I'm not into anime about wars or giant robots. But recently I got into Gundam X, and it totally blew my mind, and other people I know absolutely love Gundam 0080: War In The Pocket. Good news: you don't need to be a Gundam fan or know much about the Gundam series in order to really enjoy it. But this one's a real oddity, as this is only six episodes long. But like another six episode anime, FLCL (aka Fooly Cooly), everyone praises it and loves it, hailing it to be one of the best Gundam series ever. And as of now, I agree with them. Besides, nobody said that short series were all bad. In fact, some anime can really benefit from being short if the right staff worked on it.

The story is about Alfred "Al" Izuruha, a young boy living on a neutral space colony during a war. His colony so far is safe from the evils of war, but it's actually home to a secret Federation base that is currently in the process of hosting a secret weapon, a Gundam named Alex. A Zeon team is deployed to destroy the Alex, but Alfred befriends one of its cadets, Bernard "Bernie" Wiseman, a young pilot who was just recently recruited into the ranks. Because Al is so young, he and his friends idealize war through toys, fake badges, video games, etc., and he's going to learn very quickly that war and death aren't fun and games, especially when he makes himself part of Bernie's team to destroy the Alex.

For an anime made in 1989, the animation is surprisingly good. Then again, it was made during an era where people could actually afford to put in as much money into animation as they could to make it look as good as possible. Movement is smooth and fluid, the character designs are all distinct and very detailed, the mechas are all well designed and look really cool, and the anime makes really good use of characters' facial expressions. Nothing important is said, but you can tell the characters have a lot going on in their minds and are still very expressive, making the drama very subtle and understated, which works really well here. It's because of this that the series never delves into cheese or melodrama, a very common pitfall that many mecha shows, Gundam included, tend to fall into, because they tend to let angst completely take over the storytelling when it really shouldn't. The show is much more focused on empathizing small details rather than overblown battle sequences, and everything from the characters to the animation feels genuine, and you never feel like anything happens solely because of the writers' wishes. But I do feel like sometimes the amount of details tend to be a little too much. At one point, Al winds up having three sclera in his eyes, which can look really jarring.

Because of my lack of familiarity with mecha shows and the tropes they tend to use, anything I say about the characters is solely based on what I saw in the show itself, though I have heard that Gundam tends to overuse a lot of tropes and beat dead horses, such as an ambitious rookie character who ignores orders on occasion. Now, six episodes isn't nearly enough to develop a huge cast, but again, the show offers a lot of subtle details about the various characters that show us what they're like rather than shoving it in our faces. Plus, the two central characters, Al and Bernie, along with Chris, Al's next door neighbor, absolutely steal the show and receive all the time they need to shine. Bernie is a young ambitious man who wants to play a more active role in his job, always treated like a rookie by his superiors (Which makes sense, because he is one) but he's still competent and likeable, and any decisions he makes, good or bad, still make sense according to the show's logic and story progression. I hear a lot of people really don't like Al because he's a little kid and feel he should have been cut out of the show, but I personally thought Al was perfectly well written and a realistically portrayed child who was never too bratty, and even when he acted so, his actions still made sense. Furthermore, the show relies heavily on the idea that Al and his classmates see war as a fun game, glorified and commercialized by the public, and making a point to illustrate that, well, it really isn't. Even the side characters, who aren't nearly as fleshed out and well rounded as Al and Bernie are, are nowhere near bad. The fact that War In The Pocket is technically told from the perspective of members of the Principality of Zeon, who are considered the bad guys in Gundam's universe, makes this one of the most morally ambiguous series out there, and it does a stellar job in showing that no side of a war is truly good or bad, and that both sides have decent people just trying to live their lives. War In The Pocket is a character study first and foremost, and seriously, there's a ton of anime that could really stand to learn a thing or two from this.

(Oh, and can I just say how much I absolutely adore Chris? She's an awesome lady, and she deserves more love!)

Honestly, in terms of flaws, I could really only find two, both relating to audio. One, I do feel the soundtrack is rather dated. It's not bad, but some pieces of background music could stand to be a little less poppy at times. The opening and ending songs were nice, but the English grammar in the opening wasn't very good. The second one is more of a nitpick, but I couldn't help but notice it. In episode 3, there's a scene where Al and Bernie are in a space simulation while infiltrating a base, and at one point when Bernie is scolding Al for his stupidity, the scene randomly goes silent for a few seconds, even though Bernie's mouth is shown to be moving. At first I thought this was a massive oversight by the English dubbers, that they may have forgotten to record a line of dialogue, or that maybe the file I saw was bad and I could find a better copy elsewhere. Unfortunately, it was the same in every place I found it, and I eventually found out that, no, that random bout of silence in the episode wasn't an error. It's in the Japanese version as well. I don't know why the creators thought to have that part be silent, but I personally found it really jarring, and it really took me out of the immersion. To understand what I mean, it'd be like, say, watching an English dub of an anime and having random lines be completely silent and undubbed. I know the video game Atelier Ayesha had this problem, and I didn't play that until long after I watched War In The Pocket. That's how jarring it was to me personally. But again, that's more a personal preference than anything.

In case you're wondering, while War In The Pocket is technically considered a distant sequel to the original series that aired in 1979, you don't need to have seen the latter to enjoy the former. Any references to the original Gundam show are mostly just aesthetic in nature, along with name dropping White Base and implying the existence of Newtypes, but that's really it. Also, should you decide to watch War In The Pocket, I should warn you now: It doesn't have a happy ending. I honestly thought the ending was great, further wonderfully illustrating the utter pointlessness of war and remaining true to the show's messages, but I know others who may not agree. Even so, this show is utterly fantastic and I can totally see why fans of Gundam hold this particular OVA in such high regard. If you want to watch a great short anime that cares about its story, characters, and messages, give War In The Pocket a try. I did, and I don't regret it one bit.