Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan's Island

Since it's based on an episode of the 1979 television series Mobile Suit Gundam that was deemed too poor - by series creator Yoshiyuki Tomino - to be included in any of the North American licensing agreements made in the early 2000s, surely Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan's Island should then be supplementary? Little more than a fanciful feature-length interlude that cannot play into any larger story or thesis specifically because of its apparent, ancestral, disposability? As if to hammer home this point, Yoshikazu Yasuhiko (the director of Crusher Joe: The Movie, the Sight and Sound feted Arion and early Manga Video UK release Venus Wars)'s film even disregards a time-sensitive mission given to the heroic faction, while the piece is rolling, to concentrate on Amuro Ray, a child soldier who has been uprooted from his warship habitat then deposited on a desolate island that is home to an enemy deserter and the war orphans under his protection. 

Injured during a battle with a weather-beaten but expertly piloted Zaku, Amuro awakens, not as a captive, but as a guest in Cucuruz Doan's household - a shattered lighthouse without the means to power its torch. While his host spends his time scratching away at blueprints from a lost age, the rest of the family, children of various ages, farm a small plot and dutifully tend to each other. Amuro slowly heals and eventually mixes in, earning the respect of the other children by repairing the pipes that carry their water supply. Although apparently low in its stakes, the power in Yasuhiko's film is that there is very little underlying tension between Doan and Ray. They are warriors from opposing sides but, unlike say John Boorman's Hell in the Pacific, there is little obvious animosity between the two before a truce can develop. The two characters barely even talk. It's not that Doan does not know that Ray is the pilot of the terrifying white Gundam either. Doan, we are shown, rescued an unconscious Ray from that stalled mobile suit. It seems that Doan has simply accepted that Ray is a child then treated him accordingly. 

When Amuro recovers enough to go searching the island for his giant robot, Doan gives him a water flask and a cap with a Zeon insignia stamped onto it. Amuro's acceptance of this cap is critical in terms of understanding how the boy is behaving in this space. Although the hat is adorned with the faction symbol of his enemy, Amuro accepts the gift purely in terms of its intended function: to keep him from getting sunstroke whilst out searching. He wears it without shame or complaint. He has seemingly disconnected from a theatre of war that, currently, exerts very little power on this place. When a crack Zeon commando unit - the Southern Cross Corps, Doan's former unit  - do arrive on the island, Doan again climbs inside his mobile suit in an attempt to vanquish the invaders. While Doan battles his one-time allies to a stand-still, Amuro finally locates his robot, nearly drowning in the process. Once encased in his Gundam, the teenager is forced to fight two of these commandos. The first he kills mech-to-mech, Amuro plunging his laser sword into the cockpit of the enemy mobile suit, vaporising his opposite. 

The second enemy pilot is out of his armour though, just a person snooping around. Amuro cannot afford to let him flee and either raise the alarm or resume piloting his robot though. Ray must press his advantage. Yoshikazu Yasuhiko's film again defies the simplistic morality of heroic fantasy by having this child use his towering robot to step on and crush this fleeing, helpless, enemy. The act registers first as disgusts then abject horror on Amuro's face; Yasuhiko's boyish draft of the character accentuating this acute, overwhelming, distress. The unspoken spell of Cucuruz Doan's island has been broken. Ray forcibly disconnects from the fast friendships he has made in this place; the safety and comfort of a childhood lived amongst other children. He resumes being a soldier. Later, having beaten back the remains of the Southern Cross Corps, Amuro enacts a kind of mercy on Doan, one he cannot give himself. Using his white Gundam, Amuro picks up the remains of Doan's ruined Zaku and casts it into the ocean, finally and completely severing Doan from a responsibility to fight. The children fret but their guardian understands. As Amuro and his White Base allies are waved off from the island, the viewer is left with an overwhelming impression that they have experienced a short but profound moment in Amuro's life. An alternative to a life spent fighting was briefly available to him but, ultimately, forgone.