City to debut updated 18-meter statue in summer of Tokyo Olympics

During the live project announcement stream for the Gundam franchise 's 40th anniversary on Wednesday, the " Gundam Global Challenge" project announced that it is now aiming to make a life-size moving Gundam statue in 2020.

Under the new title of " Gundam Factory Yokohama," the project is collaborating with the city of Yokohama to bring on new technical supervisors and designers. The final result will be unveiled at the Yamashita Pier in Yokohama in summer 2020, and will remain there for about a year. The project previously had a competition in 2015 for to make a 18-meter-tall (59-foot-tall) statue move. The 2020 Summer Olympics will be held in Tokyo.

The project had originally planned to make a moving statue by 2019. The previous life-size RX-78-2 statue already had limited mobility; it could move its head and automatically "open" its cockpit to reveal a screen inside. That statue was replaced in September 2017 with a similarly life-size RX-0 Unicorn statue, which could light up and move various panels to transform between "Unicorn Mode" and "Destroy Mode."