New Gundam Anime Reveals Its First-Ever Female Lead

A new trailer for the anticipated Mobile Suit Gundam anime was just revealed at Bandai Namco’s Gundam Conference on Tuesday. The Witch From Mercury (Kidō Senshi Gundam: Suisei no Majo) is the first television series from the franchise in seven years, and will feature Gundam’s first-ever female protagonist. The trailer reveals her look, and that of her mobile suit, the Gundam Aerial, which is slated for a toy line sometime during the summer. The anime was first announced in September of 2021, and is now officially scheduled for an October release of this year.

The Witch From Mercury follows Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans, which ran for two-seasons from 2015-2016. The fifty episode series was well-received by audiences and focused on large-scale military conflict within the near solar system. There has been no news yet about the timeline during which The Witch From Mercury is going to take place or the plot of the series. Considering that Iron-Blooded Orphans had short-range melee weapons inspired by medieval swords and polearms, perhaps the new anime will take a more mystical approach.

From James Whitbrook’s earlier reporting on the announcement:

The idea of a spacebound “Witch” could even draw parallels to one of the most iconic concepts from Gundam beyond its titular mobile suits: the Newtype, a name given to human beings who have evolved from life in the space colonies during the Universal Century, with latent psychic abilities. Newtypes — and artificially developed iterations of them known as Cyber-Newtypes — are a hallmark of the Universal Century timeline in particular, although variations on the concept have been riffed on in other Gundam material. So if The Witch from Mercury wants to play with the concept as well, it could be very interesting indeed beyond more giant robot astropolitical action.

There will also be a prologue project titled Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury Prologue. It will debut this summer, ahead of the anime, at the Gundam Factory in Yokohama before making a tour of the franchise’s establishments across Japan and China, including the Gundam metaverse project at the future site of the Gundam Base Virtual World. They also revealed two mobile suits that will be present in this prologue, named Lfrith and Beguir-Beu.

According to the conference, high grade 1/144-scale models for the three newly revealed mobile suits are already in production.

The anime will premiere in October.