“The more people, the more complicated the situation, and then it’s just chaos.”
Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway–The Sorcery of Nymph Circe is a visual spectacle that suffers slightly from middle-sibling syndrome. It’s not just the second part of a trilogy but the second part of the story, featuring an in media res opening that picks up abruptly where part one ended. The Sorcery of Nymph Circe’s deliberate pacing allows for focusing on character and motivations. That languid structure is punctuated with stunning Mobile Suit battles that vividly portray the terrifying power of those towering combat machines.
“Gravity feels so heavy and suffocating.”
Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway–The Sorcery of Nymph Circe is a 2026 Sunrise animation feature film. The movie is directed by Shûkô Murase, a veteran of the Gundam oeuvre, who was an animation director or character designer on many earlier Gundam titles, including 1991’s Mobile Suit Gundam F-91, ’93’s Mobile Suit Victory Gundam, and 1995’s New Mobile Report: Gundam Wing, the smash hit on Toonami for the Cartoon Network. The Sorcery of Nymph Circe has an ensemble cast including voice actors Kenshô Ono, Juńichi Suwabe, Sôma Saitô, and Reina Ueda. The screenplay is adapted by Yasuyuki Muto from a story by Yoshiyuki Tomino, the man who conceived the Real-Robot genre and created the original Mobile Suit Gundam in 1979. Tomino is the driving force behind most of the Universal Century stories.
The Gundam franchise is a prolific, long-lived, and many-headed hydra, with myriad feature films, video games, and television series. It can be viewed as Japan’s Star Trek in that there are alternate dimensions, different timelines, and different time periods within those disparate timelines. The Universal Century is particularly dense. It is Tomino’s baby, and he’s been shepherding his creation since 1979, helming some of the genre’s most iconic series and films.
The one thing the timelines all have in common is the ubiquitous use of Mobile Suits, which are largely disposable, piloted, humanoid fighting mechs, and the prototype testbeds known as Gundams.
What made Tomino’s Real-Robot creation unique from everything that came before it was that his Mobile Suits and the people who drove them were expendable, like a typical grunt in a combat theatre. They were ‘real’. The Suits could run out of ammo, run out of power, break down or simply be overwhelmed and destroyed. This set Tomino’s show apart from, and instantly rendered obsolete, the Super-Robot genre, which was the trend at the time.
The film is an adaptation of part two of the novel, Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway’s Flash, published in three volumes from 1989-1990. That story, written by Tomino, is the sequel to 1988’s highly lauded feature, Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack, making a 38-year lag between the films.
“Sorry. Right now, let me do my job.”
“Didn’t you make up that job yourself?”
After defeating Lain Aim (Saito) and leaving his Gundam Penelope burning belly up in the ocean, Hathaway Noa (Ono) returns to the Mafty flotilla and his flagship, Valiant, to rearm his Xi Gundam. He finds himself very distracted by his encounters with Gigi Andalucia (Ueda), a state his fellow insurgents pick up on very quickly. There’s something about her that reminds him of Quess Paraya, but he can’t quite put his finger on it. Every time Hathaway thinks of Quess, he gets pulled into cognitive loops where he plays back his memory of the circumstances of her death and what happened after. He tries to ignore his inner turmoil and plan Mafty’s next step, an attack on the upcoming Adelaide Conference, where many high-ranking Earth Federation flag officers and politicians will be gathering in furtherance of their corrupt agenda.
Kenneth Sleg (Suwabe) has been placed in charge of security for the event. Sleg’s Kimberly unit consisting of combat-tested Gustav Karl Mobile Suits as well as Aim’s damaged Penelope and a training Mobile Suit, Alyzeus, have been transferred to Davao and renamed the Circe Unit. While establishing his command, he keeps a close eye on Gigi. He suspects the alluring, unusually perceptive courtesan might be a spy. Gigi can’t sleep. She lays in bed repeating Hathaway’s name over and over again. She’s obsessed. She knows she has a job to do, but she can’t get Hathaway out of her head.
She hitches a ride with Sleg to Hong Kong. He has an appointment with several Cabinet ministers. Gigi interacts with her mysterious patron and then purchases and personalizes an exquisite luxury apartment. Still, she finds herself compelled to pursue Hathaway further and returns with Sleg to Davao. As they prepare for landing, a Mafty faction launches MANPADS at the approaching aircraft. A panicked Gigi has a distinct Newtype reaction, and Sleg orders an emergency-waveoff, saving their jet as missiles explode on the runway behind them. The crew wants to know what’s happened, but Gigi’s baffled. She can’t explain it, and they chalk it up to sorcery.
Sleg learns that the ruthless Criminal Police Organization suspects that Hathaway Noa is Mafty Navue Erin. They want to put the bag on his father, the war hero Bright Noa. Their plan to coerce Hathaway’s compliance with a hostage is at odds with his own plans for the vigorous defense of the upcoming conference. Continuing to be engrossed with Hathaway, Gigi has managed to deduce where Mafty’s secret base is and makes a beeline to it on a borrowed Base-Jabber.
In his Xi, Hathaway and his team, in their Anaheim Electronics-supplied Messer Mobile Suits, prepare for a probing attack on Davao, flinging themselves into the dragon’s teeth to set up their next move, a comprehensive attack on the first Adelaide Conference held in thirteen years.
Can Hathaway get past his guilt and trauma to become a successful, responsible leader? Will the seemingly flighty Gigi stick with her choice or flitter off back to Sleg if she fails? What plans within plans is Sleg plotting? Will the trap Mafty expects to spring at Davao be too much for them to handle? Please see Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway- The Sorcery of the Nymph Circe.
“How tedious.”
“But Gigi, that’s how life goes.”
Like the first film, The Sorcery of the Nymph Circe is a truly beautiful movie. Characters are hand-drawn, while background and Mobile Suit depictions are assisted with CG. Water and wave effects are tremendous. Along with the light blooms and diffusion, these flourishes give surfaces an uncanny richness and depth that nears photorealism in certain spots. Mobile Suit combat is brief, brutal, and savage. The cascading showers of molten sparks that splash out from damaged machines are a visual shorthand that is a few small steps away from being the arterial spurt in a typical Takashi Miike movie. The government is desperate to quash a video of a Mafty guerrilla attack being suppressed by a squad of Mobile Suits. This short film depicts the literal fog of war as fearsome fighting mechs loom out of the explosions, fire, and smoke to squish and stomp screaming resistance soldiers into paste. The perspective is harrowing and makes it clear how helpless puny humans are when facing the might of massive Mobile Suits.
Thanks to the deeper dive into the characters, the viewer is given more insight into Hathaway’s motives for his work as Mafty. The corruption of the Earth Federation government is truly eye-popping. However, this reviewer finds Gigi’s impetuses completely opaque. While it’s not too hard to figure out what Sleg’s schemes entail, what he wants, or how he plans to get it (even if he’s being too clever by half), Gigi is hard to read. Is she a spy? Who is her mysterious benefactor? Is she playing Sleg? Toying with Hathaway? It’s difficult to discern.
In an interesting scene, Kenneth lays out his thoughts on human evolution, which remarkably parallel those of Zeon Zum Deikun, the originator of the Newtype theory. Gigi, who possesses the remarkable spatial awareness with the peculiar insights of a Newtype (and more importantly, has Newtype reactions) thinks Sleg’s ideas are loopy and that he must be in a cult.
The post-traumatic stress that Hathaway endures manifests in the aforementioned cognitive loops as well as occasional outright hallucinations. Mirroring many real-world veterans, Noa dislikes the drugs that are supposed to treat his symptoms but also fog his brain. His hallucinations are jarring and debilitating, making him a sitting duck in combat when they flare up.
As the middle part of a story, Mobile Suit: Hathaway-The Sorcery of Nymph Circe suffers from not having a true beginning or a cathartic ending. Important stuff happens in this lush and gorgeous movie, but nothing gets resolved. It is hard for this reviewer to judge the story in total and the quality of writing without seeing the conclusion and resolution of the plot. There is some required homework to fully enjoy this film; a viewer should be familiar with at least the first part of Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway, and watching Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack from 1988 would help with complete comprehension. This single story masquerading as a trilogy might have been better served as a streamed, six-to-eight-episode mini-series. Still, fans of Gundam and of the giant-robot genre in general will find a lot to like in The Sorcery of Nymph Circe.
Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway- The Sorcery of Nymph Circe is in theatres 05/14/26.
Mobile Suit Gundam was created by Yoshiyuki Tomino.
Newsdesk