The two new Armored Trooper Votoms films have a theme song, a trailer and a date. Sunrise and Production I.G unveiled a new visual and teaser for Sōkō Kihei Votoms: Haiiro no Hexe (Armored Trooper Votoms: The Grey Witch) on Friday. The teaser confirms that Mika Nakashima performs the first film’s theme, “Na mo Naki Shijin no Yō ni” (Like Some Nameless Poet). The first film opens in Japan on November 20.
The Theme Song
Toshihiko Takamizawa wrote, composed and arranged the song. He is the vocalist and guitarist of THE ALFEE, a band that has been active since the 1970s and remains a fixture on Japanese television. Pairing him with Nakashima is a deliberate bit of cross-generational casting: she has been a headline name since the early 2000s, and his songwriting predates most of the audience the films are chasing.
Cast and Staff
The cast announcement is the more interesting part. Miyuki Sawashiro voices Ash Vamps, the pilot known and feared as the Grey Witch. Mabuki Andou plays Maki Stauffenberg, an officer assigned to look into Ash’s past without anyone knowing. A two-hander about a legend and the person sent to dig up what she did is a tighter premise than the franchise’s usual war-epic sprawl, and it fits the film format better than a series would.
Mamoru Oshii directs both films. Ryōsuke Takahashi, who created the original concept and directed the 1983 television series, supervises. Shinobu Tsuneki handles mechanical design, with credits that include The Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and Kaiju No. 8, working alongside Yoshiro Sōno, the manga artist behind Sōkō Kihei Votoms: AT Stories. Kenji Kawai composes the score, which means the man behind the music for Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor 2 is scoring Oshii’s Votoms films.
That combination is the reason these films are being watched closely. Oshii and Kawai have spent decades on philosophical science fiction with slow pacing and long silences. Votoms is a series about thin armor and the high cost of being inside it. The two sensibilities do not obviously overlap, and the teaser suggests the films lean into the second one: machines, weather, and a woman whose reputation arrives before she does.
A Franchise That Ran for Four Decades
The 1983 anime is one of the founding texts of real robot storytelling. It is set at the end of a century-long war between the Gilgamesh Confederation and the Balarant Union, where the dominant weapon is the VOTOMS, a one-man tank with serious firepower and armor thin enough that pilot casualties are part of the design. Chirico Cuvie, a soldier in an elite unit, gets used as a pawn in a conspiracy, gets branded a traitor, and spends the rest of the story trying to stay alive long enough to understand why.
The franchise kept going for decades after that. The Last Red Shoulder, Big Battle, Armor Hunter Mellowlink, Roots of Treachery, Pailsen Files, The Heretic Saint and Alone Again all followed, with Alone Again in 2011 standing as the most recent entry until now. That is a 15-year gap, long enough that a large part of the current audience has never seen a new Votoms release arrive in real time. Other mecha revivals have moved faster, including Gundam SEED FREEDOM ZERO and Code Geass: Star Chaser Aspal, both headed for theaters in 2027.
Section23 Films’ Maiden Japan label put the original series out on Blu-ray in 2019 and 2020, which is how most English-speaking viewers met it. Those discs are the practical starting point for anyone who wants to catch up before November 20.
What November 20 Tells Us
Two films announced together, with the first dated and the second not, is a pattern that has become common for veteran properties. It lets the production committee commit to a complete story while releasing in halves, and it spreads the risk of a theatrical run across two openings instead of one. The second film’s date will depend on how the first performs.
November 20 is a crowded weekend in Japanese theaters, as most November weekends are. What separates this one is the staff list. Oshii directing Votoms, with Takahashi supervising and Kawai scoring, is not a nostalgia exercise assembled by a committee looking for a logo to reuse.
Whether that produces something worth the wait is the open question. The teaser does not show much, and a theme song reveal is a marketing beat rather than a statement of quality. But the pieces are in place, and the date is set.
Source: Anime News Network
Featured image: Teaser visual for the Armored Trooper Votoms: The Grey Witch films, via Anime News Network.
