If man has the ability to make robots he can wear like a suit, man will do so. If man makes robots, man will use those robots to do crimes. If man uses robots to do crimes, it follows that man must therefore also use robots to fight crimes. That is the basic premise of Patlabor: The Mobile Police (later renamed Patlabor: The Early Years). The robots are called Labors. It’s a mobile patrol, hence: Patlabor.
In our first episode, we meet the ragtag crew that makes up Tokyo Metropolitan Police Special Vehicle Section 2, Division 2: there’s Noa Izumi, a cheerful, high-energy girl who’s always wanted to pilot a Labor. She’s even preemptively named hers Alphonse. There’s her partner (in work… but who knows the future…) Asuma Shinohara, who is the son of the CEO of the main Labor manufacturer, Shinohara Heavy Industries. Asuma doesn’t really want to be doing this. He’s on bad terms with his father for unspecified reasons, which is why he’s here. Still, he grows into the job.
While Noa and Asuma are our putative leads, Patlabor is really an ensemble piece. The members of SV2 include a harried husband (Mikiyasu Shinshi), a really tall guy (Hiromi Yamazaki), and a gun nut (Isao Ohta). There’s a crackerjack professional flown out from America who has the amazing name “Kanuka Clancy.”1 And finally there’s the eccentric captain of SV2: Kiichi Goto, who always looks like he’s half asleep.2 Plus there are the other members of Section Two: mechanics, programmers, and the superbly competent head of the never seen SV1, Captain Shinobu Nagumo.
Patlabor takes place in a type of work environment often romanticized on television but perhaps never encountered in real life: everybody seems completely crazy but actually that’s just how it looks when things function correctly. Everybody has a job to do; everybody gets a chance to stand out. Most of the cast has lives outside of work, even Kanuka. There’s a funny moment where Asuma can’t figure out what to do with himself over a holiday, since he hates his father and doesn’t want to go home, so he keeps visiting people only to find that they are already busy.3 He’s not the only one, though: Goto also keeps coming into work, even though he’s on vacation.
My DVD of Patlabor says “it’s like Law & Order with giant robots.” That’s good ad copy but it doesn’t communicate the tone.4 Patlabor is a comedy. It’s about a perpetually underfunded police force that runs on coffee and the battered idealism of its recruits. In these seven episodes we have Noa taking out some criminals by throwing her own broken robot arm at them, a comic mashup of Godzilla and Frankenstein where a guy actually creates a sea monster and then tries to hide it, an episode about a guy who steals a truck that unbeknownst to him was already stolen by a group of terrorists, and an episode in which Division 2 is elaborately conned so that they can learn the lesson “gun safety is important.” There’s a gag where Asuma tries to surprise Kanuka with a rose and it does not go as planned.
But there’s also a two part story that’s more like a thriller, in which Goto is matched in a battle of wits with an old school friend who has become a terrorist and is staging a military coup. While this episode is often funny, it lightly indicates that Patlabor’s near-future setup5 contains darker elements. Even the funny episodes involve active eco-terrorist organizations. Shinohara Heavy Industries seems a little shady, which is of both political interest and personal interest to our cast.
There’s a kind of story that episodic, lightly serialized storytelling seems ideally situated to tell. It is about what it is like to be an idealistic person who signs up to be a part of what you see as a larger mission to serve society. And you do serve society. You do help people. You do work with people every day who are idealistic and brave. But every once in a while, you bump up against something, you hit a point of obstruction, you uncover an oddity, and it makes you wonder. Then you go back to the daily grind, because, well… what else do you do? Quit your job? Become a terrorist yourself? Then what are you gonna tell your wife?
Patlabor is not Neon Genesis Evangelion, by which I mean, nobody in this OVA is secretly trying to end the world.6 It’s not The X-Files: the government here is not straight-up evil. The suggestion is more that greed, unspectacular corruption, and terror of responsibility are the vices that circulate in the higher positions of leadership—particularly this last quality. (Politicians who value image management above ensuring public safety pop up even in lighthearted episodes.) At the bottom of the chain of command, you have SV2. These are the people who actually have to bear the responsibility of whatever happens.
In the two-part episode in which Goto and Shinobu thwart the attempted coup, both captains display great courage. They are both threatened with arrest from politicians who would rather roll over than fight for the country. Afterward, they’re back at work. They know and cannot unknow that the politicians above them were more concerned with saving themselves than saving the country.7 Without itself being a cynical work, Patlabor creates a cynical world. The younger members of the cast are idealistic in a pure, straightforward way. The captains of Section Two, particularly Goto, have learned how to be idealistic and crafty at the same time.
At the same time, Patlabor is not an ode to a cop who gets the job done no matter how dirty because those suits upstairs don’t understand how tough it is on these streets. The duty of a police officer, we are told, is to minimize threat to human life, and an entire episode is dedicated to taking that seriously.8 After Ohto shoots his gun in a hostage situation out of impatience, causing no loss of life but (since it’s a robot-sized gun) plenty of property damage, SV2 is sent to retrain. Goto and the mechanics collaborate to create an eerie ghost story about an officer who accidentally shoots a civilian in a training exercise. Since we just saw an encounter with a real no-fooling sea monster, that there might be real ghosts in Patlabor feels possible.
The lesson Goto wants the members of SV2 to learn is simple: don’t fire a gun simply because you want to and it makes things easier. A gun is a deadly weapon and should ideally never be used at all. You need to understand and respect the weight of that responsibility, because when somebody dies, it leaves a hole in the world. You may live in a world in which people constantly dodge responsibility and get away with shady dealings. But you’re still the only person responsible for what happens when you fire the gun. That’s what it means to be a public servant.
This took longer than I expected for what I would love to say was a good reason… but it was mostly because I initially watched these hanging out with Boswell and Buster and every time I tried to review or rewatch an episode I got too sad about Buster’s death.
Patlabor was developed by a group called Headgear, which seems like something Oshii and his friends created. (I am going off of this link which I found through Wikipedia.) Because I haven’t watched the second Patlabor movie yet I avoided reading too much background material on the franchise. In any case, because of this joint creation, there are at least two separate Patlabor continuities. One starts with this OVA and goes through the two movies. The other starts with a TV show.
After the first episode, which features a cool red spider Labor, there’s not a lot of robot design variation. I was kind of disappointed. However, the first movie will fix this omission. More spiders! So many more!
On that note, and this also comes up in the movies, the Labors are interestingly “low tech,” by which I mean they are mostly machines, not computers. But we can put a pin in that until we do the movies, which seem like they’re explicitly about this shift. (I watched the beginning of Patlabor 2 but haven’t finished it yet.)
There was a time in my life when this shot would have been my profile pic for everything. But now I have a job and… wait, I don’t have a job.
Patlabor came out the same year as Gunbuster, albeit six months earlier. Since Oshii pioneered the idea of the OVA (see Dallos), it’s funny to me that Gunbuster is still more ambitious about the kind of story it wants to use the OVA format to tell. It could only be an OVA series, whereas Patlabor could easily be a TV show. Gunbuster is also about a hundred percent hornier in ways that are embarrassing.9 You win some, you lose some.…
In Patlabor the NYPD is basically treated like its own branch of the US armed forces. Is this… actually true…?
There’s this moment in the second episode when this creepy old woman stares right into the camera for what feels like a long time, and it was a moment so straight out of a Satoshi Kon movie that I shot right to the credits on Anime News Network to see if he worked on this. (No.)
but like… you see it, right There are some really gorgeous moments in the OVA, but one that really stood out to me was a scene of Asuma looking over an overpass as the headlights of cars streak by under him.
Similarly, the moment the JSDF Labor that was under wraps gets up… awesome. Woohoo!! Woohoo!!!!! I mean uh it’s bad. Coup bad. (Woooo…………hoo……………)
I love Americans in anime… we’re always super competent, very beautiful, sort of obnoxious, and prone to violence but in a very controlled way. Also Kanuka carries a gun with her everywhere, which is probably illegal?
Very relatable. Here, he probably is half asleep and thus somehow looks more awake:
We’ve all been there:
My experience with Law & Order is mostly “being in the same room as somebody who is watching it” but my secondhand impression that it’s like… rape murder murder murder rape murder cutting deals with the DA rape murder ain’t no justice murder murder dundun sound.
Now technically near-past.
We get a little closer to that in the first movie, but it’s still more of a plan you can kind of imagine an actual terrorist developing. I haven’t been able to watch Patlabor 2 outside of the opening six minutes or so.
Is there a suggestion the politicians who contact Shinobu were involved, and that was why they happened to be out of town? I got that the first time I watched it but not the second.
I watched the episode about gun safety during what was probably the worst possible news cycle to watch a feelgood story about police learning not to shoot guns lightly.
Like you’ve never been so swept up in the heat of battle that you ripped open your shirt, under which, despite your 30HH bra size, you were not wearing anything.