Based on the manga by Masami Yuki

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

I feel like I’m playing computer games against God.

Patlabor gets
the time frame wrong – the film is set in 1999, and we have yet to get to
“Patlabor” work mechs even knee deep into the Millennium – but this follow up
to the 1988-9 straight to video series is still very relevant in its themes.
Getting very good distribution back in the day through Manga Entertainment with
its 1993 sequel, this Mamoru Oshii
helmed work, with screenplay by Kazunori Itō, still comes with a lot of salient
points decades on with the context and exposition raising many ideas. In
futuristic Tokyo, the Babylon Project has been set up to reclaim land in Tokyo
Bay, to overcome lack of land in the country and overcrowding, alongside the
goal to turn the capital into a cosmopolis. In this world, as mentioned, it has
giant bipedal robots but, even if there are some combat machines and a division
of the police force, this is a reality where the “labor” is seen as the
equivalent of farming and construction machines, the advancement of a bulldozer
for a new age.

The film does presume
you have seen the straight-to-video series before, but that never becomes an
issue here, and as the Manga
Entertainment release in the United Kingdom came for VHS and DVD, this was
a rare case of a title where the lack of context was never going to be an
issue. The film presents the world in a way anyone can quickly catch up on its
set-up, in that, after establishing this context of a Japan which uses giant robots
for practical use, there is the issue that they can malfunction, and that the
police naturally also needed their own, and even divisions to deal with issues
involving them, whether abused or out of control. Division 2, our lead team,
are unfortunately the cartoonish group in their police force, and it shows
their status when they strike fear into a construction worker they are trying
to save from his labor going out of control. The recent spate of labor
rampages, opening the film, is alarming for them especially Asuma Shinohara,
the hot headed young police member, and his seniors, leading them to dig up the
cause. It is Patlabor 2, the sequel,
which is held the highest, as it became a far more serious political thriller,
but this even as a lighter toned work has its pointed moments of relevance. Mamoru Oshii and his screenwriter Kazunori Itō here also have passages of
introspection which would be seen in Oshii’s
work before and especially grow in the time after Ghost in the Shell (1995) caught peoples’ attentions. Itō was not a stranger for the
unconventional and the cerebral, future screenwriter for both Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor 2, as well as live action
films such as one of the last of Seijun
Suzuki's films, Pistol Opera (2001),
an unsung and bizarre crime pastiche, to the late nineties Gamera reboots, and his name deserves to be nodded to for his
talents with the narrative too.

This is also
however a comedy too, which may surprise some, as until Vlad Love (2021), Oshii’s
return to television anime, a large period of time in his directorial career in
live action and animation, in mind to many titles of his never leaving his home
land, focused more on cerebral and somber existential tones post Ghost in the Shell. The humour here
from the previous stories in this franchise, following the misfits of Division
2, including female lead Noa Izumi and her beloved police mecha, does help this
film greatly, especially as when the introspection does appear. It means a lot
more when brought in when we can also appreciate these characters being
ordinary police and even doofuses, especially in mind to the Division 2 leader Captain
Kiichi Gotō, held in high regard as talented officer who ended up there for
being too good, someone who turned this band of misfits into a family who fish
in their off time outside and grow tomatoes on sight when not dealing with the
labor rampages.

Central to its
main plot, as more labors are going berserk, is the connection to new hardware
software for them, its creator a mysterious man we never see a clear image of
and is already dead in the first scene, having committed suicide, but we learn
so much of regardless of this. He is the Harry Lime figure that Gotō has
detectives from other police sections learn of, his tale emphasizing so much
philosophy and existentialism Oshii
and Kazunori Itō get into. Even
spiritual ideas are there as explicit Old Testament references are rife
throughout, including the Tower of Babylon, the building which God was said to
struck down when humans dared to make a tower reach Him, re-contextualized in
an existential debate here of Japan losing its consciousness as
industrialization and capitalist grow progresses into the future. I dare not
claim any true knowledge of Japanese culture, but even as far back as a film
like Stray Dog (1949) by Akira Kurosawa,
made just after Japan lost World War II, destroyed and forced to have to build
back up over the fifties and sixties, that film touched on these ideas found
here a long time after. Existential concerns beyond the film itself are found
of the old Japan being lost as more metropolises and advancement leads to more
of their consciousness being lost, something anime has covered greatly, and Oshii would get into the nineties
further with even the consciousness of human beings. The sites the mystery man
at the center of lived in, creator of a diabolical plant for countrywide labor
rampages, turn out to be old buildings which are being demolished when the
detectives reach them, emphasizing for the characters as much as the audience
these grave concerns of old districts and communities disappearing without
trace in the march for progression.

The reveal, full
spoilers, also is uncomfortably realistic, that this is all due to software
from a major business and tied to the government which has been coded with a
deliberate hack to cause these rampages, which the government would happily
like to deal with without hassle. Actually, and it says how more positive Oshii and Kazunori Itō especially were, or a drastically different attitude
from Japanese business culture, that Patlabor
could be seen as less realistic, all because of how quickly this is dealt with.
No one pretends this has not been revealed, wishing to still have their
boatload of cash from the deals, and deny malfunctioning hardware that could
cause deaths ever came up, but that could be me merely being cynical.

There is a
lighter touch to the first Patlabor
film, especially as Patlabor 2 was a
drastic change in tone even in terms of the character designs, but there is a
lot to juggle which is a huge credit to the production. This is still an action
film and a comedy, but one which has a mind to it, and even with the humour,
you see the creativity Oshii had and
could be neglected. The introspective scenes, including the symbolism of empty
birdcages and abandoned old derelicts, are shown with incredible cinematic
style through the animators of Studio
Deen and Production I.G., and
there are unexpected production choices here which caught me off-guard
returning to this film. One of them, one of the best of the film, is the
unexpected and inspired use of a fisheye lens for a comedy scene. A fisheye
lens is an ultra wide-angle lens that produces strong visual distortion
intended to create a wide panoramic or hemispherical image, and for obvious
reasons, this would be something you had to animate, and back in this hand
drawn era, it makes this an incredibly ambitious visual choice, especially as
it is for a moment when a character snaps and gets into an argument with his
senior officer, which makes the scene funnier.

Patlabor 2, as mentioned,
is the big one of the films, the third film WXIII: Patlabor the Movie 3 (2002) not connected to the Oshii films
with different collaborators, but the first film does deserve considerable
praise.  It has to juggle the comedy and
the moments of contemplative philosophy, really pertinent ideas of Japan’s
technological advances, which is an ambitious task in itself within a film that
is beautifully cinematic. This is before the personality is shown in how the
film is made, let alone with its idiosyncratic visual touches, including a hair-raising
moment evoking Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), and action scenes
with elaborate mechanical animation, including the finale involving storming a
heavily guarded location. The resulting film, all beautifully put together, is
exceptional, and whilst this is absolutely a case of a film where multiple
figures who are important to its virtues, this in context for Mamoru Oshii is also a good film to
return to bring a perspective to him. As a person who I view as an auteur who
brings his own voice to the work, Patlabor
is fascinating to return back to in showing his flexibility.