The world of The 08th MS Team was brought to life through the tireless efforts of an exceptional production staff. From among its core creators, we spoke with three key members: mechanical designer Kunio Okawara, setting production staffer Yoshitaka Kawaguchi, and scriptwriter/composition writer Akira Okeya.

Mechanical Designer
KUNIO OKAWARA

――To jump right in, multiple designers and mechanical designers were involved with The 08th MS Team. Which parts did you personally handle?

Okawara: Let’s see… I guess it was about two years ago now… I did the Ground-Type Gundam, and what else was it again?

――The GM.

Okawara: Ah, right, the GM too. And the Zaku. Though with that one, I basically just took the Master Grade version and stuck three spikes on it. (laughs) As for the Gundam, Kawaguchi had a very solid image of what he wanted, so it felt like we were developing it together. Up to that point, Gundams had been general-purpose machines, so I started from the question: what would happen if you made one completely specialized for ground combat? And the thing I paid the most attention to was the boarding system.

――So it doesn’t use the Core Block System.

Okawara: Right. In space, you can get away with being pretty vague about how a pilot boards the machine, but once you move to the ground, you have to think about the most familiar, believable way a person would actually get in. That’s where I tried to be inventive.

――Unlike in zero gravity, on the ground you actually have to climb up into it.

Okawara: Exactly. In a battlefield situation, I think boarding becomes one of the most important parts. Up until then, the setup had usually been that a wire dropped down from beneath the hatch, right? But if I were the one trying to board it, that’d scare the hell out of me. So I figured, naturally, the rope ought to come down from above, more like a helicopter insertion system. And standing on the rim of the cockpit would be terrifying too, so I thought, maybe it ought to have at least a little step-ladder arrangement… Also, early on it had vulcan guns mounted in the flanks, but Kawaguchi had some very firm opinions about that, so in the end we decided to go with this block-style configuration.

――Originally, they would have gone here in the flanks…

Okawara: That’s where the vulcans were. (laughs)

――What about the surrounding designs, like the hover tank and the other machines?

Okawara: That area was all Yamane.

――How did you coordinate and reconcile the designs?

Okawara: Honestly, we really didn’t, not much at all. I left that to him. It feels like a remake of First Gundam, or maybe more like a rewrite, so really, I would’ve liked to do all of it myself. But I had a whole lot of other jobs going on, too.

――You described it as something like a rewrite of First Gundam, but by this point seventeen years have already passed since First Gundam, hasn’t it? How do you see the differences in design approach or broader design trends over that time?

Okawara: We’ve gone completely back to basics. First Gundam, Z, ZZ, and the Gundam works that came after all have different design sensibilities. But since this is depicting the era of First Gundam, we deliberately kept all of that newer stuff out. We went back to the old style, all the way back to the point of asking, “If this had been the setting back then, how would I have done it?”

――So would you say that meant adding more realistic settings, or more finely detailed ones?

Okawara: Yes, that’s right. Overall, the idea was to stop within a range where anyone could instantly recognize, “Ah, this is the world of First Gundam.” Yamane, who handled the support mecha, is very skillful, so he understood all of that and worked within it perfectly.

――Mobile suits like the Zaku are still incredibly popular even now. I don’t think there are many robot designs with this kind of longevity. When you first designed it, did you have a feeling like, “This one’s going to work”?

Okawara: No, not at all. Back then, the standard thinking was that enemy mecha wouldn’t be turned into merchandise. So in the end, as long as it fit naturally within this animated work called Gundam, nobody really complained. If the director and I were in agreement, that was enough. It’s not like the sponsors were going to object, so it was fine. So with that one, I think it was probably finalized after only about a second draft. The only condition was that it had to have a mono-eye. Beyond that, I was basically told to do whatever I wanted, as freely as I liked. Though I do think a big part of why it’s endured this long is the way it was directed and presented.

――What is “Gundam” to you, personally?

Okawara: It feels like both a benefactor and an adversary. In the end, Gundam has let me be involved in all sorts of different projects, but on the other hand, it also means I still have to keep doing Gundam. I’d like to do robot shows and mechanical design in completely different genres too, but once business enters the picture, the safe bet always turns into Gundam. Still, even with Gundam, when they shake things up completely—like with G Gundam—then I can enjoy it in all kinds of ways as though it were something brand new. (laughs)

――Thank you very much for your time today.

Setting Production
YOSHITAKA KAWAGUCHI

――To start with, I think one question many fans had after seeing The 08th MS Team was this: just how widely deployed is the RX-79(G) Gundam, a mass-production ground-combat unit?

Kawaguchi: The number was limited from the start because there were only so many usable parts to work with (see pp. 142–144, “Development History of the RX-79(G)”), so we’re talking about a little over twenty machines. In model kit terms, I suppose you could call them something like test shots, that’s more or less the way we think about them. What the main story is depicting right now is really only the exploits of one small slice of the military. So there would be units that got GMs assigned to them, and others that just happened to receive Gundams instead. That’s the framework we’re working from.

――I see.

Kawaguchi: I’d actually like to depict battlefields with mixed GM-and-Gundam units at some point.

――So it’s not as if every squad from the 1st all the way to the 08th has Gundams assigned to it?

Kawaguchi: No, not at all. A battalion has about two companies under it, and beneath those are the platoons. Broadly speaking, we’ve decided on things like: the 1st Platoon uses GMs, the 3rd Team uses Gundams, the 4th has been wiped out and is in the middle of reorganization, that kind of thing (see pp. 40–44, “Team Organization”). It’s just that none of those other units actually appear on screen.

――At the beginning of Episode 1, Sanders is piloting a GM, but up to that point, wasn’t Jaburo the first place a GM had ever appeared onscreen?

Kawaguchi: About that, there’s a man named Inoue (Koichi Inoue: essentially Sunrise’s living Gundam encyclopedia), someone people call a Gundam scholar, and I talked it over with him. He said it’s not as if every last one of them would have been built in factories on Earth and then launched into space. Some of them, for instance, would naturally have been built at factories in one colony or another. And of course, there would also have been operational testing in space. That was the thinking behind letting it appear there.

――So while the GM was undergoing space trials, it happened to run into Aina’s Zaku?

Kawaguchi: Well, you see, that machine was basically attached to something like a reconnaissance unit. Our idea is that it had been assigned to a force operating in relatively high-risk conditions, the sort of unit that required a certain range of action and general-purpose flexibility. But in the actual finished episode, it’s hard to communicate that much detail.

――This ties back to the earlier question of Gundam deployment, but as for the organization of a mobile suit platoon: is the basic operational doctrine essentially three mobile suits plus a support hover tank? Is that the standard setup?

Kawaguchi: That’s roughly how we think of it. Broadly speaking, the Federation already has something like an Air Force, Navy, and Army. And the Gundam as originally conceived, the Gundam as Tomino thought about it, feels very air force-like. The three-unit formation is part of that. What we wanted to do here was take that concept and make it more army-like. Mobile suits were probably still a new kind of weapon at the time, and it isn’t entirely clear which branch developed them in the first place. Back when fighter aircraft first appeared, the navy had them, and the army had them, too. Then the navy started thinking about whether they could somehow make use of them on carriers, or on ships, anyway… I vaguely imagine mobile suits going through a similar sort of process.

――So that would mean the way units are organized, and even their specifications, would differ from front to front?

Kawaguchi: Yes, exactly. It would be interesting if we could get to the point where army mobile suits and air force mobile suits appear on screen, and you can clearly see that they’re used completely differently, or that their specifications differ in noticeable ways. Fundamentally, what we’re always thinking about is what will be visually interesting on screen. For example, if a Gundam or a GM were to come crashing into frame, bam, bam, at about this size in the composition, then pull back with a great whirring motion, and a helicopter or something could slide into the shot until it’s framed about the same size as the Gundam’s bust shot, that would make for a tremendously interesting image. But whether we can actually create that sort of effect to the degree we want is another matter, it’s a bit difficult. Still, if the opportunity comes up, that’s the kind of thing I’d like to pursue.

――Thank you very much for your time today.

August 27, 1996
Kami-Igusa, Tokyo
Interviewer: Hironori Shibahara (Hobby Japan)

Setting Production
AKIRA OKEYA

――What led to your involvement with the project?

Okeya: Let’s see… I guess it was about two years ago. At the time, Kouichi Inoue and Makoto Mochizuki from Sunrise’s planning department and I were talking about doing a realistic war story set in the world of Gundam. That was more or less how it started.

――When you say “realistic,” how does that affect the way mobile suits, being robots, are treated?

Okeya: Well, they’re just something that exists naturally in that world already… like clothing.

――So far, The 08th MS Team has followed a largely self-contained, one-episode format. Will it continue in that same style going forward?

Okeya: Basically, yes, each episode does stand on its own. But from Episode 7 onward, things start connecting more closely.

――What would you say is the single biggest point you want viewers to focus on in this series?

Okeya: Hm… the way it feels to me, it’s actually pretty close in spirit to a school youth drama. (laughs) You know the type, where Masatoshi Nakamura plays the newly assigned teacher, struggles to deal with his students, and ends up going through his own youth right alongside them. That sort of thing.

――So does that make Shiro the Masatoshi Nakamura figure?

Okeya: Yes, well, in terms of the energy he brings, that’s basically it. Though mentally, he may actually be the youngest one there. The idea is that the people around him either get swept along by him or end up dragging him forward themselves, but one way or another, they all grow through their involvement with each other. As for what’s ahead, what I’d really like people to watch is just how far Shiro can keep charging ahead.

――Thank you very much for your time today.

September 1, 1996
Telephone interview
Interviewer: Ken Sasaki (Hobby Japan)

Source: The 08th MS Team Visual Book (pages 064-065)