This year, to celebrate 45 years of Mobile Suit Gundam, Bandai revived a 44-year-old model kit: the original RX-78-2. This was the kit that kicked off the gunpla craze and, as popular memory often has it, saved Gundam itself from obscurity. For just ¥1,320, you too can own the original Gundam model–sort of.
Unlike the original kit, the 2024 version includes colored plastic (so you don’t have to paint) and snap-fit pieces (so you don’t have to glue). Remarkably, this throw-back model leaves the builder with absolutely no sense of what it would have been like to assemble the original 1980 model. What it does do, however, is inculcate in the builder the imagined history of Gundam and model-building in general.
Today, we take for granted that the way to support a mecha series and demonstrate your fandom is to build a model kit. For most anime, the preferred form of merchandise is figures or Blu-Ray discs, and while mecha fans certainly buy these as well, the model kit still reigns supreme. Gundam may not have invented the idea of a mecha model, but it certainly ignited the trend; now, the expectation is that every new mecha series will launch with a line of model kits. The mecha model has become so emblematic of the genre that it’s transcended merchandise and become the subject of shows themselves.1
The earliest miniatures we know of date to Ancient Egypt. We have miniature lead furniture built by the Romans. The first dollhouse we know of dates to 1558 from Bavaria, but its sheer quality and opulence suggest that lesser versions pre-dated it (and were simply less well preserved). Tin soldiers, invented in the 18th century, were crafted to a uniform scale in an agreement between manufacturers. By the 19th century, miniature dioramas depicted not just humans but also the mechanical, beginning with trains. In the 20th century, tanks, airplanes, and trains were the favored toys of children.2
The miniature figure often exists in its own miniature context. Dollhouses reflected the mansions and homes of the builder, miniature soldiers re-enacted historical battles, and tiny humans danced in festival dioramas.3 We can locate this impulse in mecha modeling, too. Kits are arranged, within miniature terrain, to perfectly resemble a single frame from their shows. In model magazines, this authenticity is often “proven” by a paired still image from the anime. The diorama becomes what Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett calls a “memory object,” a crafted object that holds and recalls the memory of an ephemeral time or place.4 For mecha fans, the memory recalled is not a personal one, or even a cultural one, but a memory of fiction.
Gundam, in particular, has cast itself as a history. All fiction which posits a kind of other world with its own internal logic adopts the trappings of history, and especially fiction which represents itself through physical artifacts like models.5 Model-building is an act of nostalgia, either for your past, for your communal past, or for your imagined past. In all cases, the miniature represents something that is presently inaccessible, either because its time has passed or because it has never come at all. Susan Stewart, in her study on longing, puts it thus: “the miniature is often a material allusion to a text which is no longer available to us, or which, because of its fictiveness, never was available to us except through a second-order fictive world.”6 That the events of Macross, or VOTOMS, or Gundam never actually occurred only strengthens our desire to capture and memorialize them.
In their December 1990 issue, Hobby Japan ran an edition of its column “3D Show,” featuring a scene-accurate diorama from Episode 17 of Patlabor The Mobile Police: On Television by legendary modeler, and magazine mainstay, Hitoshi Hayami. The photographs were accompanied by an extensive discussion from Hayami of the episode in particular, the physical and emotional details of the scene, and the effort that went into capturing the feeling of the show within the model. Even the name of the feature–“3D Show”–reflected the idea that these dioramas were meant to be physical representations of an animated reality.
These kinds of dioramas were used extensively as a form of advertising in model magazines of the ’80s. They demonstrated the quality of the models, as determined by their ability to accurately represent the show, as well as reminded the viewer of their favorite scenes; before home video became commonplace, models were a way to recreate the show “on demand.” For the most popular scenes, fans can now buy specialized kits to help them recreate iconic moments, like this pre-built diorama for the “Last Shooting” scene from the original Gundam.7
It would be fair to say, however, that most fans aren’t building elaborate, show-accurate dioramas in their homes and apartments; for most fans, mecha modeling is about building individual kits, devoid of context.
These models can be found anywhere; in the May 1985 issue of Mokei Jouhou, reader-submitted models were haphazardly placed on shelves, illuminated by harsh lamp light and casting deep shadows. In one case, the models stood on the floor in front of a rotting wood door. Over time, model magazines would evolve their method of presentation; the October 1997 issue of Hobby Japan displays the results of a contest, the finalist submissions uniformly illuminated in front of a nondescript gray background.
The standalone model, presented with a neutral background and without significant modification, does not need any additional context. These models are what Stewart calls both particularized and generalized: they are particularized (as a singular, frozen physical object) but also generalized (representative of the entirety of the mecha’s being, of every scene and show it has appeared in).8 The removal of context allows the model to call to mind a wider range of memories. It is not just that the builder can re-pose a model, or change its loadout, but that the model’s vagueness allows it to symbolize a wider historical-fictive narrative for the viewer.
Thus far, I have emphasized how models are used to recall the show. It is hardly a shocking revelation that fans choose to build models from shows they like and wish to remember, the same as a fan might choose to buy a pre-built figure or a piece of art. Models, however, are participatory; the builder of a model does not just actively re-create a favorite show but also can create it again anew. Custom models and dioramas of imagined scenes all allow the model builder to become not just a fan but a director, experiencing the narrative of their favorite show as they create it themselves.
A custom model; anything from an alternate paint job to a kitbash to scratch-built parts–is at once a piece of art, an expression of the modeler’s vision, as well as an alternate history of the show. Custom models often come with descriptions of how they might fit into the fictional history of their shows: their development history, or where they might have been deployed.
This speculative history extends to dioramas as well as custom models. Modelers imagine not just scenes that “really did” happen in the show, but also scenes that “could have happened.” This is evident in the common motifs of the custom diorama: hangar scenes for obscure or custom mecha, and battle scenes featuring grunts or under-utilized mecha. These are scenes that would not merit attention in the anime itself, but which surely took place where the “camera” wasn’t looking.
This act of historical imagining is not limited to mecha modeling. In his book Playing With Trains, Sam Posey identifies two schools of thought among model railroaders: those who seek to recreate, in schedule, scale, and detail, an actually-existing line, and those who build with fantasy and impressionism. But even the most famous, most influential of these “fantasy” railroads, The Gorre & Daphetid, whose gothic sensibilities and vast influence over the field make it the Gormenghast of layouts, had its own fictional history.9 All models offer the builder the chance to re-imagine and re-interpret history; models of fictional events allow the builder to rewrite history completely. The model builder is no longer subject to history but a participant.10
Model-making takes a distant subject and makes it personal. Corporate mass media is transformed into the art of the individual; ownership and authorship over mecha anime is not vested entirely in an unknowable creator or faceless corporation, but in the individual fan.11 The model-maker becomes the storyteller, the historian, of the anime. The transformation of officially licensed model kits into custom models and dioramas frees the work from the anime and allows the builder to substitute their own narrative for the anime.
This is something of a doomed errand. Any kind of reclamation of the anime through modeling involves first the purchase of those model kits from the manufacturer; no matter how radical your re-imagining or personalized your build, the company gets its cut (unless, of course, you build everything from scratch or employ 3D printing). Mecha modeling took off because of its dual purpose as a product and marketing tool. Unlike model railroads or dollhouses, the subjects of mecha models are undeniably owned by a single corporate entity; the Gunpla Builders World Cup exists more to promote gunpla as a product than to celebrate the hobby’s greatest artists.
Eventually, this will likely change. Dollhouses have mostly become the realm of art; today you can view the Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute in Chicago, or the Stettheimer Dollhouse at the Museum of the City of New York. Model railroads still mostly live in railroad museums (the National Railway Museum in England), model railroad-oriented attractions (Miniatur Wunderland in Germany), or even the private property of its builders (like the famous Franklin & South Manchester layout in Massachusetts). Time will likely see them join dollhouses among the mainstream. Mecha modeling has already begun to move away from pure corporate promotion; in August 2006, Hobby Japan featured a beautiful gunpla diorama that had been on display in the Hamamatsu Municipal Museum of Art.12 In the face of 45-year anniversary models, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that mecha modeling is a young hobby, one that is still undergoing definition.
Why do we build models? There are formal reasons: model-building is a popular hobby; mecha models are aligned with other popular forms of model-making; model kits were profitable for the most popular show in the genre, and so continued to be produced. We also build models because the content of mecha anime encourages it: its emphasis on history, the inclusion of “alternate” and “custom” models within the show itself (a mechanism developed to sell more model kits that also encourages historical imagining), and the depiction of a wide world of which only a small slice is seen on screen.
Most importantly, we build models because we are trying to remember something. The model is an act of nostalgia for a time that never was. Through the model kit, the fictional is made historical and the historical is made real. The model supplants the anime; the source text is less important than the model, which is more physical, more present, and more personal. We build models not just to commemorate our favorite shows, but to remember them as they ought to be, as they only ever existed within our own heads. The nostalgia of the model is a nostalgia not just for the anime, but for that ideal version of the anime that exists only in the head of the model-maker. An imagined history, for an imagined history.
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Notes
- Knight’s & Magic [sic], a mecha fantasy isekai series, is premised on the idea that the main character built so many mecha kits in their old life that they would be a genius mecha designer once reincarnated. The Gundam Build series dispenses with “actual” mecha altogether and sticks with just the models. Now, of course, the snake bites its own tail and you can buy models for both series.
- Karl Gröber, in his exhaustive history of children’s toys, wrote at the start of the 20th century that: “To a boy of the present day a Trojan horse or a knight in armour no longer means anything; such antiquated things do not excite his imagination in the slightest; he wants aeroplanes, steam-engines, and other such technical achievements of modern days; he values only that which copies the latest creation of the human mind.” How right Göber was, in a way that he could never imagine, that the next fashion in model toys was the giant robot, an invention purely of the human mind and not of the real world. Karl Gröber, Children’s toys of bygone days: a history of playthings of all peoples from prehistoric times to the XIXth century, trans. Philip Hereford (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1928).
- Of the doll house, Flora Gill Jacobs wrote: “For at least four centuries the dolls’ house has so accurately reflected the life about it that a book about dolls’ houses becomes a footnote, at least, to cultural history.” Flora Gill Jacobs, A History of Dolls’ Houses ( New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965).
- Kirshenblatt-Gimblett discusses the memory object, and the role of the miniature in personal memory, in her article “Objects of Memory; Material Culture as Life Review,” in Folk Groups and Folklore Genres Reader, ed. Elliott Oring (Denver; University Press of Colorado, 1989).
- Fiction that continues through multiple installments – like with the great mecha franchises – becomes self-referential and relies on the viewer to engage with previous entries not just as stories, but as historical referents that explain and elucidate the present. As Louis Mink said in Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument, “When individual narrative fictions do aggregate […] we most naturally construe it as the borrowing, for imaginative and artistic purposes, of the conventions of historical representation.”
- Susan Stewart, On Longing (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992). Stewart, in her chapter on miniatures, makes many poignant observations relating inadvertently to mecha models. The miniature, she writes, “bears the tangible qualities of material reality but also serves as a representation, an image, of a reality which does not exist. The referent here is most often the fantastic, yet the fantastic is in fact given ‘life’ by its miniaturization” (60).
- We can imagine quite easily how a child of the Federation, decades after the year 0080, might build a model kit representing this iconic moment in their own history, just like how English children in the 19th century would have posed tin soldiers to recreate Waterloo. Maybe one of these Federation children had purchased that kit in the gift shop of the museum of the One Year War, as seen in the opening episode of Gundam Unicorn, where decommissioned mobile suits were posed and presented as representations of their history, just like we pose our own model kits. Our practice of building models aligns us with these fictional characters as we jointly recall their history.
- Stewart, On Longing.
- In fact, it may be more accurate to say that Gormenghast is the Gorre & Daphetid of fantasy novels, given that the layout almost certainly existed first. Though it was destroyed in a fire in 1973, fans of the G&D have meticulously preserved every article, photograph, and video they can find, itself an act of admirable historical preservation.
- Creator of the G&D, John Allen, had this to say: “No. 2, the C. D. Grandt, oldest operating loco of the line. Though originally built in 1835, it was purchased by the GD Line long after it had seen years of service. It is now used only for celebrations, fan trips, and very light extra service when no regular locomotives are available.”
- Stewart: “[model-makers] completely transform the mode of production of the original as they miniaturize it: they produce a representation of a product of alienated labor, a representation which itself is constructed by artisanal labor” (58). In mecha modeling, the subject being modeled is not a real, physical product of mechanized production (like with trains, planes, or tanks) but was still produced by a corporation for mass consumption. While anime is still produced by artists (and not machines), those artists are poorly paid, poorly credited, and easily disposed of. The mecha model (itself mass-produced, this time by mechanized labor) is a way for an individual to recreate the anime according to a personal vision. The contradiction Stewart identifies, between the alienated subject and the artisanal model, remains intact.
- Hobby Japan, August 2006.