An unexpected change of directors. A release schedule that slipped further and further behind. At the time it came out, the circumstances surrounding The 08th MS Team were anything but smooth sailing. What kind of impact did that turmoil have on the work itself? We spoke with Yoshitaka Kawaguchi, who was involved first in setting production and later as production desk, and who lived through the chaos on the front lines.

A Sunrise producer born in 1965. After working in setting production on Mobile Fighter G Gundam (1994), he became involved with The 08th MS Team, and has since gone on to work on numerous Sunrise productions, including OVERMAN King Gainer (2002) and Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion (2006).

――I understand that on The 08th MS Team you first worked in setting production, and later as production desk. At what point did you join the project?

Kawaguchi: At the time, I was working on G Gundam, and before that wrapped, I ended up handling The 08th MS Team in parallel. By the time I came aboard, Director Kanda was already attached, and I think Okeya had been set for the scripts as well. In terms of content, I think it was still only at the stage of being “sort of a military piece.” What caused the most debate around that time, actually, was whether or not we should include a Gundam at all. Bandai Visual was telling us, “Aim for 100,000 units,” but once we started seriously thinking through the setting, it was heading in the direction of only having GMs, and of course that wouldn’t sell. (laughs) So we needed to somehow force a new Gundam into existence, and Koichi Inoue, who’s still in the planning office now, said, “Why not just say there was a prototype ground-combat type?” And that became the path we took.

――In the current setting, the Ground-Type Gundam is said to have been built from leftover parts from the original Gundam.

Kawaguchi: What Inoue first came up with was actually the idea of a limited-run prototype production unit. You know, the sort of thing where, between the prototype and full mass production, a factory would build a few machines as line tests. But by the time actual production began, Inoue had already moved off the project, so after that, on the floor, we argued it out from every angle and kept refining it as we went. Then Director Iida, who came on in the latter half, said, “Even with cars, there are parts that fail to meet spec but can still be used, so if you gather those up, you could say that was enough to build a few units.” In the end, those two ideas got blended together. So if you ask what that setting most closely is, it’s really a joint creation between Inoue and Director Iida.

――I’ve heard there was a great deal of close back-and-forth with Okawara over the design of the Ground-Type Gundam.

Kawaguchi: Director Tomino has said, “Gundam is a Zero fighter.” His image of it is that of a combat aircraft. But what Director Kanda and Producer Mochizuki were trying to make was something that moved like a heavy tank. I’m not especially knowledgeable about military subjects, but I do love mechanical gimmickry, so I threw out a lot of ideas. That’s why we ended up with mechanical depiction that didn’t feel beholden to previous Gundams, things like having it carry a container on its back and not jump around. There was definitely a sense that we were making a rather freewheeling, almost self-indulgent Gundam…

――I understand the container was originally Okawara’s idea: “Since it’ll be walking through jungles and such, it ought to be able to carry supplies.”

Kawaguchi: I thought that was fascinating, because it felt like it could do something almost like Thunderbird 2. Something we used to joke about on site was, “Wouldn’t it be great if the inside of that thing were basically a one-room apartment for camping out?” (laughs) I mean, it’s about the size of a two-story building, so wouldn’t it be fun if there were one Gundam whose whole role was something like that? We never had the nerve to actually do it, of course. But with just the container, all the distinctive features were on the back, so we wanted something up front too, and I pitched various ideas to Okawara. There had already been a precedent for a boarding winch in Victory Gundam, but if the wire doesn’t come down from above the place where a person is supposed to stand, it’s inconvenient, and honestly, it’d be scary. That’s how the little crane came about. And then there’s the Gundam’s vulcan guns, they’re mounted in the head, right? But on something like an F-15, which is roughly the same size class as the machine itself, the cannon mounted in the fuselage is actually pretty large. If you put it inside the head, it ends up being a very small gun. That had bothered me for some time, so I suggested mounting it in the chest instead, where there’s more thickness to work with. I may have been fairly persistent about it, but Okawara took the idea on board. (laughs)

――What kind of discussions did you have regarding the other mechanical designs?

Kawaguchi: The Zaku came at a time when Bandai was about to release a Master Grade plastic model, so the idea was to carry over that design and detail work. That said, we did add a few details, like the boarding crane. The Apsaras was conceived as a kind of super-weapon, something everyone could gang up on at the end and defeat in a way that felt satisfying. Personally, I had something vaguely like the Big Zam in mind, and even Katoki’s early draft had long, slender legs. But Director Kanda said, “Who needs legs?!” (laughs) In the end, Director Kanda was not really a robot guy, he was a military guy, so a fighter-type machine without legs was probably easier for him to stage. Then Katoki added a Zaku head so that, at a glance, you could understand the scale, and it ended up with this shape like a kagami mochi. (laughs) There was even an idea where the landing gear would literally be Zaku legs. Katoki may also have been thinking about the idea of it as a secret weapon cobbled together in a situation where materials were scarce, and maybe about the people who build scratch models, too.

――Those long, slender legs did come back later on in Apsaras III, didn’t they?

Kawaguchi: At that point, Director Iida said it would be better with legs, and brought them back.

――Had the core outline of the story already been decided from the beginning?

Kawaguchi: Director Kanda and Mochizuki seem to have been thinking of something more like Combat!, a one-story-per-episode format. But then the feeling emerged that the story also needed a vertical thread running through it, and that’s when, as I recall, the romantic element with the heroine was born. It had been decided from the start that it would be set during the One Year War. But we were never imagining them fighting huge enemies, it was meant to be more on the level of a regional conflict, at most. Aina and Ginius, too, were conceived while carrying over Zeon’s glamorous, classical image, but on the scale of, “We’re going to make our mark on Earth and earn recognition back in the homeland.”

――Ginius gives the impression that he may have ties to the Zabi family, but the series barely touches on that.

Kawaguchi: The portrait of Degwin hanging in the room is really only there because he’s the most important man in the country. The reason is that there was a feeling that maybe it wasn’t wise to tie the show too deeply into First Gundam. If you do that, then the next step is, “Well then why not bring in Amuro and Char too?” People did say that at the time. But we felt we ought to be careful there, after all, Amuro and Char really belonged to Director Tomino… Since this wasn’t something like G Gundam, where the world itself is different, deciding how far to link it all was one of the difficult parts.

――At most, something like showing Gihren’s speech on a monitor, perhaps.

Kawaguchi: Looking back now, I kind of think we shouldn’t have even done that. If we hadn’t, we could have blurred the timeline a little more. Around that time, the Universal Century timeline was only just starting to take shape, and at first I honestly thought, “You can always rewrite that stuff later.” (laughs) I liked Gundam, but I wasn’t deeply versed in it, so in a sense I was making the show while studying Gundam history as I went.

――Still, that speech is what later gave rise to the Odessa retreat material and all that, isn’t it?

Kawaguchi: That’s true. I feel like it was Director Iida who first suggested tying Yuri Kellerne to Odessa. At first, he was just an unpleasant aristocrat. But then we decided to flip that around a little and make him, in fact, a good man. I think we were consciously trying to do that in the latter half of the series, taking characters who initially came off badly, or didn’t make much impression, and reversing them. If you just keep piling things up in the same direction, they end up as nothing more than bad people. So that’s probably why Yuri and Norris were singled out.

――Do you have any memories of working with the staff, including the two directors?

Kawaguchi: Kanda’s real strength, originally, was portraying the hearts of people before adolescence. In that sense, I think maybe this protagonist was set at an age that was difficult for him to handle. Otherwise, maybe it would have been better to make the lead a more hopeless adult. (laughs) Director Kanda and the others talked a lot about different war films, and Kelly’s Heroes came up as a point of reference. But that movie is full of complete losers, isn’t it?

――They were using tanks for selfish personal gain, after all.

Kawaguchi: If you’re going to tell a small-scale story, it’d be great if you could push it that far. Steal a Gundam and a Zaku, pretend to be on both the Federation and Zeon side, and go off to rob some buried gold somewhere. Okeya, the scriptwriter, was very good at human drama, but he relied entirely on Director Kanda for the military knowledge, so I wish we’d been able to come up with ideas that played to his strengths a little more. On the other hand, once Director Iida took over, the looseness disappeared from the characters. If your protagonist is a serious type, once he falls into a slump, he can’t come back up without a clear trigger. I think we may have gotten trapped in that very familiar pattern of the earnest protagonist. Separate from that, though, he brought in all sorts of affection and ideas for the robots, which is why the mechanical battles in the second half were so well received. The Norris battle in Episode 10, for example, that was a place where the staff really gave it everything, and I think you can see Director Iida’s strengths there. In the end, Gundam lives or dies by how well the mecha are allowed to shine. And in terms of sensibility, too, Director Iida was probably closer to the audience. After all, he built Gunpla at home himself.

――What about Yamane’s involvement?

Kawaguchi: I’d worked with Yamane on G Gundam, and even back then he kept saying, “I want to do submarines and tanks!” “What I really want to do is submarine stuff!” (laughs) So we brought him in to strengthen the military flavor, asking him to handle things like the trucks and the Ez-8, and he packed them with all sorts of fine-grained technical flavor. The Ez-8 is a Gundam without horns, but we had him design it in strict fidelity to the role it needed to play in the story. The horned one had already appeared, and if it had been damaged out in the field, there wouldn’t exactly be replacement parts on hand. On that point, surprisingly, nobody around us said much of anything. More than that, all we kept hearing was, “Just finish it already.” The release intervals kept stretching and stretching until it became one release every six months.

――So there really was tremendous pressure during production.

Kawaguchi: From the standpoint of the people on the ground, it wasn’t an easy job to do in the first place. No matter how hard you work, as long as it’s Gundam, you’re never going to surpass that first Gundam. Sequels are just fated not to surpass the original. The first work has the freedom of trampling untouched snow. But once you get to the second and later installments, it’s hard to exceed a hit first work while still moving in the same direction, and if you reject that original direction, then yes, you may gain a different kind of strength, but you have no idea whether people will accept it. Human nature being what it is, most people would rather be doing the work of trampling fresh snow.

――And with Gundam especially, the constraints of the setting are enormous.

Kawaguchi: You look at recent American comic-book movies and kind of envy the way they can rewrite the setting every time they make a new one. (laughs) Compared to that, Gundam projects at this point were very earnest, almost too earnest. The result was that a temperature gap opened up between the hardcore Gundam fans and the more general audience. Even the OVA line originally came about in part because Director Tomino’s Gundam was always pushing toward new worlds and new artistic directions, which created distance between those works and the fans who loved the world of the first series. So the thinking became, “Then let’s do that side of things in OVA.” Nowadays Gundam has become much freer, and even with Gundam UC, because Fukui got Director Tomino’s blessing, “Do as you like,” it doesn’t carry that same twisted feeling.

――Even so, I’d say The 08th MS Team accomplished something important by preserving a military context inside the Gundam world. In fact, earlier Gundam works often felt much more strongly science-fictional, and less overtly military.

Kawaguchi: Exactly. To me, the true sequel to Gundam as a piece of real military fiction was actually Fang of the Sun Dougram. And then Armored Trooper VOTOMS took that as far as it could possibly go. Once the hero robot’s face doesn’t look all that different from the others, that’s probably about the limit for it as character merchandise. So 08th MS Team feels like a pulling-back from that edge. I don’t think audiences today are really looking to Gundam for military elements all that much. But back in the days of First Gundam, the audience had that military appetite, you had people modifying plastic models and building dioramas. Since then, time has passed, and what we’ve come to understand is that maybe the people who really want military out of Gundam have already become a minority. As the old fans aged, and the core purchasing audience shifted toward younger viewers, the things that sold were the ones covered in sharp protrusions and bright colors. Maybe The 08th MS Team happened right at that point of transition.

――So would you say it’s difficult to do military-style Gundam today?

Kawaguchi: Gundam’s militarism is basically built on the grammar of World War II, isn’t it? That’s where it gets difficult. Even if a modern high-tech war broke out, the actual fighting would probably be over in an instant, and the outcome would likely have been decided beforehand in the realm of advanced information warfare… Of course, one option is to keep using the World War II grammar as the foundation for your military tone. But then the question becomes: how do you bring anything new into it? And that’s not easy.

――Looking back now, what feelings does The 08th MS Team leave you with?

Kawaguchi: I learned a tremendous amount from it, but I never want to go through that kind of hell again. (laughs) The hardest part was that the people who had originally set out to make it were no longer there, and the will that should have run through the whole work had become ambiguous. If that will had remained, I think there would have been many more choices available to us. But in the end, it was only by working through it that I realized how important that was, and that became a major lesson for me. Looking back now, I think the producing side should have found some kind of direction that wouldn’t get trapped by all those pressures. If you come at it head-on with the mindset of “This is a sequel to Gundam, a sequel in the video line, we’re just going into overtime,” then you fall straight into a pit. And the finished work, too, I think, wound up a little halfway in the end. The story and the characters should probably have been pared down more radically. Director Tomino’s Gundam is, above all, social. There’s an extraordinary power in the way that anime conveys a whole world in which people truly live. We never reached that. And if we couldn’t reach that, then we should have armed ourselves with a more distinctive weapon of our own. That said, as I mentioned earlier, the experience of The 08th MS Team has absolutely been valuable to me personally. In the end, you have to find some way to deal with reality. Complaining and dragging your feet won’t get you anywhere. You have to keep your hands moving, or you can’t keep making things. That’s still the mindset I work with now, and in that sense, I do feel I’m still drawing on what I learned from The 08th MS Team.

Source: Mobile Suit Gundam The 08th MS Team Official Archive (pages 126-128)