Patlabor: The Movie

Mamoru Oshii's big screen adaptation of his (more overtly comedic) Mobile Police video animation series uses its technologically advanced, near-future setting to tell an information era ghost story. Set in 1999 (ten years after the film was originally released), Patlabor: The Movie opens with hotshot programmer Eiichi Hoba taking his life; the software developer hurling himself off the enormous artificial island that now sits in Tokyo Bay, supporting the massive land reclamation initiative that will allow the city to drain its waters and expand far beyond its current boundaries. This late 80s vision of the twentieth century's concluding year is predicated on a boundless and consistent growth, one supported by the co-mingling of robotics and heavy construction equipment. The fragment of himself that Hoba leaves behind is mutinous, self-replicating data; lines of rebellion written into a faulty labour robot operating system that has been rushed to market by a floundering company with a dubious grasp on proper safety protocols. 

The meat of this Patlabor then is a procedural, one that largely abandons the franchise's showier aspects - namely massive, battling mechanoids - to examine how different kinds of police process the same, unfolding disaster. Naturally, those working under the Special Vehicles team are more attuned to tackling the problem from a technical perspective, crowding into cable-snaked apartments to run diagnostic simulations that slowly blot out their expanding mega city. The film's most arresting investigation though belongs to a police detective tasked with following up on the physical addresses that Hoba had previously inhabited. Matsui, and an unnamed partner, slowly traipse around Tokyo's slums on foot, mantling dried out canals and waltzing through dilapidated, partially abandoned buildings to a sickly shuffle courtesy of composer Kenji Kawai. Unlike the more moneyed areas of the city, these flop house streets are not lit by buzzing greens. The shadows here are black and long; sunlight burnt into the cracking concretes and mouldering wooden houses of these junk neighbourhoods. 

Bracketed by the glass and steel buildings that stretch off into the sky, Matsui stands contemplating the refuse that piles up beneath them. The people and places left behind when money migrates across town. Elsewhere, a canny police Captain takes a break from fishing in what's left of Tokyo's inner sea to talk about the cyclical nature of progress: how today's expensive technical advances are, inevitably, transformed into tomorrow's inconvenience. This drastically different, and less obviously apocalyptic, take on the temporal whiplash experienced when living in an ever-changing city isn't just philosophical flavour either. Oshii builds the concluding thirty minutes of Patlabor: The Movie around a violent and expediated demolition of the state-of-the-art facility that Hoba took flight from. With a typhoon fast approaching, Ryunosuke Ohbayashi's Captain Goto orders his gung-ho police division to the artificial island - armed with, variously, two towering robots and the pistol from Sudden Impact. The idea being that, when the Mobile Police scuttle this island factory, any political inconvenience arising from this demolition can be chalked up to the natural disaster. Oshii's bravura take on the collapsing complex conceit, so beloved in 1980s science fiction, forgoes the typically explosive outcome. Instead, this enormous factory dies by inches. Slowly transforming from a staffed and industrialised skerry into an expensive pile of disorganised debris.