Because of the first three words of its title, Mobile Suit Gundam: 08th MS Team never needs one of these retrospectives to be re-discovered. Gundam is a huge, successful franchise that’s always churning out new shows and gaining new fans. You could argue that 08th is at a slight accessibility disadvantage, being a side-story in Gundam’s Universal Century (UC) timeline. For the uninitiated, from the time the franchise began in 1979, to the mid 90s, every show took place at some point along this fictional future timeline. However, in an effort to bring in more fans, Sunrise began creating Gundam shows based in stand-alone alternate universe (AU) timelines which don’t require familiarity with UC continuity. Despite the barrier to entry, the UC continues to acquire new viewers through its compelling conflicts and memorable characters.
So given the prominence of the Gundam name in anime fandom, why write such a retrospective at all? First, 08th’s twentieth anniversary seems a fitting time to step back and judge whether the years have been kind to it. A cursory Google search for 1996 anime demonstrates that twenty years can radically age a production, but 08th doesn’t feel like it’s been left behind by the times. Apart from how the show holds up in absolute terms, I want to evaluate it in the context of the Gundam franchise. I don’t mean I will rank its quality against the rest of Gundam; instead, I want to answer the question, “How ‘Gundam’ is 08th MS Team?” In other words, does the show contain what someone might consider to be the essential features of Mobile Suit Gundam? The answer is relative, and I will elaborate on this later. This is a useful question to ask, though, because—believe it or not—08th is frequently either the first or one of the first Gundam shows numerous people watch. Finally, back when this show came out, there were only a handful of entries in the franchise, but the ensuing twenty years have given us a glut of Gundam. Even in sub-genres of niche fandoms, there’s too much stuff to watch. So, my third and final objective here is to show that 08th MS Team serves as an excellent point of entry to the franchise.
Something arresting I’d never noticed before this viewing was just how substantively and rapidly the show changes at the halfway point. Umanosuke Ida takes over series direction from Takeyuki Kanda upon the latter’s sudden, tragic death (though Ida never took credit, always referring to 08th as Kanda’s show) after wrapping up episode six. The first half of the series is a collection of half a dozen character stories whose languid pace and episodic nature make it feel more akin to parts of Patlabor than the often theatrical Mobile Suit Gundam. These episodes allow the viewer to get acquainted with each member of the 08th team, who are a pretty likable bunch despite their archetypal makeup. Of the team, only squad commander Shiro Amada (and maybe unofficial member Kiki) undergoes any substantive character development. This doesn’t mean scenes featuring the rest of the cast aren’t fun; it’s delightful to watch Karen mother the crew with tough love or to see Eledore return to the 08th team after being absent for a while due to an injury. As the unit gels, they begin to feel more like relatives than co-workers. (More family than soldiers?)
Once Ida takes the helm, he raises the stakes and quickens the pace. Going forward, the episodes are tightly serialized, abandoning their once episodic structure to focus on telling a longer, more melodramatic story. The romance between Shiro and Zeon noble Aina Sahalin elbows its way into the limelight, and their expedited connection doesn’t come across as particularly authentic. Speaking of things that are expedited, a couple of the character arcs seem to make hasty leaps forward. Aina’s brother Ginias, weapons designer and series antagonist, was certainly always cartoonishly evil. However, near the end of the show he’s suddenly crazy. When he murders the scientists who helped him design super weapon Apsalus by poisoning their champagne, I could only scratch my head in disbelief, wondering why he’d done it. His motive was completely unexplored. Shiro rapidly changes as well, going from naively good soldier to anti-war idealist in a manner that simply doesn’t ring true. You could argue that these things were going to happen on Kanda’s watch as well, and I don’t doubt that. It’s the clumsy way in which they happen that hurts the show. The second half of 08th MS Team doesn’t feel like it deviates from its intended course or destination; rather it feels as though the pilot who took over mid-flight simply doesn’t have the steady hand his predecessor did.
Where its storytelling can be uneven, the show’s visuals remain consistently solid and keep the production looking appealing despite its age. Toshiro Kawamoto’s character designs lack the angular sharpness or exaggerated leanness that typified 90s character design. The mecha designs don’t stray too far from Kunio Okawara’s original vision, but those original designs are so iconic that this won’t deter new viewers. Plus, these robots look pretty spectacular in motion. The handful of battles are animated quite fluidly, with the climactic confrontation between Shiro’s EZ-8 and Norris Packard’s Gouf being one of the highlights of the show, visually or otherwise. The animators also manage to convey the skills of the mobile suit pilots through the mecha animation. The grace with which Norris maneuvers his Gouf is impossible for any of the 08th team, who themselves exhibit varying degrees of piloting aptitude. This attention to detail and appealing visual presentation, combined with a close-knit, enjoyable cast of characters make 08th MS Team a fairly satisfying if slightly disjointed experience to revisit two decades later.
The show is satisfying on its own, but does it effectively communicate what Gundam is? The show certainly shares themes with previous UC titles, e.g. there are good people on both sides of war, rather than the reductive “good guys vs. bad guys” scenario; war is a pretty awful thing that makes people suffer unjustly; and conflict brings out of people both extraordinary courage and desperate savagery. In terms of poignantly conveying these ideas, 08th MS Team is among the most successful entries in the franchise. However, its tone, setting and focus are quite different from previous shows in the franchise. Mobile Suit Gundam features world-spanning conflict, with sprawling casts of characters taking to space to participate in battles that were huge in both scale and consequence. 08th is about a small, tight group of pilots toiling away in a terrestrial, localized conflict. It’s the very definition of a side-story in that its contents are not critical to understanding the larger plot of the UC. For some, these details matter much more than 08th thematic similarities to prior Gundams.
I think stepping back from these specifics a bit will allow us to see that, while 08th MS Team may not look a lot like the original Mobile Suit Gundam, it is a fine representation of what the franchise has become. So far, I’ve only compared 08th to UC series that came before it, but looking at its 90s AU contemporaries proves instructive. Two years prior to the airing of 08th’s first episode, the inaugural AU series, Mobile Fighter G Gundam, graced the small screen. Less than a month after that finished, New Mobile Report: Gundam Wing began its television run, which overlapped a bit with 08th’s video release. These two shows were divorced not only from the UC’s continuity but also its tone; they were radically different from mainline UC series! G was an homage to over-the-top, 70s super robot series, and Wing was much more about the pretty boy characters than the robots. The 90s were a decade of experimentation for the franchise. Different creatives got to try their hand at Gundam, and this resulted in a variety of productions that are as different from each other as they are from the original. When considered in this context, I think 08th MS Team appears very much in line with the direction Gundam was going in at the time and has continued to go in since. Seen as part of a strategy to diversify the content in order to broaden the fanbase demographics, 08th is exactly the show Sunrise needed to make at that time.
Taken in sum, I believe this show works as well as almost any Gundam series as an introduction to the franchise. Many of the elements that make it different from previous UC titles make it more accessible: a short run-time (including a last episode you can entirely ignore), a small cast of likable characters, and a self-contained narrative that requires little explanation on the front end. Those looking for a more grounded, Vietnam-esque war tale in the vein of Ryosuke Takahashi’s Votoms will find 08th more digestible than Zeta Gundam or Stardust Memory. But, for all these differences, this show is still UC Gundam. First time viewers will get a taste of the Federation-Zeon conflict at the heart of the timeline. They will encounter the prevailing themes of Gundam, stated above. And, though it feels different than the storied battles of iconic UC rivals Char Aznable and Amuro Ray, the emotional melee combat between Shiro and Norris is a splendid example of the high-stakes duels that are part-and-parcel of Gundam denouement. In short, both its differences from and similarities to its predecessors make 08th MS Team a fantastic point of entry into the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise, even twenty years later.
