Why I Love… #165: Patlabor 2

Year: 1993

Director: Mamoru Oshii

Voice Stars: Ryûnosuke Ôbayashi, Yoshiko Sakakibara, Naoto Takanaka

It goes back, inevitably, to Akira. In the early ’90s if you were a teenager and wanted a gateway into Japanese animation – grown-up, edgy, violent animation – then Akira was it. I was a teenage in the ’90s, and it’s how it happened for me. A friend’s VHS at their house. The awe and excitement of it. The punk of it. It was just so fucking cool.

Akira led me to Manga Mania magazine, to their serialisation of Katsuhiro Otomo’s epic manga from which he had fashioned a much-truncated feature film and, by extension, to exposure to other titles coming out of Japan around that time. OAV series like The Guyver and New Dominion: Tank Police. Among all the noise, reviewed with passion and exuberance, were the Patlabor films. I remember being curious, wanting more of the same high I got with Akira, and it was one of the seemingly arbitrary handful of titles getting similar VHS treatment in the UK (with a signature quality US dub, of course). I had my suspicions that it wouldn’t replicate those same thrills (a PG certificate? Lame!), but the assurances of its quality overwrote my misgivings.

Those assurances were right. I loved the relative complexity of Patlabor: The Movie, and enjoyed its cerebral approach to giant mech stories (though it also delivers on the action front come the third act). Directed by Mamoru Oshii – who would later score international acclaim for a certain Ghost in the Shell adaptation – it introduced me to a broad collective of lovable police characters in the far flung year of 1999, and featured animation that at times bettered that that I had encountered with Akira. And while I never saw the OAV series from which the film was derived (and still haven’t!), that VHS was never very far from my VCR.

The same and then some went for Patlabor 2 when it was delivered to our shores a couple of years later. Where the first film played in the main as a detective story, here we had a weighty political conspiracy thriller, one pregnant with philosophical musings on the realities of peace and war, and stained with Japan’s national trauma. I’d never experienced anything near to this level of sophistication from any film, animated or otherwise. I didn’t know it was possible.

A brief overview for the uninitiated. These movies take place in a then-near-future Tokyo where oversized robots for manual labour (“labors”) have become commonplace, and a police task force – Special Vehicles Section – has been commissioned to deal with labor-related crimes. They have their own giant mechs to assist them. Where the first film’s mystery centred the action around plucky youngsters Noah and Asuma, Patlabor 2 favours Chief Goto and Shinobu with the remainder of the squad rarely glimpsed for much of the film.

One of the things that make both movies feel eerie is how the machinations of the plot are steered by villains who are rarely if ever seen. The architect of chaos in the first film, Hoba, commits suicide in the opening scene, confident that his plan to wreak havoc on the city is unstoppable (the smile on his face as he plunges into Tokyo bay is so sinister). For Patlabor 2 war veteran and master-strategist Tsuge is alive, but remains an off-screen threat, orchestrating staged terrorist attacks and turning the country’s defence system against itself to generate fear until a state of martial law is declared. Both factor the investigation into their crimes into their respective games, imparting lessons from off the board.

Patlabor 2 is remarkable for how it engages with these ideas. Tsuge may be a terrorist, but he isn’t written off or dismissed as one. Goto and Shinobu are contacted by a shadowy informant named Shigeki Arakawa. A trenchcoaty Deep Throat type. Some of the most electric and provocative sections of the movie consist of the three of them talking about Tsuge’s motivations. It can get pretty dense. My teenage self felt a little out of depth. But there’s philosophical sociopolitical substance to the questions posed in Patlabor 2.

A truly beautiful sequence midway through sees Goto and Arakawa discussing the difference between a just war and an unjust peace. Oshii keeps them off-screen and we drift through Tokyo’s harbour. Scenes of industrial quietude and decline that resurrect memories of the country’s post-war reconstruction days and the collective weight of those experiences. These watery scenes of contemplation are exponentially enhanced by the music of Kenji Kawai, and I’d make an argument for Patlabor 2 featuring one of the best scores in any film. It is mournful, tense, unready and just as thoughtful as the ideas bandied back and forth by the film’s characters. Indeed, Oshii suspends plot and action for a period of reflection mid-film, proffering the audience to digest what they’ve seen and heard so far before going forward. It’s an act of generosity he would repeat two years later with Ghost in the Shell.

If such rumination sounds somewhat detached and impersonal, a bittersweet thread of humanity is sewn into the narrative connecting Shinobu to the elusive Tsuge. Rumour of a past intimacy between them is feathered in early, and wordlessly confirmed mid-film when the detectives get unusually close to catching him during a nighttime riverboat rendezvous. Again it is Kawai’s delicate music that does the talking. It turns willowy, longing, nostalgic.

As intimated at length, nostalgia defines my connection to this film, and it has long been unavailable in the UK in any reasonably attentive physical release (the Manga Entertainment DVDs of the early ’00s are of horrendous quality). Mercifully, they have now been tended to and resurrected by tireless label All The Anime, receiving a long overdue blu-ray reissue. They look beautiful for their relative age (although those ’90s dubs have been replaced, dashing a small part of my fond remembrance; the replacement dubs – should you feel so inclined – are decent substitutes).

Having them there is like a kind of security blanket. But revisiting them confirms their worth outside of any personal connection to my youth. They are incredibly fine, soulful, intelligent films. And this second one stands, quite frankly, as one of the best animated films ever made in my book, eclipsing even Otomo’s venerated (and frankly incomparable) Akira.