Nostalgic Anime Retrospective No.31] The World of "Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket" Deepens through "Seeing" and "Hearing

Mobile Suit Gundam Twilight AXIS, the latest in the Gundam series set in the space century, is now available for download. The key to the game is the mysterious Gundam mobile suit "Tristan. It is a modified version of the Newtype Gundam "Alex" that appeared in "Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket" (1989, hereafter "Pocket War").
It is rare to see a variation of the mobile suit that appeared in "Pocket War. Let us examine the "Pocket War" (6 episodes), the first OVA in the Gundam series, to find out what kind of work it was.

What was seen in the eyes of the boy Al?

The setting is the Ribault Colony on Side 6. In the neutral zone of Libor Colony, which was not involved in the fierce battles between the Principality of Zeon and the Earth Federation Forces, the Federation Forces' new mobile suit, the Alex, is secretly brought in.
The Zeon army's Cyclops Unit infiltrates the Libor Colony with the aim of capturing or destroying the Alex. Bernie, a new soldier in the Cyclops Unit, meets Al, a civilian boy living in the Ribault Colony. Al, who has an innocent admiration for the military and mobile suits, happens to witness the Alex's delivery container and offers to help the Cyclops team.
However, the Cyclops team is a decoy, and if they cannot destroy the Alex, plans are afoot to annihilate the entire Ribault Colony with nuclear missiles. Bernie, who has lost all his friends, decides to work with Al to defeat the powerful Alex and protect the Ribault Colony.

The story progresses as the boy Al "witnesses" things, people, and situations that had nothing to do with him.
Al, who carries a video camera with him at all times, peeks into Alex's loading container and captures it on camera, as mentioned above. Bernie sees the images taken by Al and leaks them to Zeon's upper echelons. Convinced of Alex's presence, the upper echelon dispatches a Cyclops unit to the Ribault Colony. In other words, the story begins to roll when Al witnesses the container.
Perhaps if we list "what Al has seen," we can get almost the whole story?　Let's try.

■We see Alex's container.
See Chris, the woman who moved into the house next door.
We see the battle between the Federation and Zeon forces.
See the mobile suit (Zaku) that Bernie rides.
We see Bernie's figure on top of the Zaku that fell in the forest park.
We see a city destroyed in battle.
Seeing the battle taking place outside the colony.
We see the truck of the Cyclops unit that Bernie is riding in.
Watching the Cyclops team assemble their mobile suits.
We see federal military personnel working at the secret base.
We see Alex in a state of parts in the secret base.
We see the Cyclops team members die.
We see the pilot get into the Alex and start it up.
We see Alex defeat a mobile suit of the Cyclops Squadron.
We see Bernie is the only survivor.
We see a dead child emerge from the wreckage of a building.
He sees a bugged microphone attached to his unit insignia.
You see the "image" of a city and a school blown to pieces by nuclear missiles.
You see your school half-destroyed by the battle.
You see your classmates alive.
Riding on the arm of a repaired Zaku, he sees the city where he lives.
I see Alex stab through the Zaku that Bernie is riding.
I see Chris being carried out of Alex's cockpit.
We see the video message from Bernie.

The last video message is from Al's POV (subjective shot), and we do not see any expression on Al's face as he watches Bernie's final scene, in which he died in vain. Also, notice that Bernie barely moves on the screen and speaks his feelings through dialogue.
In this scene, Al, who has "seen" the important scenes in the story, is "listening" to Bernie's heart. The same is true in the last scene when the principal gives a speech, and Al begins to cry as he "hears" the principal's words. Al, who has been involved in the situation by "seeing," gets in touch with the inside of the story by "listening.

Bernie, the "listener," finally "sees.

While Al "sees," Bernie's motivation for action is to "listen.
After the Cyclops unit is wiped out, Bernie leaves Al and tries to escape from the spaceport alone. However, a stranger at the port bar calls his girlfriend in a drunken stupor and cries out, "What's the matter with you, all you do is lie!" and "You don't even have the guts to tell a lie!" and "hear" her cry out, and stop running away.
Even in the scene where he and Al are working together to repair the crashed Zaku, "Al, can you hear me?" Al is in charge of reporting from the cockpit monitor. In the video message, "Al, can you hear me? Al, can you hear me?　Listen carefully. In other words, it can be taken that Bernie is teaching "listening" to Al, who was only "watching. The shift from "watching" to "listening" may mean the end of the boyhood of being on the sidelines.
Al says of Bernie's death, "He's blown to pieces. It's worse than mincing meat," he "hears" from the conversation of a Union soldier. For Al, the days of just "watching" are over.

One last thing. Bernie, who was in the position of listening and being listened to, also has a scene in which he "sees" for a moment.
On the night he and Al parted, Bernie gazed forlornly at the house of Chris, whom he had been interested in as a member of the opposite sex. Then, she sees Chris' smiling face in a bright room decorated with a tree, celebrating Christmas with his parents. However, since Bernie is only looking at Chris's house from the car, there is no way that he can see the inside of the house or the expressions on the people's faces. In other words, what Bernie sees is only an image of him. Or perhaps the camera intentionally showed him scenes that he could not see as "a world that has nothing to do with Bernie.
In any case, "Pokemon" teaches us the powerlessness of merely "seeing. The only way to understand what is in the hearts of others is to "listen.


(Text by Keisuke Hirota)

(C) SOTSU, SUNRISE