Yoshiyuki Tomino

Yoshiyuki Tomino (born 1941) is the creator and original director of Mobile Suit Gundam (1979), the franchise that launched the “real robot” genre and grew into one of the most commercially significant properties in anime history. A prolific writer and director across five decades, he is one of the medium’s foundational figures.

People sense what is real

In a December 2023 interview with the Japanese business weekly Toyo Keizai, Tomino argued that machine-made animation will not easily surpass human work. His reasoning rested on perception rather than technology: humans, he said, instinctively sense authenticity and spot what is not real, and he predicted that human labor would eventually be reappraised and the industry would come back to analog line drawing. He reached for the shogi prodigy Sota Fujii as his example — a teenager who played the AI engines, found them strong but somehow suspect, and so got into the habit of thinking for himself.

The same interview finds him gloomy about almost everything except human perception: he predicts the anime boom will peak within five or six years, doubts the streaming “platformers” pay creators fairly for their intellectual property, and complains that his own fully digitized, climate-controlled new studio building is a worse place to make things than a drafty postwar workroom. His stance is less about prohibition than a bet that human discernment is a durable check on synthetic art.

Tomino’s optimism about human perception sets him apart from peers who fear displacement outright; it places him in the anti-AI camp not through protest but through a confident dismissal of AI’s ability to lead the medium. Compare Hayao Miyazaki and Gorō Miyazaki.