Interest
Life-Size Gundam Statue to Move By 2019
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The "Gundam Global Challenge" press conference announced plans to make the 18-meter-tall (59-foot-tall) Gundam statue on Tokyo's Odaiba island move in the year 2019. The project, first revealed as "Real G Next Project" in March, will mark the upcoming 40th anniversary of the first Mobile Suit Gundam anime series. Gundam franchise creator Yoshiyuki Tomino and rock guitarist (and Gundam fan) Sugizo of Luna Sea and X Japan fame attended the press conference.
Tomino said, "Finally, what I imagined will become reality." Sugizo added, "The dream I adored as a child is at last approaching reality."
The official website will begin accepting proposals for how to move the statue in late July. The proposals will be judged, and the basic plan will be unveiled in 2016.
The statue will mark its 10th anniversary in 2019. The statue already can move its head and automatically "open" its cockpit to reveal a screen inside.
The life-size statue first stood at Odaiba in July of 2009 and attracted 4.15 million visitors before it closed the following month. The statue rose again in Shizuoka — the self-described "model capital of the world" and the home of Bandai's plastic model factories — from July 2010 to March 2011. The statue then returned to Tokyo in August 2011 — in disassembled parts — as a charity drive after the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake (Higashi Nihon Daishinsai) disaster. It finally moved to its current home at Odaiba's new Diver City Tokyo complex in 2012.
Source: Oricon
Update: Typo fixed. Thanks, GracieLizzy
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