Objectively There Is No Reason to Expect Much. I Am Going Anyway — Mamoru Oshii's Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Die Graue Hexe

2026/09/04-21:30:00

2838 words

Seventy-seven days until release. The film cannot be seen yet.

Even so, the material already out says something. What Oshii has done to Armored Trooper VOTOMS is legible with a fair degree of precision. And the more of it you read, the less there is to expect objectively. At the same time, exactly the same material is why I want to expect something subjectively.

These are two separate books. Mix them and both become lies.

What I am looking at

The conditions first.

As of this writing, 4 September 2026, what exists publicly is the teaser, the sixty-second and thirty-second trailers, character visuals, production stills, and the staff and cast lists with their comments. I have not seen the film. So nothing here concerns direction, tempo, sound, or performance. What can be discussed is the design of the pre-release material itself.

The outline: Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Die Graue Hexe, styled ARMORED TROOPER VOTOMS DIE GRAUE HEXE. Two films; the first opens 20 November 2026. The second has no announced date¹².

The staff list, copied from the top. Director and co-writer, Mamoru Oshii, sharing the screenplay credit with Kei Yamamura. Original work credited to Hajime Yatate and Ryosuke Takahashi, with Takahashi also serving as supervisor. Original character concept by Kazuya Kise; character design by Tetsuya Nishio, Takafumi Kojima and Shingo Ogiso. Original mechanical design by Kunio Okawara; mechanical design by Shinobu Tsuneki, Yoshihiro Sono, Ju Ishiguchi and Ko Inada. Music by Kenji Kawai, sound direction by Kazuhiro Wakabayashi. Costume design cooperation by Katsuya Terada. Planning and production by Sunrise, production cooperation by Production I.G, distribution by Bandai Namco Filmworks¹.

It is the first wholly new entry in the series in fifteen years, and a Sunrise 50th anniversary project³.

Compressed to one line: the people who made Ghost in the Shell are holding Ryosuke Takahashi's VOTOMS.

Read the cast list and this is an Oshii film

The cast was announced on 21 August; character profiles and a new trailer followed on 4 September¹⁴⁵. Here are the names, in the order the official site lists them.

Ash Vamps. Maki Stauffenberg. Alix Ballack. Ignis Schweinsteiger. Fritz Gersdorff. Brunhart Müller. Adrian Deisler. Mat Hummels. Soltig van Gunnar. Vid Hildebrand. Mateusz Julian Podolski. Weisweiler. Oliver¹.

The surnames are almost uniformly German-speaking. The title is German too: DIE GRAUE HEXE.

So far this is explicable as war-film dressing. What is not is which surnames. Ballack, Schweinsteiger, Müller, Deisler, Hummels, Hildebrand, Podolski. Open a squad list for the German national team or the Bundesliga and the same names are there. Mat Hummels shares both given name and surname with the actual player Mats Hummels. Weisweiler was not a player but the manager who ran Borussia Mönchengladbach and Köln.

Two things argue against coincidence. First, Oshii has watched football since the 2000s and writes a running column about the national team for Pia⁶. Second, there is a record that the private military companies in The Sky Crawlers — Rostock and Lautern — take their names from Bundesliga clubs, and that footballers' names were used for characters in Kerberos: Steel Hounds⁷.

No official source says this, however. It is an inference built on matching surnames and a documented habit. Treat it as unverified.

There is also a second lineage in that list. Stauffenberg and Gersdorff. Both are surnames of Wehrmacht officers involved in attempts to kill Hitler. Claus von Stauffenberg carried the bomb on 20 July 1944. Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff, in March 1943, strapped explosives to his own body at a captured-weapons exhibition in Berlin, intending to take Hitler with him; Hitler left the hall earlier than scheduled and the attempt failed⁸.

Gersdorff then escaped arrest and lived. Most of his fellow conspirators were executed. He was the one who remained.

Ash Vamps, the protagonist of Die Graue Hexe, is the soldier called "the witch" because she "returns as the survivor from any operation, however brutal"¹. Fritz Gersdorff is placed in her platoon. Whether Oshii arranged that deliberately is unknowable unless he says so. But the arrangement can be read. That reading is mine, not a fact.

Even the order of battle is twentieth-century German

More than the names, it is the unit designations that hold my attention.

Ash belongs to the 601st Fallschirmjäger Battalion, in its 3rd Company, a penal unit. Maki belongs to the 808th Independent Propaganda Company, arriving at the forward base as a captain sent "by high command to cover the front." Her actual assignment is to investigate Ash, the soldier who does not die¹.

Fallschirmjäger, Strafbataillon, Propagandakompanie. All three are Wehrmacht organisational vocabulary. A slice of the Gilgamesh military has been rewritten in the language of a twentieth-century army.

The Hundred Years War of the original VOTOMS was, in the official site's own phrasing, a war "whose very cause is unclear." Its proper nouns followed suit: Chirico Cuvie, Uoodo, Kummen, Sunsa, Gotho — sounds that belong to no country. The design in which neither side is right and the stateless sound of the naming were probably one thing.

Oshii has introduced the vocabulary of a war that has causes, culprits, and dates.

And Maki's job is well chosen. An officer of a propaganda company — someone whose function is to film, record and transmit the battlefield — steps down from recording, climbs into an AT, and becomes a participant. "The truth of the battlefield can only be known on the battlefield," runs a line of the official synopsis¹. The distance between looking and taking part is a subject Oshii has been handling since Patlabor 2: The Movie.

So it is not only the characters' names. At the level of the order of battle, this film has already been rebuilt around Oshii's interests.

On the name Ash

The protagonist's name comes from Oshii's side as well.

As Real Sound has pointed out, "ash" and "grey" recur across his work. The heroine of the live-action Avalon (2001) is named Ash, and The Next Generation -Patlabor- has a preternaturally gifted woman pilot named Rei Haibara (hai is the Japanese word for ash)⁹. Now Die Graue Hexe adds another Ash. The grey of the title and the name of the protagonist look like separate words in Japanese, but they arrive at the same place.

Key visual for Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Die Graue Hexe. Ash, a woman soldier with a blue-grey bob, sits in what looks like a dim mecha hangar with a hand raised near her mouth, eyes narrowed at the viewer. A thin cartridge-shaped earring hangs from one ear; a frayed collar sits at her neck

Image source: official site of Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Die Graue Hexe (votoms-gh.com)

The full character visual is worth reading too. Ash stands in a cropped tank top with a jacket knotted at her waist, enormous cargo trousers, fingerless gloves, and plain working boots. Her shoulders and arms are dirty; her face barely moves. Her only ornament is a single earring shaped like a shell casing.

This is not the body of a mecha-anime heroine. It is the body of a woman in an Oshii film. Katsuya Terada's credit for costume design cooperation points the same way.

So objectively there is nothing to expect

Everything above converges on one reading: someone else's series is being converted into a Mamoru Oshii film.

There is one more piece of evidence for that reading: the comment from Yuichi Nakamura, who describes watching the footage supplied for recording.

Watching the material they gave me for the recording session, I thought, wait, something's odd here. After a while I noticed the peculiar sense of tempo. The air you feel in the pauses between lines and scenes, in where the camera sits. That's it — it's the thing I felt the first time I watched Ghost in the Shell¹.

He means it as praise. As information, though, it says that the person who saw the footage first was reminded of Ghost in the Shell, not of VOTOMS.

There is more on that side of the ledger. Oshii's last new theatrical animated feature was The Sky Crawlers in 2008, an eighteen-year gap. What has played in cinemas under his name since has been live action, remastered revivals of older films, or the belated first release of a film shelved for decades¹⁰. He was born in 1951 and is now seventy-five.

Beyond that: this is a two-part film whose second part has no announced date. And it is a fiftieth-anniversary project. I do not rate the batting average of films born inside an anniversary frame very highly.

The most telling item is Oshii's own comment.

I was a huge fan of the original VOTOMS. It has always been the work I admired, the thing I wanted to try someday. Some people probably suspect I'm going to stick a standing-noodle stall into VOTOMS, but I'm being serious about it. I am making a serious war action film¹.

That he has to pre-empt the suspicion is itself a measure of how reasonable the suspicion is.

And subjectively I want to expect something anyway

Now the other book.

In 2005, in conversation with Takahashi, Oshii said that although he had always wanted to make a military piece or a robot piece, he still had not managed it⁹. Twenty-one years later he is doing it. A project someone waited twenty-one years for can be built differently for that reason alone.

And what Oshii saw in VOTOMS overlaps with what he has spent his career doing: treating robots as weapons rather than as characters, and placing the operator as expendable rather than heroic. The Protect Gear of the Kerberos films, the expressionless equipment, the full-body armour that erases the face. There may be no other franchise where Oshii's preoccupations are not borrowed goods. So the thing that looks like an intrusion into someone else's work might, in this one case, fit.

There is one more thing he has not changed.

Full-body view of the Scopedog in desert colours, model ATM-09-VC. A sand-coloured armoured humanoid weapon with three turret lenses on its head, a heavy machine gun in its right hand, and gliding wheels visible on the soles of its feet

Image source: official site of Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Die Graue Hexe (votoms-gh.com)

The Scopedog. The desert-colour ATM-09-VC is described as a field modification suited to conditions on Valkyria II, with an autoloader added for its heavy machine gun. But the three turret lenses on the head, the roller dash driven by the gliding wheels in the legs, and the arm punch that extends the arm to strike are all left in place¹. The original mechanical design credit still reads Kunio Okawara. It seems fitting that the bonus for the ¥1,900 standard advance ticket is an illustration board of the Scopedog drawn for the occasion by Okawara himself⁴.

So the film is trying to rewrite the people and the order of battle into Oshii's terms while leaving the machine where 1983 left it. If that division holds, it is a rather good one. The people change; the AT stays a weapon.

Takahashi's presence as supervisor matters too. "Films have what you might call a director's own touch, and I'm a fan of the Oshii touch myself," he says¹. The author has authorised the rewriting. Not in the sense that an author's blessing makes it safe — in the sense that someone with standing has stated the rewriting is design, not accident.

Music by Kenji Kawai, sound direction by Kazuhiro Wakabayashi. I cannot remember an Oshii film where the sound was dull.

There are two kinds of expectation, and one of them does not need to come true

Objective expectation is forecasting from a track record. Being a forecast, it can be right or wrong. And built from the material currently to hand, the forecast for this film tilts toward doubt: eighteen years, seventy-five, an anniversary, an undated second part, and the fact that the person who watched the footage first thought of Ghost in the Shell.

Subjective expectation is not a forecast. It is an admission that there is something you want to see anyway. It cannot be right or wrong.

Mix the two and both break. Mixed, it comes out as "this is going to be a masterpiece," which is a forecast padded with wishing, or as "it's Oshii, so of course," which is resignation with the face of judgement.

So keep them apart. Objectively there is nothing to expect. Subjectively I want to expect something. I will probably be there on 20 November, opening day. And if the forecast was wrong, I will write that it was wrong.

How many more chances there are to watch a new Mamoru Oshii animated feature in a cinema, as a new film, is unknown. That belongs to the objective side.

Relation to earlier writing

Patlabor, VOTOMS, and Ghost in the Shell are not returning to their origins in the same way. (17 May 2026) set those three beside each other as works "born from different production structures, returning to the present by different routes." VOTOMS got as far as being an anti-heroic war robot show out of Sunrise's television studio line, now returning toward weaponry rather than fond nostalgia, and stopped there.

This piece is the continuation. That one was about organisations. This one is about what happens at the level of proper nouns, unit designations and bodies when such an organisation enters someone else's work. It does not retract the earlier view; it drops the resolution by one step.

I will probably write about this again after seeing it. What I will want to check then is how the division proposed here — the people are Oshii's, the machine is Takahashi's and Okawara's — actually plays on screen.

Sources

Official site of Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Die Graue Hexe: the STAFF, CAST, CHARACTER, MECHA, STORY and INTRODUCTION sections, plus the comment blocks from the director, the original creator/supervisor and the cast. Accessed 4 September 2026. The title is styled ARMORED TROOPER VOTOMS DIE GRAUE HEXE. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹
Eiga.com title page. The first film opens 20 November 2026; the second is listed with no release date. ↩
V-STORAGE, 15 January 2026. States that this is the first wholly new Armored Trooper VOTOMS in fifteen years and a Sunrise 50th anniversary project. ↩
V-STORAGE, 21 August 2026. The standard advance ticket is ¥1,900 including tax, with a B6 illustration board of the Scopedog drawn for the occasion by Kunio Okawara. The Animate-exclusive version with a dog tag is ¥2,700 (¥1,900 ticket plus ¥800 dog tag), ordered 21 August to 15 October and issued 16 October to 19 November. Online-only and premium bromide (¥2,200) versions also exist. Quantities are limited. ↩ ↩²
Denfaminicogamer, 4 September 2026, reporting the release of main character profiles and a new trailer. ↩
Pia, "Mamoru Oshii: What Was That Thing in That Film Again?", instalment 127, in which Oshii writes about broadcasts of the Japanese national football team: "Of course I want to watch, but lately, for some reason, they often don't broadcast the national team's matches." ↩
Japanese Wikipedia, "Mamoru Oshii." Used for his date of birth (8 August 1951), his football watching, the derivation of the private military company names in The Sky Crawlers from Bundesliga clubs (Rostock, Lautern), the use of footballers' names for characters in Kerberos: Steel Hounds, and the list of works he has directed. A secondary source; the naming derivations are not confirmed by any statement from Oshii himself. Unverified. ↩
Japanese Wikipedia, "Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff." On 21 March 1943, at a captured-weapons exhibition in Berlin, he attempted to detonate explosives on his own body together with Hitler; Hitler left earlier than scheduled and the attempt was aborted. Gersdorff escaped arrest and became one of the few survivors among the conspirators; the plan only became known after the war through his memoir. Reading the character's surname as a reference to this history is this article's interpretation, not an official explanation. ↩
Real Sound, January 2026. It quotes a 2005 Newtype conversation between Oshii and Takahashi in which Oshii says that despite wanting to make military and robot works, he has still not managed to. The same article notes the recurrence of ash and grey in Oshii's work — Ash in Avalon, Rei Haibara in The Next Generation -Patlabor-. This is a secondary source; the Newtype pages themselves were not checked. ↩ ↩²
From the Mamoru Oshii filmography on Eiga.com and the list of directed works on Japanese Wikipedia. Since 2008, the works released theatrically under his name have been live-action films such as The Next Generation -Patlabor- and Garm Wars; remastered revivals of Angel's Egg, The Red Spectacles, Innocence, Ghost in the Shell and the Patlabor features; and the 2015 first release of Nils's Mysterious Journey: The Movie, produced in 1983 and shelved for decades. Vlad Love (2020–21) was a web and television series, with Oshii credited as creator and chief director. ↩