ike his schoolmates, 11-year-old Al thinks war is pretty exciting. He
plays violent video games, draws mecha in class, and sneaks around in
restricted areas of the local spaceport. He chatters
eagerly with his friends over the latest developments in the messy space
war between the Earth Federation and the Duchy of Zeon. Al can afford to be
nonchalant about the conflict; he lives on a neutral space colony, an
idealized world full of high-tech conveniences and luxuriant parks.
His world is almost untouched by the war, except when supply ships
don't arrive on schedule.
But the political situation changes abruptly as his colony builds
diplomatic ties with the Federation. Soon Zeon and Federation mecha are
tangling in the streets. Al is thrilled at the chance to see real battle
suits up close, and he chases a damaged one to its crash site, where he
boldly confronts a young Zeon pilot named Bernie. Hoping to outdo a
schoolmate who owns a real Federation rank pin, Al trades his digital
camera's memory disk for Bernie's Zeon insignia. But the camera disk contains footage of a
mysterious Federation weapon being unloaded at the spaceport, and Zeon
promptly sends Bernie's team back in to find and destroy the
weapon at all costs.
When Al accidentally encounters Bernie again, he has all the information
necessary to blow the Zeon spy's cover and get him and his teammates
executed. He suggests an alternative--they can make him a Zeon spy, too.
When they agree, hoping to keep him quiet, he throws himself into the role
with abandon. Al performs poorly at school and is dangerously resentful and
hostile at home, but as a spy he outshines Bernie, making it possible for
the team to infiltrate the community and locate the weapon they're seeking. Al
doesn't realize he's altered the course of the war--not for the
Federation or Zeon, whose real conflict is being fought far away and on
a much higher level--but for himself, his friends, and his placid little
world.
A complex moral tale
War in the Pocket, set three years before Gundam 0083:
Stardust Memory, deals
with a critical point in the complex Gundam history, but does so from a
distance. Somewhere in the background, Zeon and the Federation are winding
down the war, but the distant, momentous events make little difference to
the localized "pocket war" of this series. And even the pocket war is less
important than the various characters' perceptions of war, which are
revealed gradually and carefully through plot twists that lead in a
surprising number of directions and provoke a surprising range of
sympathies. As with Stardust Memory, there are few clear good guys
or bad guys here: just a lot of human beings with regrettably opposing
viewpoints that they're willing to (or forced to) die for.
The moral complexity of the story gives it some authority, as does the
astute characterization, which makes even a drunk woman sobbing into a
phone at a bar an interesting and sympathetic individual. Only the
overly restrained animation and a rather conventional opening mar what
eventually shapes up as a first-rate story. Pocket shows, all too
painfully, how war alters reality and casually destroys lives. And it does
it with compelling simplicity, through the point of view of an avid young
war buff who thinks combat is a game.
Compared to Federation functionaries and Zeon fanatics, Al makes an odd
and uncomfortably sprightly little protagonist, despite his occasional
sociopathic moments. Briefly, his inclusion threatens to turn Pocket
into a cute, wholesome, Norman Rockwell version of war, or perhaps another
anime wish-fulfillment fantasy about young boys with big toys getting to
fight alongside their older, tougher counterparts. But the series' ultimate
ends are considerably more subversive, and Al's awakening is decidedly
unconventional. Where Stardust Memory turns war into galaxy-wide
pageantry, Pocket makes it ragged, hurtful and empty. The
amazing thing is, neither series contradicts the other.
Note: the individual volumes of this series are still available in both
subtitled and dubbed formats, but there's no subbed box set of just
Gundam 0080. There is, however, a boxed set that includes all of
Gundam 0080 and Gundam 0083 subtitled--not a bad deal, if
you want to see both sides of the coin.
-- Tasha
n previous episodes of
Serial Experiments Lain, enigmatic eighth-grader Lain Iwakura was
spending most of her spare time in the virtual world of the Wired, looking
for answers to a variety of mysteries, including her own identity. As the
series concludes, she's still searching, and listening to rumors about herself,
the nature of the Wired, the Knights, and how they all connect. But rumors
are spreading about her as well. Her schoolmates believe she's been spying
on them and spreading embarrassing information on the Wired. Strange
messages appear on her computer and everyone in school seems to be staring
at her. Like so many of the other weird events around her, this latest
twist would be easily explained if there were two Lains--one in the
Wired, and one in "reality." The mocking God-voice from the Wired claims
this is true, but Lain refuses to believe.
Prompted by the self-proclaimed God, she explores her powers over human
memory and the solid world. She denies the various contradictory stories
she's given about her nature, but she accepts her abilities and uses them
to reset the memories of those around her. Apart from her one-time best
friend Arisu, her schoolmates no longer remember her apparent spying or the
information she supposedly revealed. But in the process, Lain seems to
break off from her real-world self entirely. No one sees her at school. Her
desk is gone. Her parents act like broken dolls. "I always tried to keep
something like this from happening," she says despairingly. "I always tried
not to say anything weird."
Information pours into her--the identity of the Wired God who has been
manipulating her, the purpose of the Knights, the reason the world of the
dead has been encroaching on reality. But Lain snaps in and out of touch,
rejecting everything she hears as lies. Sometimes she confronts her
tormentors, sometimes she lies quiescent in her oozing computerized womb.
But eventually, she will have to make a decision about who she is and which world she belongs to.
Unorthodox, but never boring
As with previous Lain installments, each episode in
these two volumes uses a different style to communicate its core
information--sometimes in flat
chunks of exposition scattered between events, sometimes with sly visual
metaphors, sometimes in hallucinatory dream sequences that have to be taken
at face value to continue the flow of the story. Once again, a rotating
group of directors and separate animation directors created each
episode, resulting in a patchwork of styles. At some times--as when Lain feels
everyone's staring at her, or blames her erasure from the "real" world on
her own lack of socialization--the series seems like the simple paranoid
fantasy of a particularly timid adolescent. At other times, it presents an
entirely new cosmology. One episode, "Infornography," presents a welter of
flashbacks over howling electric guitar music in a sequence reminiscent of a
Pink Floyd video. Lain may not be suitable for all tastes, but it's
certainly never predictable or boring.
Instead, it's a complex and jumpy narrative that imparts a great deal of
information in subtle ways, and may require repeated watching. It's
possible to piece together a coherent theory that covers all the
strangeness surrounding Lain--but the series creators make a point of not
handing that theory to the audience on a platter, and any dozen viewers are
likely to end up with at least half a dozen impressions. It doesn't help
that Lain herself denies each new theory as it's presented.
What does help is that Lain remains a visually beautiful and
unconventional series with a strong sense of style and a wry sense of
humor. Most Net-savvy viewers will get the Internet jokes, like the sexy
female Net avatar whose voice reveals that "she" is actually a male user,
or the avatars who are all eyes, all ears or, more frequently, all
mouth. And most Net-savvy viewers will also probably find some measure of
relevance in Lain's struggle to reconcile her dual on- and offline
existence. Lain is less a coherent story than it is a nonlinear
conundrum--but it's a judiciously fashioned conundrum that keeps its
lessons subtle as well as relevant.
Lain still reminds me a lot of Key: The Metal Idol--except that this series
maintained its mysterious and elliptical style throughout.
-- Tasha
ike his schoolmates, 11-year-old Al thinks war is pretty exciting. He
plays violent video games, draws mecha in class, and sneaks around in
restricted areas of the local spaceport. He chatters
eagerly with his friends over the latest developments in the messy space
war between the Earth Federation and the Duchy of Zeon. Al can afford to be
nonchalant about the conflict; he lives on a neutral space colony, an
idealized world full of high-tech conveniences and luxuriant parks.
His world is almost untouched by the war, except when supply ships
don't arrive on schedule.
n 
