Many giant robot properties are, most fundamentally, about the power and freedom of becoming your adult self. Often centered on young men on the cusp of adulthood, their robotic instruments become vehicles through which those boys can explore the responsibility of genuinely impacting society, and deciding what kind of mark they want to leave on the world. It’s a robust metaphor that gracefully implies the world-shifting nature of adolescence, but the dramatic range of giant robot narratives expands far beyond individual transformation, as the brilliant Patlabor demonstrates. Developed throughout the late ‘80s by the five-artist Headgear collective, and set only a brief decade after its own creation, Patlabor focuses on a very different kind of transformation – not on one boy becoming a man, but on Japan becoming a modern and technologically advanced global power.
Patlabor is as grounded a giant robot property as you could imagine, centered not on villain-fighting heroes, but a group of patrolling police officers who just so happen to control a couple of “Labors.” The very names of these robots implies their utilitarian function – first developed to help with construction and civil maintenance, they are unwieldy as weapons, and other police departments treat the Labor-wielding units as something of a joke. The first episode of Patlabor’s Early Days OVA is mostly spent waiting around in lazy anticipation, because the team’s new Labors are stuck in traffic. Labors are imperfect tools, and as society begins to integrate them into public works and institutions, their actual role in the future is still uncertain.
That Early Days OVA seems to embody that uncertainty even in its own winding narrative turns. Some episodes focus on goofy concepts like a kaiju growing in Tokyo Bay, or a ghost potentially haunting an old training facility. Those episodic larks bump shoulders with heavier topics like domestic terrorism, culminating in a two-part drama where Labor Unit 2’s chief Gotoh must halt a military coup by his old teacher, as a JSDF splinter group attempts to dissolve the Japanese government altogether.
The sharpness of that final conflict, and its relevance to a rapidly transforming Japan, sets the stage for the ambiguous and forward-thinking Patlabor: The Movie. If this film has a villain, it is Change, or perhaps Ambition; our reckless drive to claim the future, no matter the consequences, no matter what is lost in the bargain. Additionally, Patlabor: The Movie is emphatically a film about a specific moment in time, defined by the obsessions of its creators, from director Mamoru Oshii’s fascination with Christian theology to Headgear’s more generalized thoughts on the end of an era. The film’s greatest strength is its specificity – how well it captures its fraught moment, and how beautifully its reverence for robotic drama echoes and reverberates with the consequences of heedless, rapacious progress. Patlabor is an unabashedly political film, but its victories demonstrate how politics could never be considered “apart” from art. They are the conditions through which we view the world, the terms that set our ability to envision the future – what is possible, what is likely, and what must be prevented at all costs.
Though it’s theoretically set around the turn of the 21st century, Patlabor paints a vivid portrait of Japan in the late 1980s, as the boom period of Japan’s Economic Miracle in the wake of World War II was still in full swing, and Japan stood as a global leader in terms of economic and technological development. The Tokyo of Patlabor shimmers with bright new skyscrapers, and the streets are littered with Labors dutifully sculpting a new city out of the old. The progress and optimism of the era are exemplified through the Babylon Project, and its flagship creation, the Ark – a massive, many-layered platform rising in the heart of the Tokyo Bay. From the Ark, thousands of Labors will emerge to carry Japan through the great flood of transformation, and into a new era marked by reclaimed lands and a reimagined Tokyo. Even the Labor-wielding Section 2 are already reaping the bounty of this project, as their very headquarters lies on land dredged from the depths of the bay.
But Patlabor isn’t a starry-eyed work of optimistic futurism. Though its sumptuous mechanical animation betrays its inherent love for the beauty of giant robots, it also can’t help but question how such inventions would impact our everyday society, and what risks we might run in embracing such miracles of technology. The recklessness of Japan’s surge towards a robot-powered future is clear even in the transition from the Early Days OVA to this feature film. In the OVA, the Babylon Project is a proposed project to drain Tokyo Bay, consistently stymied by environmental protests and eco-terrorism – here, it’s an established truth of civil development. In the OVA, the idea that Labors might be put to military use was a terrible, almost unthinkable potential development – here, they’re already in active military production, and the film even opens with a tank-like Labor going berserk.
The consequences of Japan’s heedless technological development come through clearly in Patlabor: The Movie’s gorgeous, decaying cityscapes. When a series of Labor malfunctions prompts Gotoh to call in a favor from the detective Matsui, we spend long minutes following Matsui through the winding streets of old Tokyo, as he tracks the developer of the revolutionary “HOS” Labor operating system through dozens of temporary homes. The alleys and avenues of old Tokyo are presented in loving detail, as if Patlabor itself is determined to not let these places pass into history, the film’s intricate paintings offering a final testament to the city that was.
Oshii’s framing of old Tokyo is truly gorgeous. All the areas Matsui passes through are run down and abandoned, but they still exhibit a quiet dignity and detailed beauty, as ramshackle bridges cross over canals and converge on angular, multileveled public plazas. Laundry strings cross overhead and cats prowl below, offering echoes of the lives that were lived here, the communities that once shared these spaces. As Matsui concludes his own reflections on the city’s changes, he rises to reveal he’s been sitting on the derelict edge of what was once a communal bath – the centerpiece of a former community, now simply the bleacher seats for one more performance of a Labor leveling an old home.
While the film’s decaying old neighborhoods and ominous skyscrapers make its own ambivalence clear, the full cultural complexity of the situation is illustrated through the generational divides segmenting Patlabor’s heroes. When Section 2’s chief mechanic Sakaki meets with the head mechanic on board the Ark, the two speak in proud terms of how far their country has come. From initially working on repairs for United States’ occupation vehicles, they have risen to the level of steering their own country towards a technologically superior future, with the rise of Labors serving as a kind of national redemption. What use have they for the old places of the city, which were only ever a sign of Japan in defeat?
The middle-aged adults, who now actually steer the Japanese economy, see progress in more pragmatic terms: growth is growth, and consequences can always be relegated to an inferior bureau. In both the Early Days OVA and the feature film, the chain of command and distribution of consequences is critical to Patlabor’s drama, and this middle generation seem to relish that drama. A great deal of Chief Gotoh’s genius is his ability to manage the disparate demands of a thousand contradictory civil institutions. Gotoh calls in favors when he must, manipulates superiors when he can, and at times puts his whole hand on the table, accepting that sometimes, doing the right thing means accepting you will be punished for raising your head out of the trench.
Eiichi Hoba, the thirty-year-old architect of HOS, has a very different perspective. Old Tokyo is not a sign of Japan’s defeated past to him, nor is it simply one stage of an inevitable economic expansion – it is the city he was born in, the home he was raised in. And having lived through the partial death of this home, he is determined to make Japan’s expansionists understand the cost of their ambition, and the victims left behind. As the film opens, he stands on the edge of his own greatest creation, in a vision of apocalypse echoing Oshii’s prior Angel’s Egg. A raven rises from his hand, and he smiles, lips running red with the bloody spillover of the sun’s ascension. Having completed his grand and catastrophic design, he falls willingly, plummeting into the backwash of his own accursed tower.
Hoba’s plan involves a secret code he implanted in all HOS-updated computers, that instructs any Labor that hears a specific frequency to go berserk. Humans cannot hear this frequency, but they can unwittingly create it – through the whistling of wind through their great towers, they convoke the language that will herald the end. His plan thus perfectly embodies the obliviousness of mankind’s rush towards a technological Eden, with the greed of those who rushed to corner the market by implementing HOS directly summoning a mechanical apocalypse. Japan’s leaders destroy Hoba’s old homes, and are themselves destroyed in turn.
Patlabor does a terrific job of conveying the horror of Hoba’s vision, and the terror unbound technology. The film uses darkness to phenomenal effect in making eerie, shapeless monsters of the Labors, and a horrifying edifice of the Ark itself. Scenes of Hoba’s virus overrunning humanity’s controls are presented through blaring red screens and alienating fisheye shots, while robots emerge from darkness lit only by the glaring, pitiless lights of their visual sensors. This film would not work if it could not depict both robots specifically and technology more generally as horrifying, masterless concepts, and its success is a credit to its evocative imagery.
Fortunately, Hoba’s bitterness is not his generation’s only response to the callous cultural churn of modern Japan. The new recruits of Division 2 stand as a stark contrast to Hoba’s hopelessness, from the overeager machismo of Labor pilot Isao to the fond mutual trust of operator pair Nao and Asuma. Gentle giant Hiromi plants fresh tomatoes in the outskirts of Tokyo, a patch of the old world recaptured in the new. Prompted by Gotoh’s clever manipulation, the HOS empire’s heir Asuma goes far beyond the line of duty in his attempts to solve Hoba’s riddle, literally challenging both his father and grandfather to accept responsibility for their crimes. And in the end, even the Labors themselves are embraced as something salvageable and worthwhile by the next generation. In its final moments, Patlabor’s sprawling conflicts are reduced down to the talented pilot Nao’s trust in her unit Alphonse, with her own profound personal strength ultimately redeeming these amoral machines.
Just as Patlabor is emphatically a film about a specific historical moment, it is also a film defined by a sincere cultural belief – the idea that even if our interwoven agencies and industries can create stagnation and scatter blame, we are still far stronger together. No single hero stops Hoba’s plans, just as no single villain was responsible for their propagation; though old Tokyo still crumbles to dust, the Ark falls as well, the instrument of ruin shattered by the servants of Tokyo’s collective efforts. When the sun rises again, the wreckage and destruction are great, but Tokyo remains.
Patlabor The Movie is a searing, beautiful, and ultimately optimistic film. It’s a film that acknowledges the recklessness of brash technological progress, but can’t help but also see the glory in mankind’s most ambitious creations. It offers a poignant eulogy for a lost city, asking us not to cease in our forward momentum, but at least spare a moment for the eras and communities left behind. In a world where we now must bear both the material and social consequences of a tech-driven society, it’s encouraging to see that in every era, both that hope and that fear can be shouldered at the same time. Neither can save us alone – the future cannot be stopped, but it must be greeted with humility, and reverence for the arks that have sheltered us all along.
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