Patlabor

Patlabor • Patlabor: The Movie • Patlabor 2: The Movie

patlabor 1988. OAV. (7 X 30 min.) Science fiction/adventure. dir Mamoru Oshii, others. scr Kazunori Ito. mus Kenji Kawai. des Akemi Takada, Yutaka Izubuchi.

patlabor 1989. TV series. (47 X 30 min.) dir Naoyuki Yoshinaga.

patlabor: the movie 1989. Movie. 99 min. Science fiction/drama. dir Mamoru Oshii.

patlabor 2: the movie 1993. Movie. 107 min. Political thriller. dir Mamoru Oshii. -bc

Patlabor is a mecha series with a twist. Set in near-future Tokyo, it tells its stories through the eyes of a single unit of underpaid and overworked civil servants. While the OAV and TV series are often humorous, the two movies are dead-serious treatments of the collision between humanity and technological advancement.

In Tokyo at the end of the 20th century, a labor shortage has led to the use of construction machines called Labors, one-man robots that can do the work of dozens of men. A building boom requires the use of thousands of Labors, and with it comes the use of Labors for crimes or drunken brawls. Hence, a division of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police is created to operate Patrol Labors (or Patlabors, for short). Special Vehicles Section 2 consists of a motley crew including no-nonsense female Captain Shinobu Nagumo; jaded but shrewd Captain Kiichi Goto; young Asuma Shinohara, son of the president of Shinohara Industries which manufactures Labors; eager female rookie Noa Izumi; hot-tempered, gun-crazy Ota; veteran mechanic and engineer Sakaki; and Japanese-American Sergeant Kanuka Clancy of the New York Police Department, visiting Japan for a year to train in Labors.

The TV and OAV series follow the day-to-day activities of the unit as they train, quarrel, ponder new equipment, subdue rogue Labors, and deal with terrorist acts and deceitful corporate practices. There is frequent bureaucratic wrangling as the Special Vehicles Unit has to protect its turf and get what’s needed and avoid what isn’t (e.g., new Labors they don’t feel comfortable with), as well as tussles with the corporations that supply their mecha. Looming over their daily routine is the Babylon Project, a massive building development seeking to reclaim land from Tokyo Bay covered over by rising sea levels caused by global warming. Eco-terrorists protest the project and often use Labors as acts of sabotage.

Patlabor: The Movie follows the investigation into a sudden rash of Labors going out of control and wreaking havoc in Tokyo neighborhoods. The behavior is traced to the new Hyper Operating System (HOS) installed in 80 percent of all functioning Labors in Tokyo, invented by an eccentric programmer named E. Hoba, who killed himself a month before the Labors starting going berserk. An investigation into Hoba’s past indicates that Hoba had a larger plan in mind that will go into effect when certain climatic conditions occur, even after the HOS has been removed from all Labors. The Patlabor unit has to figure out what is going to happen, and where and when. It all leads to a harrowing climactic battle between the Patlabor crew and a host of berserk Labors on an offshore platform called the Ark, part of the Babylon Project, in the middle of a typhoon.

Patlabor 2 takes place in 2002 and follows a series of terrorist acts in Tokyo, including a missile strike on the Yokohama Bay Bridge, that threaten to start a civil war. At some point, the police surround the military bases in the city, followed by the army’s mobilization and virtual occupation of the city. Arakawa, a Japan Self Defense Force (JSDF) intelligence officer, feeds Captain Goto a steady supply of information including the identity of the man behind these acts, Yukihito Tsuge, a disaffected former military man whose combat Labors had failed in a UN-sponsored test and who happens to be a former lover of Captain Nagumo. More terrorist acts occur, including an attack on Section 2’s base, until Nagumo leads the unit through a secret tunnel to the offshore man-made island where Tsuge keeps his base of operations for a final showdown.

Patlabor: The New Files (1990, OAV, 16 eps.)

Patlabor WXIII (2001, movie)

The character design is much simpler and rounder in the OAV/TV series, and the character animation stiffer than in the movies. The greatest effort seems to have been put into the mecha animation, the design and motion of the Labors. The intricate movements of these handy machines through traffic and city streets and up and down tall buildings to respond to various crises are a major draw of the series. Interestingly, the character design makes most of the characters look at least vaguely Japanese. Ironically, the one Japanese-American in the cast, Sgt. Kanuka Clancy, looks the most Japanese. (Noa and Asuma, the juvenile leads, look the most Western.) In Patlabor 2, the character design is significantly altered to make everybody look distinctly Japanese, one of the rare instances of such design in anime.

There are distinct differences in style between the movies and the OAV/TV series. Being higher-budgeted, the movies offer more detail in all areas, including character design, mecha, and background art. Patlabor 2, in fact, is much more intensely detailed than even the first movie, with the distinct aim of looking as photo-realistic as possible. It’s also the only entry in the entire series where the Labors are not the main focus—they’re hardly even used in it until the final battle. Instead, the emphasis is on the military hardware used to threaten Tokyo, including F-16-J fighter jets, combat helicopters, and, surprisingly, three blimps.

In Patlabor 2, Oshii develops some of the stylistic trademarks he would expand on in Ghost in the Shell 1 & 2. There are long dialogue scenes, philosophical expounding upon war and peace and what they mean to Japan, accompanied, in one scene where the talkers are in a boat, by detailed shots of waterfront structures such as power plants, abandoned warehouses, and rotting piers. At one point, there is a beautiful wordless montage of military tanks, checkpoints, and soldiers on guard in the streets of Tokyo as the city goes on about its regular business while under martial law. These look forward to similar scenes in Ghost in the Shell. In fact, Patlabor 2 is more like Ghost in the Shell than like Patlabor 1.

Kenji Kawai’s music offers energetic accompaniment to the characters’ antics in the TV series. In the movies, however, his scores take on an eerier tone, with greater emphasis on percussion, arising from the mystery of the cases the characters are con­fronted with, evoking a sense of displacement in the first movie and unsettlement in the second.

Patlabor offers an unusual take on traditional mecha anime. Borrowing the concept of boomers from Bubblegum Crisis, and the look of Labors from Gundam, Patlabor is not grandly heroic or full of deadly battles like those series, but instead focuses, rather unsentimentally, on a group of ordinary, everyday civil servants stuck in an underfunded police division on the outskirts of Tokyo. They make the best of the Labors they have and get used to them, with young Noa Izumi becoming particularly attached to her “Alphonse.” The earlier entries don’t seem to question the technology so much. We see the tension caused by the Babylon Project and the protests against it, and the outcry whenever Section 2 causes extensive property damage, but the Patlabor crew are essentially good guys and there is a general ongoing love affair with their mecha in these episodes. Their greatest challenge, in fact, comes from proving the viability of human qualities over mecha power. The unsympathetic bureau chief declares that “Labors run on money, not pride,” but the youngest crew members insist it’s “Skill and courage!” They have to constantly demonstrate that dedication is the key factor in the Labors’ success, not simply technological efficiency and raw power.

In the movies, however, we get distinct critiques of a social and economic structure that values technology and economic advancement above all else. Hoba, the mad programmer who commits suicide at the beginning of Patlabor 1, lamented the loss of older sections of Tokyo in the wake of all the new construction. Detective Matsui picks up on this when he declares, after following Hoba’s trail through the back alleys of Tokyo, “No one in Tokyo seems to care about our vanishing history.” After looking for clues in one apartment where Hoba had lived, Matsui is urged to hurry up by a construction crew waiting to knock the building down. These represent some of the most affecting scenes in the movie as we see the rapidly disappearing traces of an older Tokyo with simpler values and lifestyles than those of the gleaming, high-tech, multistoried luxury tower and landfill-based Tokyo going up around them.

Patlabor 2 addresses the larger questions of war and peace and Japan’s place in the world’s conflicts. “What does peace really mean to Japan?” is a question posed to Captain Goto by Arakawa, the military intelligence officer. Made at a time when Japan’s economic miracle was held in awe (and envy) by the rest of the world, Patlabor 2 posits a military terrorist who seeks to confront Japan with the human cost of its prosperity and the benefit it has accrued from wars in other countries. (Ironically, the entire Patlabor series takes place during a future period when, in real life, Japan’s economic bubble had burst and the country was plunged into a deep malaise.)

The movies are clearly meant to challenge the viewer and not just provide mecha-on-mecha smackdowns (although there are spectacular labor-oriented action climaxes in both). Oshii devotes a lot of time to philosophical exchanges between older male characters. The visuals are distinguished by long, beautiful digressions. We see fewer of the hijinks of the youthful crew members. There is a sense of urgency in the movies that doesn’t really exist in the previous series, and a sense of real-world pressures that don’t often figure in anime. Both of the movies clearly mark director Oshii’s deepening maturity as a filmmaker and point the way to the great intellectual and technological leaps he would make in his next animated films, Ghost in the Shell and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence.

To produce the Patlabor franchise, a creative group was formed solely for these productions and took the name of Headgear, comprised of director Mamoru Oshii, writer Kazunori Ito, mecha designer Yutaka Izubuchi, character designer Akemi Takada and manga artist Masami Yuuki. Writer Ito had worked with Oshii on Urusei Yatsura and later wrote Ghost in the Shell for him.

In the third OAV episode, one of the few with fanciful sci-fi elements, there’s an homage to classic Japanese kaiju (giant monster) movies. A giant monster spotted in Tokyo Bay resembles one of the title humanoid creatures in War of the Gargantuas (1968), a live-action kaiju epic directed by Ishiro Honda, director of the original Godzilla (1954). The monster in the OAV episode is the creation of a mad biotechnologist named Dr. Hirata, after actor Akihiko Hirata, who played Serizawa, the scientist who created the lethal Oxygen Destroyer in Godzilla. Both characters sport an eye patch.

Patlabor: The Movie, made in 1989 but set ten years later, was fairly prescient about the pervasiveness of computer technology in the years ahead. The younger characters use a home computer to solve the basic problem of Hoba’s larger plans to disrupt the city’s Labors.

A poetic wordless sequence in Patlabor 2 illustrates the resumption of everyday life in Tokyo under military occupation after the army has forced the hostile police force to back down. People go to work, children go to school, subway cars fill up, traffic builds up, tanks are stationed in the streets, army helicopters fly overhead, and soldiers stand at their posts greeting the citizens in a polite and friendly way, even posing for pictures. At the end of the sequence, over the empty nighttime streets, the first snowflakes of winter fall and the soldiers look up in awe. All this is played out under the gently enveloping electronic strains of Kawai’s soothing but subtly foreboding music, giving a sense that things may be under control, but aren’t quite right.

A troublesome aspect of the Patlabor OAV and TV series is the alarmingly casual view of terrorism portrayed. Bombings in Tokyo are seen as fairly routine and the work of petulant young activists opposed to the Babylon Project’s massive development of Tokyo Bay. There doesn’t seem to be much outrage at these acts among the Patlabor crew. When two would-be bombers seek to disrupt a Babylon Conference at a hotel they are seen as inept goofballs who wind up merely blowing a hole in the rooftop bar, with no casualties, and are treated somewhat comically as the Patlabors arrive to rescue them and their unflappable hostage, a veteran bartender. The idea that disruptive bombings can be an acceptable form of social protest doesn’t sit well in the post-9/11 world. This, of course, changed with the two movies, in which the terrorists were very clearly identified and motivated, portrayed not as comical or heroic, but as embittered and more than a little psychotic. Still, the images of helicopters firing explosive shells into the floors of high skyscrapers in Patlabor 2 will make some viewers uncomfortable.

Oshii’s beloved basset hound, a trademark of his movies, is first seen in Patlabor 2.

violence Lots of mecha combat, but no serious violence to humans that we can see. Some of the female characters bathe, but they don’t go nude. profanity Some mild curses in the subtitles and English dub.