Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team

**This is an older review I wrote a few years ago as an experiment. It's a little long, and I don't know that I'll be returning to this exact format in the future, but I hope you find it interesting! -R

In January of 1996, Sunrise began releasing the first episodes of Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team on home video. Helmed by veteran anime director Kanda Takeyuki, the show took the long-running space franchise into more grounded territory with its Vietnam War-inspired take on the Gundam universe. Yet that July, halfway through the production, tragedy struck when Takeyuki was suddenly killed in a traffic accident. The 08th MS Team stayed incomplete for several years until Takeyuki's former collaborator Iida Umanosuke came on board to finish the remaining episodes under Takeyuki's original plan.

It’s a testament to the show’s two directors that, despite its tragic context, The 08th MS Team has since built up a reputation among fans as being one of the most respected entries in the Gundam franchise. Abandoning the series' space-opera roots in favor of gritty action and a ground-level focus on a squadron of foot soldiers, The 08th MS Team often has more in common with war movies like Platoon than other sci-fi anime like Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Though its messy main plot and an uninspired central romance hold it back somewhat, The 08th MS Team remains a compelling, high-quality series and stands as one of the easiest entry points to the sprawling Gundam universe.

The 08th MS Team is primarily the story of Ensign Shiro Amada, a space-born Earth Federation commander assigned to Earth as part of an operation to wrest the planet back from the Principality of Zeon. Yet during a rescue mission before he lands, Shiro becomes stranded on an abandoned spaceship alongside a Zeon pilot named Aina Sahalin. Although their meeting starts in a shootout, the two quickly realize they must work together to find rescue. By the time the two part, they develop a mutual respect and affection for each other, staying in each other’s thoughts as they adjust to their different sides of the war—Shiro as a commander of the titular 08th Mobile Suit Team in the dangerous jungles of Southeast Asia, and Aina as a pilot for her brother’s experimental new weapon. 

Although Shiro and Aina’s relationship drives the core of the narrative, especially in the show’s back half, their story isn’t the only one the show explores. Early episodes detail Shiro trying to adapt to life on Earth and the frightening challenges of jungle warfare, but the show also uses this time to introduce the rest of the 08th through sub-plots and focus episodes. Among them are Terry Sanders, a veteran fighter who thinks he’s a cursed team-killer; Karen Joshua, a badass, trash-talking mobile suit pilot with a tragic past; Michel Ninorich, a cowardly comms assistant who constantly writes to a girlfriend back home; and Kiki Rosita, a devious young guerilla fighter whose anti-Zeon priorities sometimes align with 08th's. As you might expect from those descriptions, the show draws heavily on war movie archetypes, but the characters are well-enough defined to rise above simple tropes and ultimately wind up being one of the show's greatest boons. It helps that their dialogue is so smartly written—bits of interesting backstory and worldbuilding are naturally weaved into conversation along with comms chatter and military jargon, defining the world and characters while reinforcing the show's grounded tone.

Most episodes are relatively self-contained vignettes, with many focusing on a single mission from one character’s perspective. Even the most straightforward of these mission-centric episodes holds its own pleasures—the detailed focus on combat tactics and the smallest of micro-conflicts makes enemy encounters tense and exciting, and the show does an admirable job at developing its cast in the downtime. But in its best moments, the show also interrogates the human costs of waging war and blindly following orders. One standout episode focuses on Michel’s fracturing performance as a soldier as he questions his relationship with his lover back home. Another zeroes in on a tense situation where the 08th MS Team is put on standby and unable to help when Zeon pilots hold Kiki’s village of guerilla fighters hostage. In some cases, the show finds a simple resolution to its stories, like a character overcoming their fear to protect their comrades. But other episodes aren’t cut-and-dry—situations go catastrophically awry, good people are forced into bad situations, and conflicts can result in outright tragedy. The show is never better than when it condemns the self-interested commanders who put soldiers in harm’s way, and by the time its climax rolls around, it builds its thoughts on the messy, personal nature of war and the moral cost of being a soldier into a rousing anti-war statement. The only real letdown is the show’s final episode, which tries to act as an epilogue to the main plot despite focusing on characters who never appeared in the show proper. It’s a strange end to an otherwise compelling series.

Unfortunately, for all the ways that the show’s ground-level focus bears fruit, the main plot tends to get lost in the weeds. Major conflicts can begin without any buildup, and a couple battles even start without their stakes being properly explained (one has the 08th assigned to protect a group of mission-critical tank mobile suits, a fact that isn’t readily apparent). Similarly, there’s not a lot of context given to the war itself—longtime Gundam fans are likely familiar with the war’s history, but neither side espouses anything like an ideology in this show, which may leave new viewers to wonder what all of the bloodshed is about.

All of that is fairly forgivable, but the show gets one thing glaringly wrong: its central relationship between Shiro and Aina. Despite their romance theoretically being one of the show’s major selling points, the two only have a handful of direct interactions—their initial meeting lasts all of a couple hours, and their next encounter doesn’t come until the midway point of the series. Despite this, they’re unusually attached to each other by the end of the first episode, and they’ve all but proposed to each other by the time their second meeting ends. It’s clear that the show wants to play up its star-crossed lovers story, but good love stories have to spend time defining their characters’ chemistry, bringing together two distinct personalities and showing how they either come together or fall apart. The pair just doesn’t have enough time together to develop anything like a rapport, much less a convincing romance.

It doesn't help that Shiro is a one-dimensional, hotheaded anime protagonist, and while the arcs about his commitment to the war can be compelling, there’s not a lot to him aside from that. Aina, on the other hand, is—well, I’m honestly still not sure what her deal is. Some episodes paint her as having a deep, almost reverential attachment to her brother Ginias, the creator of the Zeon super-weapon she pilots, while other episodes show her openly despising him. The show also likes to think she’s disgusted with the human cost of the war—a large portion of the finale involves her leading an evacuation of wounded soldiers—but when she sees Zeon soldiers shoot an innocent mother and child in an early episode, she only remarks, “Is that really necessary?” and walks away. One later episode shows her change sides three times within the span of about five minutes. Although the show spends some time defining her background circumstances, it doesn’t give her any goals to work toward or an ideology to uphold until too late, making her behavior wildly different from episode to episode and even scene to scene. A couple other characters also fall victim to this sort of inconsistent characterization (such as Karen Joshua, much to my dismay—the show in general doesn’t do a great job writing women), but Aina is by far the most damaging example. It’s tough to buy into a sweeping love story when one of the two participants barely even counts as a character.

Even when its story elements fall flat, though, one aspect of this show always holds steady: its stellar animation and art design. As a straight-to-video OVA series, it’s clear that this show was afforded the talent and time to look its best. The color palate is full of deep black shadows and vibrant greens that make its jungle setting pop, and when the location changes, the color design aptly evokes the washed-out heat of a desert or the cavernous interior of a Zeon mountain base. The character design—by Toshihiro Kawamoto of Cowboy Bebop fame—is equally strong, with every character feeling expressive while communicating crucial personality details. The backgrounds in particular deserve to be singled out, as they’re almost universally well composed and filled with a stunning amount of detail. Shots of leafy foliage behind messy jungle outposts bring you into the show’s world, and forlorn shots of unoccupied Gundams make compelling statements in and of themselves, reinforcing their simultaneous status as larger-than-life machines and everyday tools of war.

The series’ animation is also consistent and polished, clearly benefitting from the show’s extra development time and manageable episode count. Once again, the show excels in its little details—characters are expressive and emotive, and the team's dedication to portraying things like Shiro’s head bobbing with each of his mech’s footsteps adds an extra layer of realism to every episode. The animation prowess comes across most obviously in the show’s action scenes, which frankly count among the best in the genre. This isn’t a series where mechs survive gunshots unscathed, like characters in an FPS game—battles are intense and destructive, with shrapnel flying and mobile suits taking extensive damage with every hit. The series also benefits from crystal-clear direction for its fight scenes—whether in a vicious, skin-of-your-teeth nighttime jungle fight or a standout battle with a speedy Zeon captain, the show is able to communicate the stakes and internal back-and-forth of its fights almost singlehandledly through its visual design. From its scariest battles to its most peaceful moments, this is one of the best-looking series to come out of the 90s.

All in all, whatever qualms I have with this show’s overarching story are easy to forgive in light of the things it does right. From the constant little details that keep you absorbed in its world to the most shocking moments of violence, the show is an absorbing experience, easy to watch and hard to put down until its venerable climax. I wouldn’t quite call it one of the all-time classics of the medium, but twenty years after its conclusion, The 08th MS Team still stands as one of the better mecha series out there and a high water mark for the Gundam franchise as a whole.