Anime film ‘Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway’ brings futuristic vision of Davao City to screen

DAVAO CITY (MindaNews / 21 March)  — The anime film Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway places part of its story in an unexpected location: Davao City.

While originally released in 2021, clips and stills featuring the film’s depiction of the city have recently circulated in local online spaces, prompting renewed interest in how it is represented in international media.

The film is set in a future where much of humanity has migrated to space due to overpopulation, while Earth remains under the control of a powerful federation. Against this backdrop, we follow Hathaway Noa, who moves between identities: publicly a passenger and plant inspector, secretly the leader of an underground movement staging targeted attacks against those in power.

The story opens aboard a passenger space shuttle descending from the moon back to Earth. Mid-flight, it is hijacked by individuals posing as members of Hathaway’s group, drawing the attention of both military authorities and Hathaway himself. The aircraft is eventually forced to land in Davao City, bringing the narrative’s once distant central conflict to ground.

^{Screenshot from ‘Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway,’ showing a battle sequence in Agdao, Davao City.}

From here, the city becomes a key setting. Passengers are detained for questioning and housed under government supervision, while military officials begin investigating both the hijacking and the activities of Hathaway’s anti-federation movement. What began in transit becomes fixed: localized, managed, watched.

Visually, Davao is rendered in striking detail: high-rise buildings, glass-fronted complexes, and wide, open spaces suggest a clean and highly developed urban environment. These are set against tropical elements — palm trees, coastal views, and greenery — creating a landscape that blends modern infrastructure with natural surroundings.

^{Screenshot from ‘Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway,’ showing a battle sequence in Agdao, Davao City.}

Some scenes depict more familiar textures of everyday life, including marketplaces, street-level activity that resemble districts such as Agdao, and a local Jollibee branch. Filipino characters pass through the frame: vendors, employees, hotel staff, taxi drivers, bystanders.

However, much of the story unfolds through the eyes of outsiders — visitors, officials, military personnel — moving through controlled spaces. Hotels, secured routes, and air bases become primary spaces where interactions take place.

^{Screenshot from ‘Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway,’ featuring characters in a controlled setting.}

As the narrative develops, Davao shifts. It becomes a focal point where state power and insurgent activity meet, collide. Planned attacks and military responses unfold across the city, introducing tension beneath its otherwise polished surface.

The film’s portrayal highlights this contrast between surface and underlying conflict. Davao is imagined as calm, modern, and well-maintained — bearing the visual markers of a safe, developed city. But it is also situated within a broader system shaped by surveillance, political unrest, and the logics of military force.

Within this frame, Davao functions as both setting and strategic location — part of a wider network linking key regions — while also serving as the site where distant political struggles briefly take form.

This depiction diverges from how Davao is often framed in real-life local discourse: as a city positioned far from major geopolitical fault lines, defined by safety and security. In Hathaway, however, that distances collapses, as the city is drawn into circuits of military movement and control, becoming a site of detention, surveillance, and, eventually, violence.

Even the film’s most striking sequence — the horrors of war as seen from the eyes of civilians — unfolds here, in this rendering of Davao. What once appeared orderly and secure is suddenly undone. The sky opens; structures tremble; the boundaries that once held give way. Conflict arrives from what lies beyond the city’s control; and, once it does, it is everywhere at once.

^{Screenshot from ‘Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway,’ showing the horrors of war from below.}

In this sense, the film presents Davao, not as the exception, but the rule: any city can be militarized, any city can be targeted and attacked, any city can be reshaped by power. The implication is not that Davao is uniquely vulnerable, but that no place is ever fully insulated nor distant, ever fully outside these systems; only momentarily untouched.

The result is a distinct, if partial, vision of the city: one that lingers on surfaces — glass, light, infrastructure — while tracing the imprints of control, disruption, and power that move beneath it.

What emerges is the likeness of a city that appears safe, ordered, and intact — until the moment it is not. (Bea Gatmaytan / MindaNews)