Kidou Keisatsu Patlabor 2 the Movie
One of the reasons why I ordered Patlabor 2 was because I read another review in which a critic gave the movie a perfect, 100% rating. Personally, though I certainly enjoyed it I didn't find it to be flawless. I watched the dubbed version, approximately 108 minutes long, and immediately noticed that the animation was much better than the original TV series. It reminded me of the animation in "Jin-Roh", but ironically the improvement had a disadvantage in that it made it difficult to recognize individual charachters whose faces I was familiar with from the TV show! I was operating under the assumption that the charachters would behave more or less like they did in the TV or OVA series, which turned out to be a mistake. Whereas those versions of Patlabor tend to be near situation comedies, the movies have a darker, more serious tone to them. According to the previews, the now-scattered original staff of SVD2 are supposed to reunite and solve the case, and eventually they do, but not until the last half hour or so of the movie. Until then the bulk of the attention is placed on Captains Goto and Nagumo. Goto especially didn't seem to be acting like the man I remembered from the TV series (which I had always watched in subtitled form). He had always been a quiet, soft-spoken guy, who never got excited about anything, and in this movie I was startled when he actually shouted at somebody! The people who made this movie clearly didn't feel particularly obligated to conform to the style of the original OVA series, and it might be most enjoyable to those who haven't seen Patlabor on TV. Moody music and artwork take up a good deal of time, without a word being spoken (also, the makers of this film display an almost bizarre fascination with birds!). Like the first Patlabor movie, there's basically one mecha skirmish at the beginning, then the bulk of the film is a sophisticated mystery being unravelled, and finally the Patrol Labors are called into action to set things right. I thought the climactic mecha fight was well done, though not as elaborate or lengthy as the one in the first movie. Throughout the film, you never see anybody get killed or badly injured, though with all the destruction that takes place, some people must have gotten the chop. As exciting and well animated as the action was, it was kind of difficult to take seriously because the way Japan as a whole went swiftly from a normal state of affairs to martial law. As I understand it, Japan has been very non-militaristic since 1945--there is no Japanese "army", rather the "Japan Self-Defence Force". It was hard to believe that discontented JSDF jet and helicopter pilots could be recruited to carry out terrorist attacks--kind of a paranoid conspiracy viewpoint. The movie comes to an end in a way that was partly anticlimactic and partly surreal. The makers of Anime in general apparently don't expect to have to explain everything to the viewer, and even if they haven't in this particular case, the result was still an entertaining, thoughtful piece of work--even if you don't exactly "get" it.
My favorite line: "Isumi--Get over here and kill this thing!"
6/03
Last updated Saturday, February 23 2008. Created Tuesday, June 10 2003.
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