You’ll forgive us if we didn’t think there was any way a video tour of a disassembled giant robot statue could seem like indie arthouse fare. Clearly, we were mistaken.
In a new video posted by YouTube user darwinfis105, time-lapse footage records visitors to the now-disassembled, 59-foot Gundam battle suit that dominated the skyline in Shizuoka, Japan, for just over a year. The five-minute film is the second such project created by the videographer, who previously posted some cool, time-lapse footage of the mech standing guard over the city.
Originally created as part of the 30th Anniversary of the Gundam anime series — one of the most popular Japanese anime of all time — the giant mech was built as a life-size representation of the brawling battle suits that are the stars of the series. The statue spent a year looking out over Tokyo before being moved to Shizuoka in July 2010. It has since been disassembled, with its component parts on display in the city park.
Earlier this month, we reported on a new, Gundam-themed GPS navigation app that launched in Japan and allowed users to engage in virtual giant-robot battles as they navigated the city. That was only the latest in a long line of ways Bandai Namco’s wildly popular robot franchise has integrated itself into Japanese culture, with the iconic mechs popping up in train stations, on postage stamps, and even used as the basis for military research and development initiatives.
And now they’re even the subject of an artsy video, too.
If you visit Japan, you might as well face it, folks: it’s Gundam‘s world, and we’re just living in it.
