WXIII: Patlabor The Movie 3

Fumihiko Takayama's WXIII: Patlabor The Movie 3 almost completely dispenses with the Special Vehicles teams who struggled through Mamoru Oshii's previous two instalments, preferring instead to focus on a pair of detectives nosing around a spate of, apparently, unconnected murders and some light industrial sabotage. The film's technologically advanced near-future is leveraged then not to explore any criminality connected with robotic diggers or stolen military aircraft but to hypothesize the ways in which biological science has kept pace with mechanical developments, further diverging from our norm. If you were to summarise Patlabor 3 then it would not be incorrect to say that it is a creature feature with brief intrusions from hydraulic mechanoids. This kaiju aspect is densely delineated too, with allusions to work as diverse as Shusuke Kaneko's Gamera: Guardian of the Universe and the kind of Lovecraftian horrors that are very often found entombed in ancient ice. 

The rhythms and mise-en-scène Takayama uses to tell such a conceptually outrageous story though are the complete opposite of the frenzy typically deployed. Patlabor 3 revels in describing the everyday and the mundane, the film largely an exercise in extracting a quivering, Autumnal beauty out of this vision of tomorrow's Tokyo. Since Takayama's film is almost entirely painted animation, this preoccupation with stillness and incidental detail becomes its own, intoxicating characteristic. Patlabor 3 betrays an obsessive commitment to prosaic clutter, communicated with brush strokes and feature film minutes that revolve around the description of human minutiae; be that a judgmental tremor on the face of an amusement park cashier or a Renoir calendar hanging in a bereaved mother's office. This is a hypnotic film, one constructed out of anxious pauses and static perspectives on a speculative, super-charged city that no-one actually got to live in. Japan's capital is portrayed as a sodden expanse filled with malfunctioning people, a beast that shrieks with a woman's trill, and a murder investigation that hinges on which sound frequencies are thoughtlessly eliminated by the process of digital audio compression.