El Cosmico here with another anime review for you folks, this time, for a little DVD item being released on this very day...Patlabor 1: The Movie.
Years before Mamoru Oshii did Ghost In The Shell, he turned out a film, which in my opinion is a good bit better. Not that I don't like Ghost In The Shell, but it's not in my must-have list of anime. Patlabor: The Movie is.
Originally released in 1989, Patlabor has a look that is nowadays considered old-school, with almost everything drawn by hand. Of course, some of the finest animators anywhere worked on this movie, so the results are easy to appreciate. Compared to Lain, or the new BGC series, for example, the source material wasn't digitally generated or clean, it's rough around the edges. Personally, I think there's a lot to appreciate about both styles, and since they're so far apart in time as well, it's probably not fair to compare the two. The fact is, I like the look of Patlabor quite a bit.
Okay, moving along...I ought to say that this DVD didn't live up to the potential of the format, in my opinion, a title like Patlabor warrants extra-special treatment, and while the transfers were probably as good as could be expected from the source material, the extras on this title were a bit...lacking. Jitsu o ieba, they just cover the bare-bones basics. Not to say that the disc sucks, though. Here's what I mean: if the folks doing this disc were waiters in the great restaurant of anime, I'd give them a basic tip. Not a bad tip, but definitely not a great one either. They did what they were supposed to, but that's all. Missed opportunity. Of course, I didn't like the English dub, I almost never do...although I have to admit there were some good parts to the dub, including Shinohara's argument with his boss, which worked out surprisingly well in English. Sadly, the English dub is in 5.1 surround, and the Japanese is in stereo. Oh, why is the world backwards? Honestly, if I could wipe dubbing off the face of the Earth, I would do it right now.
The truth is, though, that people generally buy discs for the titles they contain, not the extras. Most importantly, Patlabor 1: The Movie is one of the best anime titles I've ever seen: a fine example of the potential of anime...in fact, it's one of the few anime titles that I could actually see turned into a live-action film with success. Everything in Patlabor is plausible. Maybe not PROBABLE, but in this day and age, definitely possible. To me, that's what sets it apart from most anime. It's not filled with the supernatural, or technically dubious and fantastic elements, it takes place in our world, and in our time. True, we don't build a lot of giant manned robots, but you know what? We could. Right now. So, why don't we? Maybe because of the stuff we see them do in films like Patlabor.
Here's the description from the cover, only minor spoilers, skip ahead if you like:
The year is 1999 and Tokyo's Mobile Police have a new weapon in the war on crime - advanced robots called Labors are used to combat the criminals who would use the new technology for illegal means. The suicide of a mysterious man on the massibe Babylon Project construction site sets off a cascade of events that may signal the destruction of Tokyo. What is the connection between the suicide, the new Mobile Police AV-X0 Zero Labor, and a berserk prototype tank?
When Patlabor cops Noah Izumi and Azuma Shinohara investigate an unexplained wave of rogue Labors rampaging across the city, they uncover a sinister revenge plot to infect Tokyo's eight thousand Labor population with the deadly BABEL virus. With the future of the city hanging in the balance and a typhoon poised to trigger the devastation, Noah, Azuma and their teammates must destroy the source of the virus - the giant Babylon Project tower in Tokyo Bay - in a die hard battle to the finish.
Indeed. Probably the best thing about Patlabor is that it involves a genuinely interesting and compelling mystery. It just tells a good story. That's all there is to it. There are some particularly funny moments too, like when Shinohara argues with his boss, in my opinion, a classic anime clip if ever there was one, but Patlabor ultimately succeeds because it's good storytelling. No, it's not going to go down in the annals of history as one of the great works of humanity, but it's engaging and interesting. Oh, and for those of you who have trouble sitting through epics like Evangelion, Patlabor is only 100 minutes, and features what is possibly the smallest degree of mental contamination ever seen in an anime feature (see my reviews of Evangelion and Lain for an explanation of this term). Quite accessible to western audiences.
Patlabor creates an environment that is easy to place yourself in. The atmosphere is, well, the real world. It's believable, and, perhaps what's most impressive is that while Patlabor is ultimately about giant robots, the giant robots aren't used gratuitously. They're there when they need to be, and gone when they ought not to be around. Patlabor takes itself seriously.
Well, hopefully I've been spoiler-free enough to let you discover on your own how well this story unfolds, but informative enough to convey how unique and well-done this feature is. I hope so, because if you consider yourself an anime fan, you're bound to absolutely love this film. Likewise, if you've never seen anime before in your life, and are thinking of investigating the genre, it's pretty hard to beat this title for a starting point. No anime collection should be without Patlabor 1: The Movie. It's too bad that more anime titles don't measure up to the realism and vision it delivers.
-El Cosmico
mail, mail, mail your mail, gently down the fiber-optic cable...elcosmico@aintitcool.com
