Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket (Anime OVA) Review.

 

I can't quite remember my own innocence. Or rather, I don't know when I was confronted with the reality of the world in such a hard way as to make me truly aware of things like death, loss, pain to the degree that it left melancholy in its wake with the still clinging memories of what changed me. I can remember moments; simple things like using a computer and finding things your mind really wasn't ready to see or the continuous cruelty of other people's escalation until you struggle to offer kindness. I can remember death as a distant thing and compare that to now, the intimacy of close loss. It's hard. I don't know if I would go back to before then with all the good in my life that's changed things but I wish I remembered what it felt like to be so 'light' so to speak. Weightless.

 

Mobile Suit Gundam: 0080 is about weight, from the literal crashing of heavy mechanical robot foot falls on the grass and pavements of a place not ready to handle the war at home, to the proverbial; the loss of innocence and what that can cost you. It's not really about pilots of mech suits; it is, but they are people who both enrich and darken the life of a kid named Al. Al is the protagonist. A child of a distant married couple going through troubles, on a colony where 'nothing happens' in space, whose growing distaste of it leads him down a path where in a war between the forces of the Earth Federation and the Principality of Zeon, Al simply wishes to connect with something that will take him away; so he can be a soldier in a war and fight. To Al, that feeling is sincere and real; it truly is, but he plays 'war' with his friends in the park and they boast about insignia badges from forces they find and disparage the one girl in their class who seems like a spoil sport. To Al, it's both incredibly real and it's also shielded from the reality of conflict, what drives it and what that means for others.

 

This story involves Al's neighbor, Chris, a young woman whose just come back home for a time; and Bernie, a man whose crash landing into both the neutral Side 6 and the life of Al will reshape it for a good long time to come. More important, for Al, an attack from a Zeonic Squad on the Colony leads to what he thinks is his exciting big break from this boredom and the troubles of home; a chance to change things. A chance to be a soldier. A chance to escape.

 

I won't speak more on the plot. It's worth knowing little watching as you may be able to pick up as you go where things are headed. But to be clear to you; this is a story about the old leading to the new. About old and new faces. Old and new days passing back into a tomorrow you don't know. Old and new selves. Al is, by the end, not who he was. I remember an era where I was me, then another me, transformed by a choice that would be more who I felt I was but forever altered by what that choice would mean for me and how it would affect my tomorrows.

 

It's very pretty to look at, it's emotively acted in spots, it's got a story that again, you can recognize the direction of; I did and for me it meant it didn't quite hit the peak of what maybe emotionally I was looking for; but it did exactly what it needed to do, did it right and did it impressively. I recall these feelings because again, it's a story that is telling a story you know when you see it. You can feel a little like a kid in the wake of these incredibly well drawn machines, staggering into the lives of children and the vulnerable, animated with an incredibly fluid for the time manner. It's got beautiful music that threads in and out of key moments and while maintaining especially an opening that feels of the eighties and nineties, it knows when to puncture that, to leave absence in sound or to ratchet the tension in moments that are important. It might be that it didn't hit the absolute peak for me purely due to it being not what I needed in this moment; but it still informs me exactly of what I wished to indeed be informed of and know; that war is hell and we can only shield our children from that reality for so long. It's a show about empathy, about the formation of it and what happens when we are too late; from the first moment of the show and the framing of its plot with a rocket escaping Earth and a Zeon Squad unable to stop it at a cost, it's always been about being too late. Of feeling that weight where there was none.

 

You can never feel that weight's absence when it's there, but you can use that knowledge to do good for others, for yourself. And this anime is about that.

 

Picture sourced from Sunrise Inc