Gundam Wing: 30 Years Later

I watched the video three times in a row the first night. Just sat there and watched it again. And again.

Gundam Wing aired in Japan in 1995, but I saw it around 2002 on YTV out of Toronto. I was in high school, mid-teens — the age when you're supposed to have aged out of cartoons. The show came on in the evening, somewhere between six and ten. Sometimes I'd catch it live. Sometimes I'd VCR it and watch the rerun. I never got tired of it.

This was not X-Men. This was not Spider-Man. Those were Saturday morning cartoons with clean lines and clear morality. Gundam Wing had five pilots, each one damaged in different ways. The villain Treize wanted world peace — and burned cities to get it. Lady Une was so devoted to Treize that she tried to assassinate a teenage girl, launched nukes against her own troops, and nearly committed genocide to blackmail her enemies. Later her personality literally split in two from the vileness of her actions. The hero Heero was raised from childhood to be a weapon, trained to kill for a personal grudge. An emotionally hollow teenager with one job: avenge the people who murdered his family.

No one was evil. Everyone had a vision and purpose. Admittedly some of those were nutty, because it's a TV show and it needs drama to stretch across fifty episodes and a movie. But nobody was evil.

The opening songs — "Communication" and "Rhythm Emotion" — were 90s J-pop, the kind of song that hits you with a piano riff and builds into something huge. I still have both on my gym playlist. Twenty-nine years later. I don't know the lyrics in Japanese but I know the melody like I know my own breathing.

Then in 2025, Sunrise put out a three-minute video for the anniversary. They recreated the original hand-drawn animation style in CG — but they kept the roughness. Kept the lines imperfect. The music hit the same way it hit when I was thirteen. And it was clear: the people who made this understood.

There was nothing to buy. No movie announcement. No toy line being refreshed. Just: here, this is for you. A love letter from thirtysomething animators to their own youth.

Then I scrolled the YouTube comments. And that was the part that got me.

Every single comment was positive. Not in that sarcastic way people write online where they're saying something nice but need you to know they're ironic. Real. People remembering watching it with their brothers. With their dads who aren't here anymore. Someone wrote "my husband passed in 2022, he would've loved this so much" and every reply was just people holding that with her.

The rarest thing on the internet. Everyone being humans together.

Someone wrote about watching it with his brother who's gone now. The replies didn't try to fix it. They just stayed there with him and remembered what this show meant to us then and still does now.

Melville did the same thing with a whale — spent an entire chapter on the tail, wrote with so much specific care that you couldn’t look away. See what reading Moby Dick felt like for the longer version of the same instinct.