The Boy Stares Back: Gundam 0080 War in the Pocket

The machine leaps over the roof of the school building. Its arrival conjures a gust of wind and showers the rooftop in detritus. The machine’s single red eye spots a young boy on that rooftop. The boy stares back.

That machine is a MS-06 Zaku II, an intimidating, cyclopean mechanical combat robot mass-produced by the Principality of Zeon. Within the context of the One Year War between Zeon and the Federation, though, it is mere cannon fodder for the heroic RX-78-2 Gundam. That power differential grants the Zaku a strange allure in hindsight. It carries itself with pride even if it was always fated to be outclassed.

The Zaku first appears in the premiere of 1979’s Mobile Suit Gundam. Our heroes are human pedestrians and cannot stand against them. The series has not yet established that Zaku are at the low end of the power scale. This should be when they are at their scariest. Yet the Zaku have not yet accumulated enough context or cultural history to become iconic in the eyes of ordinary people like Amuro.

This has changed by the time of Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket. The inhabitants of Side 6, a neutral colony in the midst of the One Year War’s final days, recognize a Zaku by sight. The same can be said of Al, the young protagonist of War in the Pocket. When he sees the Zaku fly over the roof of his school, he doesn’t think, “enemy.” Instead he thinks, “wow, a Zaku!”

Al is what you’d call a “military otaku,” a kid obsessed with war machines and insignia. It’s no surprise really. He lives in a world where tanks and giant toy robots are one and the same thing. What kid wouldn’t become obsessed with them? Of course, as the story continues, Al learns that war is a very different thing to experience in person than it is to observe from a distance. His fandom withers when exposed to cold, cruel reality.

War in the Pocket was released in 1989, a full decade after the original Mobile Suit Gundam aired on television. Fans at the time might have already seen the confident sequel Zeta Gundam, that show's follow-up Gundam ZZ and the grand film finale Char’s Counterattack. These works were all set during the Universal Century timeline; alternate universes (like martial arts spin-off Mobile Fighter G Gundam) didn’t appear until 1994. Gundam was a known quantity. 

Gundam’s fans, in that sense, weren’t so different from Al. They recognized a Zaku when they saw one. War in the Pocket is a lesson to those fans, as well: that their favorite franchise is just as much about mortals as iconography. Really the series is quite kind to Al by assuming that a young child could learn this difficult lesson. The audience of War in the Pocket, by comparison, had to be old enough at least to afford the VHS and LaserDisc releases.

There’s a meme today in Gundam fandom circles depicting a Gundam shooting a beam rifle above the head of an audience member. The beam is labelled with the words “war is bad,” while the fan stares directly at the fan saying, “wow, cool robot!” The joke is that while Gundam has remained resolutely antiwar since the first entry, fans ignore its themes in favor of exciting surface-level violence.

War in the Pocket seemingly represents the cleanest break with that violence, diminishing the central power fantasy in favor of humanism. It may be the most uncompromising work in the franchise regarding what Gundam itself represents. The ending especially predicts the decades of commercialized, ritualized violence that would follow War in the Pocket in the marketplace.

Yet War in the Pocket was also the most fan-oriented Gundam production to that point. This goes beyond the fact that the series is about a young robot enthusiast and his journey towards wisdom. The OVA is concerned with questions that only a fan would bother to ask: “what would ordinary life be like in a neutral colony? How exactly could a single Zaku take on a Gundam unit without being obliterated? What if my favorite giant robot cartoon really did take place in a world with real consequences rather than an absurd soap opera?”

The series script was written by Hiroyuki Yamaga, the director and writer of the classic 1987 film Royal Space Force: Wings of Honneamise. Yamaga co-founded the anime studio Gainax; not the only “by fans, for fans” studio from this time period by any means, but certainly one of the most influential. War in the Pocket’s combination of earnest military sci-fi and self-aware genre writing is reminiscent of Gainax classics from this time period. The 1988 OVA Gunbuster in particular features not just a Yamaga script but also character designs by Haruhiko Mikimoto and animation direction by Toshiyuki Kubooka, who would both later reappear on War in the Pocket.

It might be strange to think of a bleak, low-stakes series like War in the Pocket as being made for the fans. Aren’t those fans supposed to be saying “wow, cool robot?” But ordinary folks wouldn’t care enough about the contradiction to be bothered. Only a fan would be so tormented about the gulf between “war is bad” and “wow, cool robot!” that they would make a six episode OVA exploring that space.

I think that is why War in the Pocket is so effective at twisting the knife. It was made by folks who love robots but also have enough self-knowledge and life experience to recognize exactly how to torture other fans with the potential consequences of that love.  The finale in particular lays out so many fan-friendly elements: a humble Zaku versus the Gundam! A battle between doomed lovers! The colony at stake! Only to resolve these threads in a way that is satisfying in execution but ruinous to the characters.

War in the Pocket taught me that Gundam has never just been one thing or the other. Super or real, populist or niche, fannish or uncompromising. I suspect that the series has always been both, and that the contradiction at its heart was never really a contradiction. Sometimes the things we find most beautiful are poisonous, and there’s nothing better than a connoisseur to know in their gut the precise nature of the poison.

This piece was written for 2024's Anime Secret Santa, organized by Taiiku Podcast.

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