ICHIRO OHKOUICHI

Ohkouichi became an anime scriptwriter through his work on the 08th MS Team novelization. Originally a Gundam fan who approached the work 08th MS Team from an outsider’s perspective, writing an anime work as a novel, we spoke with him about the appeal and possibilities of the work that became apparent through the novelization process. Born 1968 in Miyagi Prefecture. Scriptwriter and novelist. Made his debut as a novelist with Revolutionary Girl Utena: Twin Saplings. Subsequently became involved in anime scriptwriting as well. His representative works include OVERMAN King Gainer, Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion, the theatrical Berserk films, and Valvrave the Liberator.

――The novel Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team was work you did before becoming a screenwriter. To begin with, how did you come to take on the 08th MS Team novelization in the first place?

Ohkouichi: Back then I was a writer doing magazine pieces and making game strategy guides. The turning point was being allowed to run a series of articles on Director Kunihiko Ikuhara in Animage. Thanks to that, I was given the chance to write the novelization of Revolutionary Girl Utena. After that, people seemed to recognize me as someone who could write novels, and I was asked to do the novelizations for Martian Successor Nadesico and for Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team.

――Why were you specifically tapped to handle the 08th MS Team novelization?

Ohkouichi: I think it’s because the Nadesico novel I’d just written was well received. Readers seemed to like it. Also, I wrote fast. One of the conditions, I think, was being someone who could write three books in three months.

――So, one book a month? That’s rough. Why such a condition?

Ohkouichi: They wanted it published before the final volume of the 08th MS Team came out. With novelizations, once a work finishes, sales plunge, at least that’s what people said at the time. So they definitely wanted the books on store shelves while new episodes were still releasing. If you think about it that way, you really do have to write at a pace of one book per month to make the deadline. (laughs)

――Were you happy to be able to write a Gundam novel?

Ohkouichi: Of course I was. I’ve always loved Mobile Suit Gundam; it’s the reason I became an anime fan in the first place. Until then I’d only watched anime, casually but seeing Gundam made me buy an anime magazine for the first time. Watching alone didn’t satisfy me anymore, I wanted more information. From there I got deeply into anime and started watching Sunrise’s robot shows like Aura Battler Dunbine and Armored Trooper VOTOMS one after another. I loved Gundam so much I even took a proposal to Bandai with some friends and ended up making the Gundam War card game. So for someone like me to be involved with the novels after the card game, of course I was thrilled.

――For the novelization, did you meet with the directors?

Ohkouichi: Yes. Director Kanda had already passed away, so I met Director Iida and, at Sunrise, and Yoshitaka Kawaguchi, who at the time was handling the 08th MS Team’s setting development. That said, it was really just a brief greeting, nothing you’d call a proper meeting. Director Iida gave me just one directive, but it was a pretty difficult one.

――What was that directive?

Ohkouichi: He asked me to change it from the OVA. From Director Iida’s perspective, the 08th MS Team OVA had different directors in the first and second halves, and the tones were distinctly different. “If you’re going to turn it into a novel,” he said, “please give it a unified tone, your tone, Ohkouichi.”

――From there you must have went into outlining. In light of Director Iida’s directive, what kind of story did you aim to write?

Ohkouichi: Naturally, I intended to follow Director Iida’s request. That said, since it’s the 08th MS Team’s novelization, there’s no point in changing everything wholesale. So I kept the character placement and the basic incidents the same, but told a different story. Put like this it sounds nonsensical, I know. What I mean is, Shiro meets Aina in space and is drawn to her; afterward he descends to Earth, struggles as a brand-new squad leader, meets Kiki and the others whose homeland has become a battlefield, reunites with Aina, grows through the fight with Norris, defies military orders and is confined, and ultimately, in the The Shuddering Mountain battle, fights the Apsaras (Ghinias). That flow I kept the same, but I reinterpreted the characters of Shiro and Aina in my own way. From the impression I had of the first half, Shiro felt a bit too naive, too sunny, to me. Still, I thought that part of him was also his charm. So I decided to start with Shiro the softie and have him gradually grow more serious through his experiences on the battlefield.

――I think the thing that most shocked readers in the novelization was Kiki’s death. What was your intent in depicting that?

Ohkouichi: There were several reasons, but the biggest was to depict a harsher reality that would shatter the naive Shiro’s view of war. The development where Shiro learns that “real war isn’t what I thought it was” is the same as in the OVA, but in a novel you can’t show horrific situations in pictures, and you can’t make people cry out in pain. So I felt that without an event that had a bit more alterity to it, it would be hard to make Shiro’s change convincing. That said, this is war, soldiers die as a matter of course. Simply having people die doesn’t communicate a harsher reality. Shiro enlisted of his own will, and he must already have witnessed soldiers dying many times. Which means the tragedy had to befall a character who wasn’t a soldier. In a work like the 08th MS Team that focuses on the battlefield, the candidates for that naturally become quite limited.

――I see. Another key original element is the TV show-within-the-story, Captain Joe, which influenced Shiro.

Ohkouichi: The reason I established Captain Joe was largely to serve as a clear symbol for why the naive Shiro is participating in war. He was inspired by an imaginary hero named Captain Joe, and because he thought war was about on the level it’s depicted in that show-within-the-show, he was a softie. That’s why, after Kiki’s death awakens him to reality, Shiro graduates from the Captain Joe fantasy. It’s not that Captain Joe is itself bad; rather, he learns the fact that even Captain Joe had been warped by war.

――In the OVA, Shiro’s growth is drawn along two axes, his relationship with Aina and his awakening to the realities of war, and you added a third axis to deepen it. Is that right?

Ohkouichi: The 08th MS Team is anime at its core, so a big part of its appeal lies in the mobile suit battles. But in novel form you simply can’t do the same things. You can’t beat animated combat scenes where the drawings move and there’s sound, especially since the 08th MS Team’s animation is high-level. So I leaned into other strengths, and that is writing detailed operational plans that would be hard to pull off in animation, and giving mobile suits that didn’t get to shine in the OVA their chance to do so. In the novel I have Norris pilot a Gouf Flight Type for that reason. It only appears for a few cuts in the OVA, but it looked so cool that I wanted to let it play a larger role. And I’m really happy that I was able to let it shine in the new short film for the Blu-ray Box as well.

――Kiki’s death was certainly shocking, but did you get much response to it?

Ohkouichi: Quite a lot, in fact. At the time of release I was traveling all over Japan as a referee for Gundam War tournaments, and I’d have people tell me, “It was austere and compelling,” while others asked, “Why did you have to kill Kiki?” Even as I was writing, whenever she showed up, I felt relieved, she brightened the mood. She was a character I loved. I knew she was popular with fans, too. But I also thought that unless a character whose death would really shock you died, Shiro wouldn’t be able to change. And I believed that the damage extending beyond soldiers is the reality of war.

――The novelization struck me as heavy on military detail, with rather hard-edged depictions. Was that a conscious choice?

Ohkouichi: Thinking back to how I first fell for Gundam, what I wanted from it was a certain maturity and hardness. And I think the 08th MS Team is a work with particularly strong military elements. I enjoy writing about operations and tactics, so the balance probably tilted further in that direction.

――Let me ask about the short film Battle in Three Dimensions.” When you got the assignment, did the production side have any requests?

Ohkouichi: The basic conditions were, first, that the runtime would be short, and second, that they wanted the Gundam Ez-8 to have a strong showing. With those in mind, what I decided was to put in a single hook you could sum up in one line. The runtime is short, so you can’t pack in too many elements, and it isn’t a standalone product, it’s a promotional piece that comes with the Box, so I thought the appeal had to be something that comes across even just by ear. That said, it’s Gundam, so that single hook ought to be a mobile suit battle. In that case, like Ultra Fight, that five-minute program that extracts only the parts where the Ultra monsters fight, I’d make it a simple hook like “Gundam (Ez-8) versus ___.” For the opponent, I thought of the Gouf Flight Type, which I personally liked. With a flying machine, you get that special feature of flight, and I figured we could do a fight that was more unusual and interesting than a standard mobile suit battle. As for the location, if it’s just the jungle, the fight tends to be only in the up-down direction. But if you put them on a bridge, you can use vertical space as well and add variety to how the battle unfolds.

――The Ez-8’s only proper fight in the OVA is really against the Gouf Custom, after all.

Ohkouichi: For this script, I was shown Yamane’s Ez-8 design sheets again, and they were packed with gimmick ideas, like “the chest armor plate is repurposed from a Zaku shield” and “for long-range fire, the knee spikes fix the body in place.” Unfortunately, many of those settings didn’t get used in the OVA, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to use them all.

――Even though it’s a short, were there things you were careful about to make it feel like the 08th MS Team?

Ohkouichi: The setting is a quagmire battlefield, so no one’s fighting in perfect condition. Shiro’s Ez-8 is a field-modified unit; likewise, this time I wanted to convey that feeling of local improvisation by having the enemy, for example, use a half-wrecked Zaku as a gun emplacement. If that mood, that both sides are scrounging meager resources and doing whatever they can to keep fighting, comes across, I’ll be happy.

――And what about on the story side?

Ohkouichi: I felt the OVA had already said everything there was to say about the protagonist Shiro, so I decided to make the drama about different characters, ideally ones who hadn’t intersected much. Given the short runtime, rather than a big change, I aimed for a story that brings a small change to their everyday lives.

――Hence Sanders and Michel. How did you feel when you saw the finished footage?

Ohkouichi: First of all, the mobile suit battle looks cool. The Flight Type really is great. And seeing the Ez-8’s little built-in tricks, the knee spikes, the shield gimmicks, in motion makes them feel even more appealing. The character designs also faithfully pick up the look of the time, and it felt like I got to meet Shiro again after a long while. Sanders and Michel together are endearing, I like them a lot.

――Did working on the 08th MS Team novelization have a big impact on you, personally?

Ohkouichi: A very big one. Kawaguchi, who served as my point of contact on the Sunrise side during the novelization, later invited me to write scripts for Turn A Gundam. I’d never written a script before, but he told me he believed I could do it. Without this project and him, I don’t think I would have become a screenwriter, so it was a life-changing impact. After that, I teamed up with him to make Overman King Gainer, Planetes, and Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion. The producer on the Bandai Visual side for those three works was Jun Yukawa, who had also produced the 08th MS Team. The 08th MS Team didn’t just give me the spark to become a screenwriter; it also led me to two producers I came to trust most when making anime. In that sense, it was doubly important, an almost fated, work for me.

――Finally, if someone were to watch the 08th MS Team now, what should they focus on?

Ohkouichi: The military elements still hold up today, they’re good. That’s partly my own bias, but I think older fans in particular will appreciate those aspects. The level of the animation is high, and the guerrilla-war mood of a “Gundam in the jungle” is something very particular to this work. And the One Year War, there’s something about it that’s just great. Just hearing “Sieg Zeon!” or seeing those pilot suits show up makes your heart race, doesn’t it? As a hand-drawn animation that depicts the One Year War, it’s currently the last of its kind; in that sense as well, I’d like people to treasure it.

Source: Mobile Suit Gundam The 08th MS Team Official Archive (pages 139-141)