While we knew this was coming, it was confirmed yesterday that the novel series Gundam: Hathaway’s Flash will receive an anime movie trilogy starting next year.
Since Gundam Unicorn was adapted, we now have a parallel Universal Century timeline based on the novels from Beltorchika’s Children onward.
Beltorchika’s Children being the novel version of the movie Char’s Counterattack, though with a fair few notable narrative differences as well as separate mobile suit designs.
Anyway, when mobile suits like the Gustav Karl popped up at the end of the Gundam Unicorn anime, it confirmed that we were in this parallel novel timeline and that an adaptation of Hathaway’s Flash was more than likely at some point.
What’s more, the upcoming Gundam Narrative anime was meant to set up the shift towards the events in Hathaway’s Flash, not least due to the drastic change in mobile suit designs.
In case you are not familiar with Hathaway’s Flash, it was a novel series written by Yoshiyuki Tomino and focuses on the life of Hathaway Noa, son of famed Federation captain Bright Noa, after the events of Char’s Counterattack and the death of his love interest Quess Paraya.
It’s ultimately a tragic tale with a pretty dark resolution and I am curious to see how far Sunrise goes with that.
It also is one of the later points in the timeline before the changes in mobile suit technology results in the smaller Formula type mobile suits seen in Gundam F91.
The mobile suits in Hathaway’s Flash are very notable though, as they are designed by Moriki Yasuhiro (shown above) who also worked on the mecha for the anime adaptation of Zeorymer.
They are unlike anything else in the Universal Century timeline and it looks like from the teaser image for this new Hathaway’s Flash anime movie trilogy (shown top), that the designs will be very much intact in this new anime adaptation.
I also hope that Sunrise also uses the original character designs by Haruhiko Mikimoto, of Macross and Gundam 0080 fame, as his approach only added to the bittersweet conclusion of the story in the novels.
For the more observant of you, the inclusion of the Hathaway’s Flash mecha in the recent Super Robot Wars games and some amazing new Robot Damashii toys, it’s clear this movie trilogy has been planned for a while.
Personally, I cannot wait to see how Sunrise handles this part of the Gundam timeline once these movies start getting released next year.
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