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Patlabor II is grey, depressing, and a lot like riding a slow moving, flat rollercoaster in a rainstorm. You don’t go anywhere and you’ve had a net value of negative fun by the end. I’d compare it to death by asphyxiation except I’m pretty sure that’s more colorful than this film was. I don’t think Patlabor II was bad, but I fucking hate it just the same.
Hmm, I see. I'll be honest, I'm not in the best frame of mind at the moment to be writing right now and it's been a long ass time since I saw the second film in its entirety so of course it'll be hard for me to garner a frame of reference on things. However what I will say is that you're not entirely wrong, it’s a film about moving on for both the characters in the Patlabor universe itself as well as the creators themselves and the fans alike. However I felt as if it was the correct way of going about things. At the end of the day these characters aren't yours, they have their own lives of sorts to live. No matter how much you want to ship these characters with whomever, that's not your call. The TV series, the OVA's and the films are just a blip in their lives, a chapter that enviably had to be closed.
Patlabor 1 was released during the
Bubble Economy which was a time in between 1986 and 1991 in Japan wherein which the economy was greatly inflated, with the stock market prices and the price of land and such exaggerated as precedence was placed on stock investment rather than an increase in capitol and productivity. Obviously with that came the inevitable bursts which lead to a time which was known as the ‘
lost decade’, a 10 year stretch of setbacks for Japan which it’s still affected by to this day. I think the optimism for Japan could be seen in the first film, while the second film is practically Oshii himself 'destroying' Tokyo. It was a bleak time, one where Japan had lost its vision and direction. There was some visible resentment from creators in the industry like
Oshii and
Miyazaki in regards to how Japan was bulldozing over everything during this time. I think this could be seen in a lot of Ghibli films of that era and why those films focused on such events is clear when you look at where Japan was at that time. All of this was clearly visible in the first film, from the way everyone is depicted to the main bad guy himself,
Hoba as he shows his anger towards Japan for depending too heavily on technology and its dependence to innovate on technology.
In fact the Bubble Economy itself could be held accountable for why so many cult series and films like Oshii's own
Angels Egg were released during that era, because a lot more people had disposable income to spend on tapes and such and why after the burst this declined as people become more conscious of their spending and funding.
A lot of it is Oshii visibly punishing the Japanese government for sending people to the ‘battlefield’ of sorts unequipped, while they tried to sort out their own problems and contradictions. This can be seen at the start of the second film for example, where the main villain, Tsuge refuses to open fire while his subordinates killed, waiting for a response from HQ. A person working on the key animation for the film at the time told Oshii "in a situation like that, of course you fire." And Oshii himself remarked that it’s obvious that you’d fire in this scenario, but that the point was to depict
The Japan Self-Defense Forces at that time and its mind set and how they didn’t consider things like Peacekeeping operations as a militaristic matter. Also the fact that he was shown in the cockpit of a Labor, with monitors surrounding him, feeding him secondary information was deliberate in showing how it’s hard to truly feel as if your life is in danger when you’re surrounded by such technology and how that may skew his perception.
Oshii himself went on to talk about how he felt that the world lacked vision during this time, not just Japan but both Europe and America. Everyone post war marched onwards toward the dream to build that nuclear family, to earn money, to build a house and eat nice food without optimism or vision and without hesitation. I guess that reminded Oshii a bit of himself, and he didn’t like what he saw. After the burst, everything collapsed, and everybody was trying hard to recoup that past, and recap without trying to build a whole new vision. The character
Arakawa in the second film says himself, the issue isn’t about whether or not we start a war, because it’s already started, but how we end it is the main issue, if we ever do end it because only then can we move on and build a new vision. When it comes to war, the winner loses. Not only does the military become overconfident as it expands, but the people also gain a groundless confidence. It can be corrupting. This is a part of his message here.
Arakawa states during a monologue, “
Our peace comes from ignoring the misery of the world.” While he later states, “Perhaps someday we'll realize that peace is more than just the absence of war.”
Oshii has gone on record saying that he was a lot more worn-out when he made
Patlabor 2, in fact at first he didn’t want to make it. At the time he wanted to move to Izu with his dog and so he wanted to make some money, but he also had a lot of political ideas in his head that he wanted to tackle at that time. He wanted to do a story on Post-war Japan and what kind of place it had become, just once more, and this time properly.
Living inside of Tokyo for around 40 years at the point, I feel that
Oshii felt as if Tokyo had become an uninteresting place, one that he wanted to destroy. It’s why he stated that he felt frustrated when watching films like
Akira, as it destroys Tokyo effortlessly. When you portray a city as something that lacks memories and feelings, you won't miss it even if it is destroyed, and thus it works to accomplish nothing. Even though he felt fed up with Tokyo, he couldn’t deny that his memories still lay there. I think that this works perfectly with
Patlabor itself, having to destroy something that you love. It brings forth emotions that animation is capable of, but rarely strives to accomplish. I think it’s obvious that it was hard to ‘destroy’ the world of Patlabor, but he felt as if it was necessary, maybe to give it meaning, and maybe to move on and start a new vision.
This may not alleviate your issues with the film, but I hope that it may have shed some light on what Oshii was striving for and the notion that the film was shaped by the period in which it was made in, and the mind-set of Oshii at that time. I apologize for the crude writing.
