It’s always a bit worrisome when a famous director — or for that matter a writer or artist — decides to go back and revisit the works that made him famous.
Perhaps it’s an attempt to relive the glory days. Perhaps it is because someone is willing to pay a lot of money for another entry in a beloved series (see, for example, Isaac Asimov’s sudden mid-Eighties rash of sequels to his best known works — Foundation, The Caves of Steel, and Fantastic Journey).
Or, who knows, perhaps it is just nostalgia, a longing to return to better times, back when things were simpler, and everything was still new.
Either way, one has the sneaking suspicion it isn’t going to end well.
I have no idea what prompted Mamoru Oshii to return to Patlabor, the legendary anime franchise he helped create. One has a horrible suspicion, in our age of live action remakes of classic Disney films, that someone decided that what they really needed was a live-action version of that Police Mecha show.
Although I suspect it may have been something else, something not on my list above — not exactly, at least:
You see, when you look at Oshii’s most recent work, the one he keeps returning to — the one that seems to show where he’s directed his creative energies at the moment — is one that hasn’t exactly got a lot of support from his fans.
I’m referring to his little seen animated film Tachiguishi-Retsuden (The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters)
Although, even that film reflected experiments Oshii had made in his feature film Avalon, and played around with in his short Minipato films.
For those of you who haven’t seen Tachiguishi-Retsuden (i.e., most of you) this is an odd, hybrid cut out animation movie, with real actors reduced to animated characters, which he referred to as either extremely detailed animation or live action with little detail, where he explored a lot of odd and quirky visuals which might be compared to a literal attempt to present anime imagery with live action characters.
But how, you may be wondering, does this apply to what, at least on the surface, is a traditional live action TV series?
We’ll get back to that in a moment.
The other curious aspect is that, rather than simply recast all the old characters with new actors, they chose instead to replace the old characters with all new ones.
Who just happen to be exactly like the ones they replaced.
We have the comic — but politically savvy and shrewd — Captain; we have the cute young girl who pilots the giant robot; we have the hot headed second pilot; the tough head of maintenance; the big, dumb maintenance guy and so on. The only noticeable change is that, instead of making one of the officers a beautiful young woman who is there on an exchange program with the United States, she is now a Russian.
Part of the reason behind this major reworking is that the storyline of the new series takes place after the sequence of events in the second film, which ended up scattering many of the major characters. It would be possible to ignore this and set the series back in the early days. Instead, however, they chose to bring the series forward in time, and tell the tales of those who replaced those who replaced the original characters.
But I’ll guess that they decided “The Next Next Generation” was a bit awkward.
Once again, Mamoru Oshii writes or directs many of the episodes and he was also the overall director of the project. He was one of the founding members of the group that created Patlabor — Headgear — and directed the first two Patlabor films.
But everyone remembers him for Ghost in the Shell instead.
In theory, the series is set in the current day — twenty years after the events of Patlabor 2. In keeping with the idea that this is our modern world, we learn that the mecha construction and utility vehicles known as “Labors” have fallen out of fashion and only a few are left.
As a result, most of the Patlabor Divisions were shut down, leaving only Division 2 and their two, overaged Ingram mecha.
This means that the two teams have a grueling work rotation which gives them little time off. Not only do they have their regularly assigned duty time, but they also have many hours when they have to be on call at the station.
Not that anyone ever needs their services.
It would be tempting to see this as a more comic version of the series, similar, perhaps, to the series’ earliest stories in The Early Days OVA. And it is true that a lot of the series is played rather broadly, particularly an episode dealing with an official inspection of the station.
A lot of the drama revolves around their budgetary woes, and the endless difficulties of keeping their aging machines working (which was always an issue in the original, but it has been exaggerated a bit like everything else in the new show), not to mention the behind the scenes politicking, as senior police officers try to create excuses for shutting them down.
However, interspersed with these episodes are a few which develop the main characters, where the girl pilot seeks out the help of a videogame master to improve her skills, the Russian girl faces off against her old mentor, and the Captain decides to help an old girlfriend (or should I say “drinking buddy?” It‘s never quite clear).
This is very much like the mix of episodes in the Television show and The Early Years OVA and the tone is on the whole similar, if perhaps more broadly humorous.
The main location — a big, industrial-type building on a piece of reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay — looks exactly like the building Division Two worked out of in the original. However, I was a little amused when I realized that this was the same location Oshii used for the fantasy sequence in 28 ½ where the big robot blasts off into the sky — and that the same old military scout car which appeared in that film is now being used by Division Two.
Perhaps it was Oshii’s experiences with creating a life-sized giant robot capable of limited movement that encouraged him to build full sized Labors for the series. Yes, CGI gets used when we see them in action, but we actually get to see them in their workshop, being loaded onto the carrier trucks, and watch the cast interacting with a real robot.
But the curious thing is that, while we see them just standing there whenever the story is set inside the Division Headquarters, we rarely see them in action: in the first episode, they battle a runaway Labor (which is over almost before it begins); in another episode, they break up a standoff by a group of radicals holding prisoners; there is an episode where we see them struggling with controlling their Labors after a critical part breaks down which ends with one of the robots firing a salute with the robot‘s giant revolver; they fight a military robot even though they are seriously outmatched; and in another, which features a giant sea monster, the Ingrams are loaded and unloaded over and over again as the threat appears and disappears.
And that’s about it.
Now the series was always more or less realistic, once you accepted giant police robots with outsized revolvers. The Next Generation has two somewhat more fantastic stories, both involving giant monsters although they are both, curiously enough, tied to earlier stories in the series. I do have to wonder from the descriptions I’ve found of those two episodes (it has been far too long since I saw them to remember them at all!) whether current series has exaggerated them beyond recognition. To be fair, though, the wild moment when we see a giant Kaiju emerge from the sea and attack the harbor turns out to be a television ad!
In fact, many of the episodes of this new series either adapt or serve as sequels to the original episodes.
The new series ends on a much darker note, with a final episode which is the lead in for a full-length movie written and directed by Mamoru Oshii, one with ties to the tangled political story of the second Patlabor movie. Curiously, despite the high regard the fans have for his Patlabor movies (particularly the second one), this movie remains essentially unseen here in the West.
Which reminds me that I really need to catch up with it one of these days.
Perhaps when you stack all this up and take a very cynical look at this series, it becomes obvious that it is more of an exaggeration of the original than a copy or even a sequel. This becomes even more obvious when you consider some of Oshii’s artistic choices:
Which brings us right back to the beginning.
When his characters have intense moments, or something dramatic happens, Oshii throws extravagant images at us, which I would describe as looking like the extreme reaction panels in a Japanese manga — only in a live action, 2-D image in a 3-D world sort of way.
While it is used sparingly, it’s hard to miss the fact that this is an outgrowth of the animation technology he created all the way back in his movie Avalon.
This only serves to emphasize the somewhat unreal quality of the entire show: despite its attempts to anchor itself in the real world, many of the episodes are far too absurd and have their share of silly elements which work our suspension of disbelief over with a pair of brass knuckles.
Oshii went on to use his new bag of digital effects even more dramatically in the serial he created for Toonami — Sandworm and Me — and I suspect he will play with it further in future projects. As often happens with new technology, I suspect his desire to play with his new toys might have a lot to do with his take on The Next Generation.
Or perhaps this series and Sandworm and Me reflect a sudden desire to do absurd — and absurdist humor — even in a project which has its serious moments?
Who knows?
Still, the end result is a likeable take on a familiar series, with a personable cast (who look very familiar!), great robot effects, and a varied and well-written collection of episodes.
It seems a shame that it is almost impossible to find here. But you never know.
Someone will probably pick it up sooner or later…
rivets on the poster 