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INTEREST: Yoshikazu Yasuhiko Reveals Why Bright Noa Was Aged Up For Gundam: Cucuruz Doan's Island Fi




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MFrontier



Joined: 13 Apr 2014
Posts: 10960
PostPosted: Tue Jun 21, 2022 11:40 am Reply with quote
I never really had a problem with Bright's age, although how old was Mirai then?
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tintor2



Joined: 11 Aug 2010
Posts: 1804
PostPosted: Tue Jun 21, 2022 1:42 pm Reply with quote
I guess that's why Noah and the others were added to Char's Counterattack. To balance Amuro and Char's ages
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Rob19ny



Joined: 13 Jun 2020
Posts: 1655
PostPosted: Tue Jun 21, 2022 3:47 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
"In the past, a character over 20 in a children's program would have been designated an uncle-type figure (ojisan)," he explained. "Bright was meant to be an older brother figure rather than an uncle figure, so his age was set at 19, the oldest he could be to represent that type.


Well, that is understandable since the age of adulthood in Japan (until April 1st this year) was the age of 20 (now 18).

Quote:
So rather than changing it [for the film], we just gave him the age that should have been common sense from the beginning."


You say that, but it is still a change. You aged him up 6 years meaning his life story has also been altered. What happened in the new 6 year time gap of Bright's life? But hey, it doesn't matter since this is a one shot movie, right?

*6 years later*

Announcer: Kidou Senshi Gundam 50th anniversary anime remake is announced for 2029. Bright is now 25 years old because the previous one shot movie is now added to the remakes story and edited into episode format.

Anyway, I would have preferred his age be kept the same.
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FallenDomino



Joined: 09 Aug 2016
Posts: 88
PostPosted: Tue Jun 21, 2022 4:21 pm Reply with quote
Rob19ny wrote:
What happened in the new 6 year time gap of Bright's life?

Nothing of note? The change just means he's older at the beginning of the series too. The only thing that making him an actual adult possibly changes is the dynamics of his relationship with Mirai.
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zalminar



Joined: 23 Dec 2021
Posts: 35
PostPosted: Tue Jun 21, 2022 6:35 pm Reply with quote
FallenDomino wrote:

Nothing of note? The change just means he's older at the beginning of the series too. The only thing that making him an actual adult possibly changes is the dynamics of his relationship with Mirai.


I mean, it also recontextualizes the stress he's under, the maturity of his responses to those stresses, and how impressive his successes are. Bright slapping Amuro when he's four years older is a lot different than him doing it when he's a decade older. It's the difference between him being basically a kid and him being an adult. It's the difference between him being just out of high school and him having the equivalent of a master's degree. It's a pretty big difference.

Anime ages can often be pretty crazy, but this doesn't seem like it was a particularly egregious case in need of fixing, given how much of Gundam is about the effects of war on a bunch of kids. I always thought part of the tragedy of the story was that not only was this kid, Amuro, being sent out to kill people with a giant death machine, but that the person ordering him to do it was just a handful of years older. This change weakens that angle of the story, it puts more distance between Bright and the other people on White Base in a way that I think undercuts some of the themes.

Edit: And I believe Mirai is supposed to be ~18, so this does add a pretty big age gap there.
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SciasSlash



Joined: 09 Jun 2015
Posts: 117
PostPosted: Tue Jun 21, 2022 9:03 pm Reply with quote
Yeah. Bright being basically a kid is an actual character point for him. 25 is almost a reasonable age for a minor military commander, but Bright isn't a reasonable commander, he's literally just the only person with an actual military rank on the ship pressganged into having to take responsibility. Making him an adult completely misses the point of his character.
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BlueAlf



Joined: 02 Jan 2017
Posts: 1493
PostPosted: Wed Jun 22, 2022 12:57 am Reply with quote
Character-wise, I always thought that Bright was already in his 20s. But I think him already being 25 is a bit much. Also putting Mirai's age into consideration, I think making Bright 21 years old would make more sense.
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JohnRhogan



Joined: 27 Mar 2018
Posts: 164
PostPosted: Wed Jun 22, 2022 9:39 am Reply with quote
Anybody else besides me notice that this was set in the The Origin continuity? Bright's uniform was blue, the GMs were already in active use, Sleeger was introduced much sooner than his TV appearance.
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Gho5tRUN3R



Joined: 21 Feb 2019
Posts: 14
PostPosted: Wed Jun 22, 2022 12:45 pm Reply with quote
I like this and hope other anime follow this trend. I never saw Bright as an older brother figure in all the times I've watched the series. Anime's ages have been absolutely ridiculous at times and while this one was less ridiculous, I'm just glad they're changing things for sense rather than some trope or comedia del arte reason.
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zalminar



Joined: 23 Dec 2021
Posts: 35
PostPosted: Wed Jun 22, 2022 2:48 pm Reply with quote
Gho5tRUN3R wrote:
Anime's ages have been absolutely ridiculous at times and while this one was less ridiculous, I'm just glad they're changing things for sense rather than some trope or comedia del arte reason.


But by the logic used, shouldn't Amuro be aged up to 18-20 or something though? I mean he's 15 because that's how old a protagonist is supposed to be to be aimed a certain demographic, not because of how realistic it is for him to competently be operating a murder-bot. It's crazy that the pilot of a massive warship is only 18, that their comms officer is 17 and that they're civilians with no training to boot, so lets clean those up too. Kinda silly to have a bunch of little kids wandering around a warship too, so let's excise that whole bit (Fraw too) while we're at it. And 25 isn't really going to cut it as commanding officer of a carrier; Bright's probably gotta be at least in his 30s before it starts making any sense.

Which is to say Bright being ~19 seemed like it was kind of part of the point of the story they were telling? That he's barely older than his ragtag crew is part of the dynamic, that he can't *really* cope with any of this much better than Amuro et al, but he needs to shoulder the responsibility of ordering these kids to go out and kill people and risk being killed themselves. He provides an important link between the powers-that-be and the youths at the center of the story; not yet really an adult himself, he's forced to become the avatar of the adults above him. It's a role unfairly thrust upon him, and one he struggles to grapple with and execute.

None of which is to say that 25 isn't still incredibly young to have the responsibility Bright has as captain, or that someone in their mid-20s can't have a story arc where they have to deal with incredible stress they're not prepared for. But here I think the dynamic between Bright and the rest of the White Base is important; Bright being so much older than everyone he's trying to wrangle creates a distance that changes the dynamic. A useful comparison might be to Murrue Ramius in SEED who is 25 and similarly thrust into the role of captain, but you wouldn't mistake her dynamic with her cobbled together crew for that of Bright's; sure, they're different characters, but Murrue does actually act more like an adult, like someone who doesn't really relate to the kids she has to command; she grapples with the stress of her position but does so more internally, there's a detachment where Bright's relationship with his random teen crew is much more visceral. It's actually a rare case where the story does seem pitched appropriately to the ages in question--Bright at 25 probably feels less believable than Bright at 19 in the original series.
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Picky33



Joined: 09 Jul 2021
Posts: 263
PostPosted: Thu Jun 23, 2022 8:10 pm Reply with quote
as someone currently watching the OG tv show (MSG), I'm not too keen on the look, I don't give 2 F's about the age part. I haven't started Zeta or ZZ yet.
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