all of that is only an issue if you’re an existing Gundam fan going into this movie expecting some new Gundam story that tries to find new things to say and do with this franchise, and there have literally been four decades of Gundam stories like that since the original series started. That makes Cucuruz Doan’s Island one of the better starting points for someone who doesn’t necessarily know everything there is to know about Gundam but wants to see some big robots bash the shit out of each other—while also understanding that the reason the robots are fighting is completely stupid and that the only winners are the corrupt hierarchies that arbitrarily decide that some lives are more important than others.