#266: Le Portrait de Petit Cossette (2004)

Studio: Daume

Director: Akiyuki Simbo

Screenplay: Mayori Sekijima

Voice Cast: Marina Inoue as Cossette d'Auvergne; Mitsuki Saiga as Eiri Kurahashi; Kumiko Yokote as Hatsumi Mataki; Megumi Toyoguchi as Shouko Mataki; Rei Igarashi as Zenshinni of Shakado; Ikumi Fujiwara as Michiru Yajiri; Isao Yamagishi as Hiroshi Hakuta; Junpei Morita as Yukata Enokido; Mamiko Noto as Yuu Saiga; Masashi Ebara as Marchello Orlando; Shinnosuke Furumoto as Michio Hisamoto; Susumu Chiba as Naoki Katou; Yukari Tamura as Kaori Nishimoto

Viewed in Japanese in English Subtitles

 

Eiri Kurahashi is the lead of a one-off horror story about items, including a painting, of the daughter of a French family which is imprinted with her soul, a beautiful young woman named Cossette who he encounters first in his job at an antique store with a Venetian wine glass that starts to bring forth visions of her. Cossette was murdered by an Italian painter who became obsessed with her beauty, following the idea of how her soul or a form of her, especially after her traumatic death, has left her ghost in various items acquired and brought to Japan centuries later. This is a project, notably, from Akiyuki Simbo, is still early in his career, in context that he had already directed a lot of straight-to-video content and television series, but before he made a certain set of projects that caught on in a huge way. Undoubtedly, when work like Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011) was becoming insanely popular, people would have not ignored him, and you see here already with Le Portrait.... the style and heightened melodrama that he would bring to that production. Other titles of this period, even when of different genres, like the surreal school comedy Paniponi Dash! (2005), showed his obsession with the style of his work, but this shows him bringing forth this surrealism with the horror genre.

The story, even if split into three under forty minute episodes, works entirely in the structure of a theatrical film, where after a blood pact Kurahashi takes the poisoned soul of the painter into himself, willing to become the sacrificial guinea pig to bleed and purge each of the cursed items connected to her death. This does have a melodramatic side more common, in how it is depicted, in anime such as how he transforms into a monster when the painter's form takes over, and how attempting to purge the curse items, including the attempt by one of the women surrounding him trying to help him, leads to magical noise and energy blasts. It is also however, in premise, a story you find in gothic literature and cinema, of becoming obsessed and falling in love with someone who is beyond the grave, abstract, an obsession with this love which robs him of his connection to reality. It is a timeless tale, retold here, as a quartet of women in his ordinary life, including one who is smitten for him, are trying to help someone who has fallen in love with a ghost and the memories he inherits of her.

This is over-the-top, where someone will literally paint in their own blood for the dramatic moment, but returning to this production, even as a pure style piece this feels like a nice production for horror anime in terms of unrestrained imagination and mood. As someone who gets a kick out of the trope in anime of figure entering phantastical worlds between realities, usually an eighties and nineties trope, this is full of such scenes, a feast of the eyes even if the strains of early computer effects are occasionally seen. Giant dolls, masses of sentient floating eyes, and a place where the living and dead can co-exist, built in the image of Cossette, which is both of a Gothic landmass, with so many hundreds of lit candles inside, and has flesh walls with pieces falling off. It is a cavalcade of stylistic tropes brought together with studio Daume, who produced their own work as well as in-between animation, only to sadly not do much into the 2010s onwards. As an original premise, barring a manga tie-in between episodes, this is the kind of production which has to be praised for its attempt at creativity, including moments in the first episode bleeding time and place to depict Kurahashi's disconnect from reality that create a sense of ill-ease.

Returning to this, even with music which evokes the use of the band Kalafina for Madoka, I see a lot of the gothic and horror aesthetic that seeped into that production, a taste for the aesthetical in beauty matched with deeply macabre storytelling. In the end, adding to the curiosity and worth of this production as its own story, Le Portrait... depict torture and has sever blood loss, but is not a work of gristly death but tragedy. This is a fascinating turn as the story progresses, becoming a psychodrama about our male lead trying to deal with this love beyond his mortal reality he is embroiled in, and how it ultimately becomes about the difference between a person and their image, literally an antagonist by the end of this. It is, for its over-the-top tone, pure romantic horror drama and really stands out.

#263: Pet Shop of Horrors (1999)

 

Studio: Madhouse

Director: Toshio Hirata

Screenplay: Yasuhiro Imagawa

Based on the manga by Matsuri Akino

Voice Cast: Masaya Onosaka as Leon Orcot; Toshihiko Seki as Count D; Hiroshi Yanaka as Mr. Hayward; Kouji Tsujitani as Robin Hendrix; Miho Yamada as Q-Chan; Miki Itō as Louise; Mitsuaki Madono as Roger Stanford; Mitsuru Miyamoto as Kelly Vincent; Narumi Hidaka as Nancy; Ryūzaburō Ōtomo as the Kirin; Satsuki Yukino as Jill; Sayuri Yoshida as Alice; Sho Hayami as Jason Grey

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

In Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984), the younger buyer of a Mogwai is given a set of rules of how to take care of it, including the rule to not feed it after midnight, and if it is not followed then the seller is not accountable of the misery the results lead to. It is a perfect Western comparison to Pet Shop of Horrors, a four part anime mini-series adapted from a manga by Matsuri Akino, which follows the same idea but as morality tales.

Mortality tales are a vast part of human storytelling, and it finds itself fitting within the horror/supernatural genre very well regardless of nationality and medium. The old phrase “be careful for what you wish for” applies to many horror tales, especially with ones like Pet Shop of Horrors and its characters who may be far from innocent in the first place. Housed in Chinatown in Los Angeles is a pet store owned by the mysterious Count D, a soft spoken man with a sweet tooth and an elegant demeanour, who sells “dreams” to his customers as well as regular pets. The ‘dreams’ however bizarre creatures that require a strict contract of three rules to be signed to be allowed to own them, that cannot be broken by the client at any point. If the rules are broken, the pet store is blameless for what happens and something exceptionally gristly is bound to happen. Officer Orcot, a homicide detective, believes D is clearly behind the deaths after buying these pets, but the true nature of the customers is far more morally grey than one would immediately presume. Bear in mind that this mini-series is only four episodes long only, single stories that do not get deeper in terms of connecting plot as the manga may do.

Case in point is episode one, which sets up D as an unnatural figure who sells a grieving couple a rabbit which looks exactly as their recently passed daughter. Like many of these types of stories, inevitably, the rules will be broken, here to not feed her anything but vegetables and water, least you would get the least expected horror story with a happy conclusion. They are, however, morality tales about when people slip and make mistakes, or when their worst tendencies slip through and the unfortunate realities are revealed, such as the real Alice dying of a drug overdose and the complicity of the parents. Like some of the horror tales I have seen in anime and in manga, it is full of elaborate explanations after the events to explain them and the morals of the tales, which could be seen as off-putting for being over explanatory, but in mind to its tone as a morality tale, this makes sense. It became quite obvious with this work that this over-elaborate explaining, all from Count D himself and his philosophising, is the main meat of many of these tales alongside the gruesome conclusions involving the mystical creatures in this mini-series something in mind to how the first episode ends with a disturbing use of rabbits and how these ones reproduce.

Count D effectively becomes a one-man Greek Chorus and Crypt Keeper as well as the one who gives them the object (i.e. the pet) that causes the events to happen. The four episodes play off the conflicts of human emotions and their follies, the old chestnuts that are still great themes to tackle, but adds the additional fact that, like in many Japanese stories, the person involved may have willingly let themselves be damned. Why Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998) became such a legendary horror film as it has was probably both its premise of the cursed videotape, but also its theme of the complicity of people, in how the tape came to existent and that a victim, anyone of us viewers in reality too, could let this happen to us even if we knew going in that viewing the tape could kill us after seven day. Pet Shop of Horrors plays with this concept nicely in such short a space of time. Episode two is about a mermaid which looks like the recently deceased fiancée of a man which he becomes obsessed with, whilst episode three is more bittersweet, its lead of an actor trapped by the shadow of his first success, as a beautiful lead in a sci-fi movie, less a tale of a man with sin but tragically a man giving up which involves the tale of Medusa of Greek legend.

There is levity here. Orcot is out of his depth with a man as eloquent and mysterious as Count D, and despite all the strange goings-on never questions why the mysterious pet seller has a strange magical creature, a cute mouse-bat critter, flying around him that would immediately break reality. Count D, even if it means providing the mayor with a cute penguin as a pet, also has powerful connections despite the fact, for all his demonic side, his moral code is more letting people suffer their own failings and merely providing the tools for them. It is also really apparent that there is a streak of platonic romance between the men hinted at, least a flirtation toyed with in the premise of two very different types of masculine beauty, the almost androgynous D against a rough and hard-headed cop. Even if not an ounce of romance was ever hinted at in Matsuri Akino's source manga, it feels subtextually here in their combative chemistry. It is still rich in atmosphere, with its occult leanings and also the score by Kazuhisa Yamaguchi, which is of its era but is a sumptuous mix of drum and bass with jazz. Tragically, he did not continue at all in the anime industry where his style of music would have been great for many works in this genre we would be getting in the Millennium.

If there is an issue with the mini-series in production, it is that, despite being hand drawn animation before the use of computers after the Millennium that became standard in anime production, it is not the best it could have been even for television. Despite the fact this is a Madhouse production, who are kings of great productions like Millennium Actress (2001), this feels like it could have had more flair in appearance than the snippets we do get; even for television, their full series Boogiepop Phantom (2000), whilst working with a budget, was brimming in far more style. The first episode, which I read in some form in a sample catalogue of manga, is naturally going to be superior in most exceptions on page, but the tale could have done with a bit more visual punch to add to the strength of the stories.

Episode four, the last, is the most idiosyncratic, in how it deals with the kirin, a mythological animal in East Asia of great reverence, almost-deities taken from Chinese mythology only owned by figures of great benevolent people and leaders. Here, there is the touch that, in this world, it suggests in a flashback in World War II Harry S. Truman, the 33rd president of the United States, had a kirin, and here the tale is about a young congress man whose male assistant is the one really pulling the strings. This assistant wants to push him to become the great young President in the White House, despite the fact his wife Nancy wants a simpler life and he himself is falling in love with her, and even for a short tale, it stands out with its conclusion for these one tale characters, from how this issue is resolved in its own bittersweet way, a great example of how these moral tales can use horror to their advantage. The obvious disappointment is that this is only four episodes long. The manga, starting in 1995, lasted until 1998, followed by Shin Petshop of Horrors which started in 2005, during the boom of TokyoPop, the American manga distributor who licensed the series, and ended in 2012, which by that time was when the bubble for TokyoPop had long burst from their 2008 restructuring onwards, leaving a huge amount of stories (and the growing back-story of who D is and how Leon Orcot becomes closer to him) on the table. That does not even factor in that the original author returned to the world further times with Pet Shop of Horrors: Passage-Hen (2013-2017) and in 2018 with Pet Shop of Horrors: Ark Adrift. It is a shame, but by itself as a one-shot, Pet Shop of Horrors is a solid ninety minute DVD not allowed to fully form into something special. Considering this was a television broadcast rather than a straight-to-video production as I had presumed it to be makes this lack of a full thirteen episode series, let alone longer, stranger with hindsight and bittersweet as you see here four good episodes for a one-shot which would have made a great beginning to a longer production.

#258: Pani Poni Dash! (2005)

 

Studio: Shaft

Director: Shin Oonuma (Series Director); Akiyuki Shinbo (Director)

Screenplay: Kenichi Kanemaki

Based on the manga by Hekiru Hikawa

Voice Cast: Chiwa Saito as Rebecca "Becky" Miyamoto; Ai Nonaka as Ichijō-san; Fumiko Orikasa as Himeko Katagiri; Kana Ueda as Kurumi Momose; Kayo Sakata as Sayaka "Rokugo" Suzuki; Satsuki Yukino as Rei Tachibana; Yui Horie as Miyako Uehara

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

Pani Poni Dash was a title I saw very early into my interest into anime in the 2000s – a strange period with hindsight, now ADV Films, who distributed this, no longer exist, and for some inexplicable reason we once bought anime in three to four episodes per disc as separate releases for one television series, this one such case in the day, without questioning the cost of this. Available together through the likes of Crunchyroll in the streaming era, one of the biggest reasons I was not a fan of this in the day was that I felt it was “too weird” back then and too random. Neither helping is that, back then, it felt like the version of Azumanga Daioh (2002) you had back home, which is mean to both shows, completely missing the point of both series. Daioh is very different to this, though one of the biggest flaws with this series still, whilst I have grow to appreciate it considerably, is that if this had followed the high school clichés more, I think this would have been a great show rather than a funny one, which starts to deviate too much with its indulgences than use them to parody that genre.

Starting with a Planet of the Apes parody, one of the many parodies Western and Japanese you will see, we are introduced to Rebecca Miyamoto, a Japanese-American prodigy who is able to become a high school teacher at eleven years old, teaching Class 1C at Peach Moon Academy. There are arguably too many characters, including the other classes, but to give you the idea of who we have in Class 1C in their anime versions there is: Himeko Katagiri, a hyper-active but lovable doofus whose cowlick is literally the source of her energy as reveal early on; Ichijō, managing to top the weirdness scale as a strange figure able to summon rain to willingly poisoning classmates, even able to see the aliens spying on Rebecca from orbit; Miyako Uehara, somewhat the geeky stereotype there to be annoyed and have a shiny forehead; Rei Tachibana, the most mature if capable of being vindictive, the glue to keep everyone together; Sayaka Suzuki (No. 6), who does suffer from a lack of characterization if with a lovable charm; and Kurumi Momose, where the joke is that she is the bland and normal one, giving her an existential crisis, as well as introducing a legitimately funny running gag that, as a result, she is the one who reacts to the increasingly insane events as most of us would, with bafflement, until the point she begins to accept the screwed up logic of the world. Then there is Mesousa, probably the most depressed rabbit in all of media, even over the insanely twisted humour of Andy Riley’s The Book of Bunny Suicides (2003) comic, in terms of the most depressed, put upon and poorest bugger of the species in media, whose depression and lack of fingers makes him hapless and lovable. Even before the cat in the school vending machine, who claims to be literal God, starts to torment him, Mesousa is the parody of cute animal sidekicks in dire need of a hug if Kurumi Momose was not already hanging out with him in the school rabbit hutch depressed she was call bland again. The aliens, as mentioned, are a Greek chorus, if accidentally breaking the rule to not interfere with the earthlings a few times, studying Rebecca as a subject and add their own amusement as a group too.

The show to its credit does have a good gag for everyone, but there are a lot of characters beyond this. Some of parodies of anime and manga, such as Behoimi, the magical girl who has no actual powers, whilst others include a very clumsy girl, an extravagant girl who brings exotic animals to class, the war between a film club and drama club pair of girls where they do not know their real identities and start to bond, and a few male characters, including the elderly teacher which a foot in the morbid and occult. A personal favorite are two other girls who are a double act, a shorter raven haired girl named Otome Akiyama who clearly has a friendship with the other girl, the considerably taller Suzune Shiratori who does have an affection for her, even if it means tormenting Otome and trying to constantly use the pressure point on her head to keep her permanently short. To say the show has a lot within it to accept is to realize by episode three, when the cowlick Himeko has is shown as not only sentient but has unnatural abilities, you also get a random Batman Returns (1992) Cat Woman parody, and some twisted jokes like the student ending the episode dead behind class 1C’s blackboard when trying to spy on them. A camping episode early on reveals kappa, the mythological creatures of Japan’s folklore, are experimenting in their own rocket space project in the deepest Japanese woods. By episode thirteen of twenty six episodes, the first of a few robot parodies appears, and by episode ten earlier, Behoimi and a newly introduced character, a maid named Media who knows her from their mysterious military pass, are disarming remote bombs around the school whilst everyone goes through their school vacation projects. It is that kind of show.

One of the hugest things about this show, and is one of its best virtues, is the production value, which is not a surprise when this is a studio Shaft production where, whilst he is not the series director, the director underneath Shin Oonuma is Akiyuki Shinbo. Akiyuki Shinbo, and Shaft in general, emphasize a distinct art style and willingness to experiment, such as in Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011), and this is not different, a parody anime where the production team were just allowed to indulge in their most experimental side. The premise is blown up countless time and the fourth wall is constantly mocked, with scenes shown to be on a stage being directed by a film crew. Various visual gags transpire, such as “Punishment Pinball” in episode 7, or RPG game parodies, which change the aesthetic considerably, as there is the use of real images especially for food as collage. Even how to get around painstaking depicting the whole class, replicating the same character models over and over, is stylized and has moments when the production switch this up with figures from fashion magazines with disturbing open smiles. Weird sight gags, parodies or plain non- sequitur fill the screen, and you will see R. Lee Ermey in his Full Metal Jacket (1987) appearance as a screenshot at random times for no reason, like how the show starts to get more invested into parodying anime and manga the more episodes pass. It is not obvious things either like a Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), but ones which are explicitly for the Japanese viewership or those who get the reference, such as changing the characters’ designs to briefly match Shigeru Mizuki's GeGeGe no Kitarō, or explicitly referring to the work in character design of Riyoko Ikeda. Sadly they only start to appear near the end of the series, but some fo the funniest, because you do not need to get the references to appreciate the melodramatic clichés it is touching on, are all the elaborate excuses Himeko has for being late to class, most of which are shoujo manga parodies. Even the music is eclectic, with even yodeling bursting through the soundtrack at one point, and deserves credit for its unpredictability.

The randomness does need to be accepted – like the entire tangent about a lost Holed Pasta Civilization which learnt the ability to make them from aliens, at least to how Himeko views them, or how the aliens, when not causing problems or being noticed even by Ichijō’s todder sister through their viewing telescope, eventually start to look like the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Honestly the biggest issue with Pani Poni Dash is eventually the school setting is just a location by the final episodes, feeling like it is bored with the set-up and more concerned with the world being threatened by an asteroid, an Edo period chambara parody, or Himeko being possessed by a sentient space mushroom. The space mushroom is so strange it is funny, but honestly, the show starts to get too indulgent and baggy by its last episodes, when consistency would have been found more if this content was forced onto high school anime clichés fully.

The Azumanga Daioh comparison is apt even if entirely different comedies, where Daioh took the time frame of school events, from sports day to the cultural festival, and had moments of legitimately strangeness too to contrast its jokes about things real teenagers would go through with school. Pani Poni Dash could have been the weirder parody, where an episode mentioned early on, disarming bombs juxtaposed with the school vacation projects being talked of in class, fully shows when this duality works perfectly. The show is funny, visually creative, and I cannot have anything but admiration for all the female voice actors here; comedies, especially ones this idiosyncratic, where there is all the gags and vocal changes, even the idiosyncrasies of the casts’ like Sayaka Suzuki calling everything the “most ---- of the year”, provide Herculean vocal stretching to test anyone, and I admire the dexterity of all the cast for ridiculous some of the scenes and moments get. The reason as mentioned I was not a fan of this in the day was because this gets weird for the sake of it, to the point it seems like the concept of being a high school anime parody is a pretense. With time having past, how weird the series is was not an issue in the slightest, even when I am lost, but that it could have tried to force itself more onto its high school story premise becomes the lost opportunity. There is a cultural festival episode, but not for example a sports day one, and that feels like a lot of lost moments could have been done with all the idiosyncratic characters and reoccurring gags this show does have, leading to funnier moments.

Pani returned, abruptly in a 2009 OVA, effectively a one-off new episode also by Shaft, which was clearly used to advertise the manga, still going in from 2000 to 2011. It is obscure to the point I had no idea of its existence until I had returned to the original series, not included with the original work in streaming or a physical release in the West. Even the opening credits are the same, and it feels like a run back in nice comfortable shoes for the voice cast and the production team to a work they liked. Only some tame fan service, mild titillation, suggest anything remotely different, alongside the questionable decision to dress Rebecca, in an antagonist's role, in a tweens' size Germanic black uniform, which we will just ignore as a poor choice. It would have actually been a good episode in the source series, actually emphasizing the better virtue of having normal school activities distorted in an absurd touch, here how Rebecca's class and a couple others have failed exams but have a chance to avoid retest if they can beat the school tradition of "Kick the Can". This is an all day event where they have in a school day until 5pm, without all of them being caught by their persuaders, to kick the aforementioned soda can. It definitely has jokes to remind you this is Pani Poni Dash, such as the aliens returning with a parody of scenes of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, represented in close parody caricature, from Michael Mann's Heat (1995), but barring some of the more overt light eroticism, this has a lot more good jokes, such as Media the maid and the magical girl, on the pursuers'' side, wishing to protect the can by planting M18 landmines and military defense weaponry around the school. It is the last piece to a work which, baring an internet radio show and spin-off manga on specific characters, has a lot I admired but was in the animated version a show which is flawed entirely because the premise, whilst mad as a box of frogs in tone, has so much you can work with that it is actually not as interesting to be as unpredictable as it was, the punch lines missed of trying to pretend to be a cohesive high school comedy with this motley crew of lovable school girls and miscreants tantalizing in where it could have gone with that dynamic schism.

#242: Pop Team Epic Season 2 (2022)

 

Studio: Space Neko Company

Director: Jun Aoki

Screenplay: Jun Aoki

Based on the manga by Bkub Okawa

Voice Cast:

Aki Toyosaki, Asami Sanada, Aya Hirano, Fumihiko Tachiki, Hiroya Ishimaru, Ikue Ōtani, Junko Minagawa, Junya Enoki, Kazuhiko Inoue, Kenyuu Horiuchi, Kōichi Yamadera, Kumiko Watanabe, Mayumi Iizuka, Megumi Han, Megumi Ogata, Nobuhiko Okamoto, Nobuyuki Hiyama, Romi Park, Takaya Kuroda, Tasuku Hatanaka and Toshiyuki Toyonaga as Popuko

Akio Ohtsuka, Atsushi Abe, Hekiru Shiina, Hidenari Ugaki, Inuko Inuyama, Kōichi Yamadera, Kumiko Nishihara, Kyoko Hikami, Mariya Ise, Minako Kotobuki, Minori Chihara, Mugihito, Rie Kugimiya, Ryo Horikawa, Shintarō Asanuma, Toshiki Masuda, Toshiyuki Morikawa, Yū Mizushima, Yuki Kaida, Yūko Miyamura and Yūma Uchida as Pipimi

Shōta Aoi as Shouta Aoi, Shunsuke Itakura as Popuko (Bob Epic Team), Toru Adachi as Pipimi (Bob Epic Team)

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

Why don't we settle this peacefully with some violence?

It was four years, notwithstanding a TV special, before the pair of Popuko and Pipimi returned for a second series. Less anime schoolgirls and more personifications of pure id, their return to television naturally within the first minutes of the first episode befuddles the audience by being a live action parody of a tokusatsu show. Starring everyone favorite time travelling pixie of a male idol singer Shōta Aoi, ever since the last season heroics, it is a straight-faced opening credits sequence using up all the budget, and it will return by the final episode with a vengeance. The fact this was set up with TV special back from 2019, and you see how this series, and the franchise in general, has played with expectations from its beginning.

Speaking of that TV special, it deserves its own review, but it does feel like a necessary aspect to cover as it feels like the gateway between seasons, showing what has changed. That special says goodbye to the sprite based video game parodies from pixel artist Makoto Yamashita, and French animator Thibault Tresca. They are missed, and missed for myself is Hoshiiro Girldrop, one of the strongest candidates for the best anime show to only exist through end of episode previews and one opening. It also marks the first glimpses of Square Enix, in a tie-in that would continue with the video game publisher working with the production onwards in season two, and the tokusatsu parody, which was first hinted at within it. It is own weird beast that can be viewed as Pop Team Epic season 1.5, only imagine a forty minute double episode, which is technically two episodes repeated twice, that repeats four times and has a recreation of a scene from First Blood (1982), the first Rambo film.

Those sadly missed for season two are honored by the new season's tone, as by the second episode Pop Team Epic has broken out a super robot parody. Already they are cracking jokes about going over the budget, with co-producers King Record tolerant again of being joked as being the villains, and the nerdiest of anime references comes in with “Obari'd”, openly making a humorous tribute to Masami Obari, who whilst an anime director is legendary as a key animator and robot designer too, someone who was brought in for said parody because he is that capable of doing robot sequences, and does indeed show (even with the character redesigns for the segment) his talent. Pop Team Epic is still a show of obscure references, jokes which does place it in the reference comedy anime which could age greatly into obscurities in the time passing, if one where the sense of being weird for the sake of weird was also a huge part of its attitude. The references are so prominent they even have to beep many out to keeping on the right side of Japanese parody law or standards, and that will always be a factor which, to an outsider, will put them off this franchise.

For those that viewed this like pure catnip to them, season two does carry a swagger, even if the same as before in structure, of a victory tour from the first season succeeding. The Obari robot parody, with one of the first jokes depicted of Popuko and Pipimi resigned in other character design styles (and genders), is very much alongside the live action tokusatsu parody of the first episode the immediate signs of this. Like before, this follows the template of a fifteen or so minute episode repeated with a female voice duo, and then a male one for the repeat episode, voice actors here including some big names, from the Yakuza videogame franchise from Sega to Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) alumni, meaning Shinji (Megumi Ogata) and Asuka (Yūko Miyamura) for those who know that series have a very weird reuninion even next to times in their original franchise. As we will get to, the voice actors for the Japanese dub, even if you do not know their best work, prove a huge virtue for me this time round, but for those who know them, this in itself a big aspect for the series, especially as it leads to the surrealism of voice actors iconic for many for the Yakuza games, playing gruff men in the criminal underworld, playing a schoolgirl being tickled to death by her friend.

Even in terms of the opening credits, with its mind boggling take on multi verses of Popuko and Pipimi, and a head banger of an opening theme (PSYCHO:LOGY by Shota Aoi) which you would expect for a far more serious show, Pop Team Epic is gunning for more elaborate and weirder spectacle. The hugest advantage this series already had, like the most interesting of these referential comedy shows, is that even if you do not get ninety per cent of the references, they linger and can last beyond their popularity in worth for how the non sequiturs and ambition is as much the humour. Case in point, I have no idea what playing PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (2017) is like, a first person shooter game which is entirely centered around multiplayer elimination death matches, baring an inkling of its content and that it was the likely influence  on one episode's main segment. The joke still works however because, alongside all its action beats, the punch line is that Pipimi will punish cheaters with the ruthlessness of a contact assassin.

The humour when it works and I think is truly ambitious is not the parodies, such as the Final Fantasy parody which comes part of a clear licensing agreement with Square Enix; it does lead to the show parodying deep-only released cuts from their video game history, which has to be still admired, and those who get the Final Fantasy parody should enjoy it with mirth. The more ambitious joke in a fantasy parody though comes without needing even the obvious references, and is absolutely ambitious and ridiculous at the same time, being a recreation of an English language education show that diverges into a power metal music video following the exploits of “Shining Shoulders”. Effectively Pipimi‘s heroic knight alter ego whose shoulder armor gleams brighter than the sun and whose feet smell of citrus, it is hilarious even in the one reference to something that went out of pop culture relevant in the four years from the first season, fidget spinners, that joke becoming funnier with less relevance in a mere name drop at the strangest time.

Sadly there are fewer experimental aspects in certain areas, such as the complete lack of stop motion this time round, but thankfully, the segments in this series become more elaborate to compensate, even an ending credit becoming charming when the main theme is joined by a recorder for a one-off remix. A parody of a romantic visual novel (specially a franchise called Tokimeki Memorial), in which a nameless boy enters high school, takes the joke even further in how, for the repeat of the episode, it drastically changes far more than other examples within the series by turning into an otome, a genre of visual novel video games with female protagonists and male love interests, gender swapping the entire segment, changing the faceless lead to a woman, and even changing jokes for the punch line which involves name checking the original manga Bkub Okawa's romantic life. That is not even mentioning the parody of boys-love/yaoi anime, with gender swapped Popuko and Pipimi; already showing a level of closeness throughout the series that manages to be sweet, even as characters meant to be sarcastic and irrelevant, this obviously plays to the idea of boys romance with recreating old jokes in a new content.  Even the cruel joke, early into this season, that the segment is cancelled mid-segment and will never appear again hits perfectly, particularly as they at least take a building with them.

There are a surprising amount of surprises to be had here – one for me is how a French illustrator and animator famous for his work on his Twitter page, Kéké a.k.a. Kévin Gemin, gets to recreate his style of bouncing cute animals in a cartoonish form with more censored hand gestures here one of the end credit animations. There is also the actual endings where, whilst they are choreographed around the same text, the voice actors working together can sometimes go off script; the best of these proves to be the two actresses from Hunter x Hunter (2011-2014), Megumi Han and Mariya Ise, who openly admit they were hired because new material was coming at the time, deliciously cynical without undercutting either property. Voice actors Junya Enoki and Yuuma Uchida in particular for me, for episode 3 part b, manage to out power even actors from Neon Genesis Evangelion, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and Horiuchi Kenryu and Otsuka Akio, voice actors famous from the Metal Gear Solid games, for completely going off script at times including the penis trauma references. You can see the talent in the voice actors on display, more so for me this season with a huge level of the laughter, even in stuff which makes no sense in any context, coming from how the actors say or shout the line out. Even the fact that there is significant more cursing in the English subtitle translation suggests a sudden energy to this series even next to the magic of the first one.

Then there is Kōichi Yamadera and the AC-Bu, who steal the show even next to great competition, the later duo artistic team of Shinsuke Itakura and Toru Adachi the heroes of the franchise from both their Bob Team Epic segments, returning here, and their Hellshake Yano segment from the first series. AC-Bu, an animation team know for working a variety of fields, managed to top that segment by having the entirety of episode 7 being the return of the Hellshake Yano character, all depicted in sketchbooks with incredible illustrations, the duo voicing the still images and moving the sketchbooks, some cut and changed for certain moments. The fact the segment is also nearly in one take, starting with one member in a locked public toilet and returning to it in the end, with the exception of closing remarks of theirs, is in itself exceptional too. Adding to this achievement is how, for the part b segment, the entire story is told by prolific voice actor Kōichi Yamadera, doing every character in a variety of voices. From the Lupin the 3rd franchise to Donald Duck, and too many roles including dubbing Western actors to count here, Yamadera is a veteran, and his performance here is incredible in how one voice actor can produce so many voices as a single person. He makes the best episode even better, and that is not forgotten the virtues of the show before, after, and how the tokusatsu parody returns with a vengeance by the final episode. Almost entirely a live action episode with it very clear, in the production value, those who work on such shows, from the on screen fighting to the costumes to the CGI effects, were brought in and were gun-ho to commit to the joke, it is an incredible way to end a series. Baffling the viewer whilst presenting a climax bringing live action and animation together in a way that makes Marvel Cinematic Universe films seen bog standard in comparison, this is what Pop Team Epic always was, the pretext of for self-referential, sardonic and reference heavy jokes really an excuse to be as ambitious and ridiculous as it can be. The littlest jokes, not just that final episode, like a Bob Team Epic segment where the leads mock an alien for a terrible crop circle from their UFO, made the series better and anything too strange for me was still that, deliciously bizarre. As someone who really felt cold for the first season, even for its virtues, returning to it allowed me to appreciate the show, and by God, they managed to improve and top themselves with the content here.   

#239: Pop Team Epic Season One (2018)

Studio: Kamikaze Douga

Directors: Aoi Umeki and Jun Aoki

Screenplay: Jun Aoki

Based on the manga by Bkub Okawa

Voice Actors for Pipimi and Popuko:

As Pipimi: Akiko Yajima, Akira Ishida, Akira Kamiya, Asami Imai, Atsuko Tanaka, Ayana Taketatsu, Azusa Tadokoro, Banjou Ginga, Bin Shimada, Chisa Yokoyama, Daisuke Namikawa, Haruka Tomatsu, Houchu Ohtsuka, Jouji Nakata as Pipimi, Jun Fukuyama, Kaito Ishikawa, Kaori Fukuhara, Kaori Nazuka, Kenichi Ogata, Kensho Ono, Kikuko Inoue, Koji Yusa, Kotono Mitsuishi, Kousuke Toriumi, Mamiko Noto, Nao Tōyama, Noriko Hidaka, Norio Wakamoto, Rei Sakuma, Satomi Satou, Shigeru Chiba, Sumire Uesaka, Suzuko Mimori, Takehito Koyasu, Yousuke Akimoto, Tomokazu Sugita, Wataru Takagi, Yū Kobayashi, Yui Horie and Yuuki Kaji

As Popuko: Aoi Yūki, Emiri Katō, Eriko Nakamura, Etsuko Kozakura, Hikaru Midorikawa, Hiro Shimono, Hozumi Gōda, Junko Takeuchi, Kana Hanazawa, Kappei Yamaguchi, Mami Koyama, Mariko Kouda, Masashi Ebara, Masaya Onosaka, Mikako Komatsu, Nana Mizuki, Nobuo Tobita, Rikiya Koyama, Ryusei Nakao, Sakiko Tamagawa, Satomi Koorogi, Sho Hayami, Showtaro Morikubo, Sōichiro Hoshi, Sōma Saitō, Sora Tokui, Sumire Morohoshi, Takahiro Sakurai, Tesshō Genda, Tomokazu Seki, Tomoko Kaneda, Toshihiko Seki, Toshio Furukawa, Yōko Hikasa, Yūichi Nakamura, Yuji Mitsuya, Yukari Tamura, Yūki Ono, Yuko Sanpei and Yumiri Hanamori

For Bob Epic Team: Toru Adachi as Pipimi; Shunsuke Itakura as Popuko

For Japon Mignon: Christine Bellier as Pipimi; Fanny Bloc as Popuko

Viewed in Japanese and French with English Subtitles

 

If I am to be truthful, Pop Team Epic is as scattershot as a musket round exploding from a gun, but that comment itself even feels absurd knowing the creators of this made the series with this intention, and that the work based on a manga mocks itself as being “shit” throughout the first animated season multiple times. Already as time has passed, until 2022 when the second series was unleashed, references this has cracked have become more obscure or less current to that moment the show was released, and the amount of censorship just of certain images, due to how Japanese parody laws work, means there are some curious insights to be gleamed as a time capsule, such as how in the first episode (for the Crunchyroll version) the Pokemon parody stays intact but they felt blurring the My Neighbour Totoro (1988) one was wiser in fear Hayao Miyazaki might frown at them. By now the parody in the first episode of Your Name (2016), Makoto Shinkai's blockbuster success of an anime film, is now a canonical hit rather than the sudden shock surprise, and yet at the same time, even as a show with a lot of parodies, it makes a joke about a viewer writing a disgruntled letter to Pipimi and Popuko, our leads, about them relaying too much on parodies for the jokes. This show always had the sense of being deliberately irrelevant, knowing the jokes could be cheap, and this also, especially for the video game parodies, gets really esoteric. How else do you explain a parody of Death Crimson (1996), one of the most notorious video game productions for the Sega Saturn console, a perfect example of the labour this show puts in for what is, to be blunt, a thirteen episode shit post disguising itself as a sketch anime comedy like gdgd Fairies (2011-13).

Pop Team Epic, and its school girl leads Pipimi and Popuko, closer to goblin personifications of ids than teenagers, were birthed into the world in 2014 by Bkub Okawa, creating the 4koma manga for Takeshobo. Pipimi (taller and more sedate) and Popuko (shorter, more prone to violence and flipping the bird) are less characters in a sitcom than forces of misanthropy in a series of strange and even nonsensical gags. Openly preferring surreal jokes or moments which are weird without an apparent punch line, imaging these two with more "conventional" designs is actually one of the jokes the series keeps coming back too. There is even a joke that, set up in the first and last episode as the closest to a plot, the evil cabal behind the show (parodying Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995)) regret their moe schoolgirl show with more cute designs for the pair turned into the equivalent of taking a dump on viewers’ television. In fact one of the funniest jokes, one I admire, is that the next episode previews are not for Pop Team Epic in season one but for Hoshiiro Girldrop, a show which does not exist which is parodying a stereotypical one, about a schoolgirl who is also an idol singer in her other life and has a crush on her male senpai. [Spoilers] The joke is funnier for the abrupt punch line, that this even has the abrupt tonal shift out of nowhere for the final preview that our heroine died and the male love interest resurrected her afterwards, as abrupt to what is a cute idol programme as what may actually happen in an actual thirteen episode show or two. [Spoilers End]

The first series was divisive for me when I had first seen the episodes, and even now, it is a show of what does not land, what does and what hits with complete success, completely unpredictable in where it is in either of these categories even in just one episode. The first episode, still, is weak, more of a series of parodies which does not fully get to the weirdness the others from the second get to quickly. One of its best virtues, which grow returning to the series, is how to even depict the dumbest of jokes, this brings a murderer's row of talented and imaginative creators and animators in a variety of formats, even crafts with sewn felt dolls, to depict them. To mock itself as merely shit again for a joke is not enough when this can parody Isao Takahata's The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013), his last film and an incredible animated production which used incredibly lavish digital animation to depict watercolour-like images. Not merely to pastiche it is enough for a joke but, knowing even for a minute or two it would take a lot of resources, copy the exact animation style from that film's lavish production.

The collaborative nature is a huge virtue of Pop Team Epic. Barring the first and last episode having a story, the episodes baring one prominent segment, usually a parody, is a series of small skits of a variety of different art styles and tones. There is also only fifteen minutes of them including opening and ending credits, as one of the strangest touches, which I was first pushed away back but watched properly finally, is how this replicates the same episode to make up the full twenty plus minute length. There are differences between them - usually tiny touches, some major one offs which are different to the same scenes, and subtitles for the Japon Mignon segments about French culture - but the biggest differences are is that different voice actors in Version 1 and 2 are used for Pipimi and Popuko. And they can be male and female, over the two versions of the same episode and allowing a huge variety of prominent figures in voice acting to try even ad libbing, not even taking into consideration the English dub took the same attitude. For a great example, if you wished for the titular Madoka, of Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011), to play Popuko, then Aoi Yūki is one such figure here, in a parody of a high fantasy anime which has not even been finished where Popuko/ Yūki is forcing the voice actors in character to perform impersonations upon threat of grievous implied harm.

There are reoccurring segments, and one of the season's best aspects is that, even if jokes do not land, this let anyone create idiosyncratic segments in their own ways. The most infamous is the "Bob Epic Team" segments by AC-bu. The creators Toru Adachi and Shunsuke Itakura, who also do the voice performances, created these garish and surreal splatters of visuals with carte blanche, and these works for all their notoriety in their ugliness were intentional aesthetically. A duo who was working in commercials and music videos since the late 1990s, they came to this production knowing what to do, and getting some of the strangest and funniest moments as a result even if also replicating material from the original manga. (Such as finding an alien in the cat bed, posing as one, and having none of it.) The parodies of numerous obscure video games (and some big hitters like Undertale (2015)) in exact pixel styles, were done by an amateur pixel artist Makoto Yamashita who was still a student at the time of the production¹, and UchuPeople, who use a variety of different multi-craft tools, are stop motion specialistis responsible for the felt and knitted versions of one collaborator provided coquetted versions of Pipimi and Popuko, used for music numbers (including a Earth, Wind and Fire parody) that usually are sweet sounding songs about wanting to kill the subject being sung to. This becomes the best aspect of this deliberately scattershot production, which embraces a variety of figures and allows them to be creative, something attesting to how one entire reoccurring segment Japon Mignon, was handed to French born 3D animator Thibault Tresca², living in Japan, who was allowed to create (mostly) wholesome 3D animated stories with fluent French speaking voice actresses about the clichés of French culture.

Its scattershot nature is its biggest vice, as surreal comedy in anime is something that is bountiful and in a variety, meaning that there are many others in this format including with more elaborate stories to embrace and compare to. Its scattershot nature however too, when it lands, leads to some brilliant moments. “Hellshake Yano”, a talented guitarist and originally a joke character from the manga itself, is probably the thing that will be brought up for Pop Team Epic’s first season, enough that in 2022, Stephen Lee "Thundercat" Bruner, a Grammy Award winning bass guitarist/singer/producer/musician, is proclaiming his love for the show and him by rocking out on a paper craft guitar designed like Yano’s on social media³. AC-bu were tasked in season one to use kamishibai, a form of street theatre and storytelling from between Japan in the 1920s/1930s to the time television became popular, even as far back as 9th-century emaki (picture teller) scrolls⁴. Telling stories with paper images, with a storyteller voicing the characters, this format even past the growth of television in the 1950s found its way to continue. (Ujicha, the cult film maker of the likes of Violence Voyager (2018), is effectively doing paper theatre himself with his cult and sometimes shocking work). AC-bu, when approaching this tradition in their own way made an utter epic by itself which could even outlast the rest of the show, the duo operating a painstaking put together, drawn and cut sketchpad depicting Hellshake Yano having to appease the crowd at a concert as they voice the performance onscreen. It was an incredible production which won me over back even when I was cold to the series, and it stands out still but as a gem in a show which had a lot of inspired moments. Even then, I have to also credit that, returning to the series, countless other jokes are just as funny: the ghost story parody where a group of young adults rent a cabin which suspiciously have a pair of guns and axes mounted onto the walls, and end up killing each other; the second version of this with a seemingly random man doing audio commentary that, whilst not fully successful as a joke, is bold and does have the hilarious moment where he finds them having a watermelon out of season suspicious; that sudden attempt at a sad ending, using the repeated episode format on purpose, which is resolved by Shōta Aoi, voice actor and singer, looking like a cosmic pixie as he puts everything right again through his dapper dress sense and ability to travel back in time; that one random time, whilst acting out orgasm, one of the actresses uses “Marilyn Monroe” over and over, or the abrupt shout out by a male actor to neoclassical metal guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen; and way too many else to count.

There is one which fully encapsulates the show and its entire attitude, which is that aforementioned parody of Death Crimson, faithfully recreating its entire opening full motion video even with a fuzzy image of a red door. A game never released outside its home country, though the sequel did, Death Crimson was an attempt by the company Ecole Software as part of their transition into video game software as outsiders. A light gun game, it is held as one of the worse games ever released for the Sega Saturn, but instead of destroying the company it was loved by those who played it, sold very well when eventually the notoriety started to be passed on, and developed a cult around them. Proclaimed “Emperor of Kusogē”⁵, and something those who made the game are proud of in spite of its notorious low production qualities, bear in mind “kusogē” does mean “shit game”, even if the term is for notorious Japanese productions in the medium which are loved even without irony; that in itself makes the perfect encapsulation, for good and for moments which do not work, of Pop Team Epic itself, proudly calling itself shit, made with complete love of the art form of anime through the talented people in various positions on the production, and spending its resources, including a large portion of the climatic episode, parodying a notorious Sega Saturn light gun game.

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1) The Alternative Faces of Pop Team Epic, or How a Shitposting Cartoon Became an Experimental Animation Stronghold, written by KViN for Sakuga Blog, published on December 20th 2022

2) The About page for Thibault Tresca's personal site.

3) Thundercat Won't Let You Stop Thinking About Hellshake Yano, written by Kim Morrissy and published on Anime News Network on January 5th 2023.

4) Kamishibai - A Brief History, written by Tara McGowan and published on Kamishibai.com.

5) The (loving) article on Death Crimson's production history and legacy, including the Pop Team Epic parody, from Bad Game Hall of Fame.

#238: Patlabor 2 – The Movie (1993)

 

Studio: Production I.G.

Director: Mamoru Oshii

Screenplay: Kazunori Itō

Voice Cast: Jinpachi Nezu as Yukihito Tsuge; Ryunosuke Ohbayashi as Kiichi Gotoh; Yoshiko Sakakibara as Shinobu Nagumo; Daisuke Gouri as Hiromi Yamazaki; Issei Futamata as Mikiyasu Shinshi; Michihiro Ikemizu as Isao Ohta; Miina Tominaga as Noa Izumi; Naoto Takenaka as Shigeki Arakawa; Osamu Saka as Seitaro Sakaki; Shigeru Chiba as Shigeo Shiba; Tomomichi Nishimura as Detective Matsui; Toshio Furukawa as Asuma Shinohara

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

Moving on from the first 1989 Patlabor film, a great deal changed even in terms of character designs, the original character designs of Akemi Takada from the first film (with Masami Yūki contributing here) moving to a notably more realistic tone alongside the mood of this sequel. That is not to say all has changed – humour is still here, as this franchise follows Tokyo Metropolitan Police Special Vehicle Section 2, Division 2, consisting of a large lovable nitwits kept together by Kiichi Gotoh.

This film’s story however feels like a proper start to director Mamoru Oshii’s serious era as a director, in mind to the likes of Angel’s Egg (1985) in-between his comedies beforehand, with a huge emphasis needed to for how screenwriter Kazunori Itō is an integral part to the film’s virtues and deserves his credit greatly. The tonal shift is noticeable though, in mind that over the three films for this franchise, let alone the OVA series and the other entries, the Patlabor project created by Headgear - a group consisting of manga artist Masami Yūki, director Mamoru Oshii, screenwriter Kazunori Itō, mecha designer Yutaka Izubuchi, and character designer Akemi Takada - the franchise has juggled multiple tones over the multi-media formats it has been adapted into. There has been an emphasis on different characters in Division 2 over these different tiles. Noa Izumi, the plucky female member who loves her Patlabor manga, was central to other entries, whilst over the three films you have Asuma Shinohara central to the first 1989 film's action mystery, and WXIII: Patlabor the Movie 3 (2001) focusing on police detectives Kusumi and Hata in what becomes a monster film. Patlabor 2 follows Kiichi Gotoh himself with Shinobu Nagumo, the female captain of Division 1, as the central leads in a political thriller.

A cerebral political thriller, which just exists in a future 2002, this begins in a prologue set in South America for a military skirmish, where a man named Yukihito Tsuge as the last survivor of his squad who intends his revenge a long time later on his homeland of Japan. This revenge is a terror campaign on Tokyo which, in its many stages, exploits all the flaws in the bureaucracy. How this is show is startling and where the themes come in, dealing with a post World War II Japan which has lived in peace, Goto representing this and Tsuge becoming a figure who wishes to bring the terror of war to the Japanese public. Tsuge's plan uses something as seemingly simplistic as exploding a car on a bridge, without casualties, to start the domino effect where everything starts to collapse to his advantage. There is a heightened piece of melodrama as, disgracing her early in her career and undercutting her ability to progress, Nagumo had a romantic affair Tsuge when he was married and teaching her in the early stages of her career, causing a drama in how she will have to be the one to catch Tsuge when possible, the emotions hanging over her head.

The Japanese Self-Defense Force is a target of the film, the film created in the aftermath, in 1992, when the National Diet, the legislative branch of Japan’s government, passed the U.N. Peacekeeping Cooperation Law that permits the JSDF to participate in U.N. operations under strictly limited conditions, which led to the JSDF participating in U.N. peacekeeping and monitoring operations in Cambodia and Mozambique¹. Oshii and Kazunori Itō's film clearly viewed this in a very negative light, as the prologue is set in such a peacekeeping operation where, not allowed to directly attack the enemy, former JSDF member Yukihito Tsuge as a captain found his entire squad wiped out, and his revenge involves using the resulting power struggle he creates between the Tokyo Metropolitan PD and the JSDF to his advantage. This story, and how it becomes part of the discussions on war as a concept against peace in Patlabor 2, is more meaningful when one is aware of this history footnote.

How the plan Tsuge has goes is fascinating, including the film still tapping into salient details of how organizations can make huge mistakes, all timeless in spite of this film being set into the 2000s. Hubris and a terrorist group able to exploit this come into mind here, such as deliberately bringing suspicions to the military for the car explosion, or having the police and military at each other’s throats in a misguided power flex from the police’s leaders. Other tactics, like blowing up bridges or finding a way to take out military vehicles with ease, i.e. causing martial law to have to be brought into place so they are on the streets like sitting ducks, are uncomfortable realistic as tactics if there were enough resources for someone to use. Even more overtly tropes from action films, like blimps which fake out mock chemical gas attacks when shot down, come with the theme in this of Tsuge to cause terror on a public who have never seen conflict. This is obvious but prescient in mind to how, when in a war back in the 30s and 40s, Japan was utterly destroyed and required to be rebuilt from the ground up decades, leaving lasting scars anime like this have tackled as a theme decades later.

It is an Oshii film as an auteur, his focus on contemplative scenes and dialogue exchanges fully here. Even the one playful touch of including a Bassett hound in a cameo throughout his career at this point onwards, a breed of dog he is obsessed with, appears here near the end. This is however a team effort and screenwriter Kazunori Itō just with this film would have won currency from fans of the medium for how well done this is. Production I.G. is on top form here, and whilst there is a noticeable change in the character designs, it is not as drastic as presumed. The characters are far more realistic in appearance, but it is credit to the film, alongside some of the intricate mechanical animation here, that it feels not as abrupt a change between two films. Again as well, there were three films, and the third film, not involving Mamoru Oshii nor Itō, looks just as different as a film into the 2000s where the switch to digitally animation techniques is noticeable on productions, so the franchise has always had an edge of letting each of the stories, least for these films, be different. The music by Kenji Kawai, as with the first film, shows as well why he was as integral to the image of Mamoru Oshii films, or more aptly also how they sound, adding an additional depth to what has gained significance as one of the best anime films from the nineties with considerable reason.

This is more so as, in another team’s hands, it would be still a good film if done well, an action anime which could still tell this story but in a more overtly comedic and over-the-top fashion. This could work as a more pulpy narrative, and still could have been a great anime, and it says a lot that when the humour is here, such as the sudden mission to buy everything edible in a store from Division 2 members, it still matches Patlabor 1 because the characters were established as a team of miscreants who just happened to be a police force. The decision, even with these characters, to take this cerebral tone which Oshii himself would run with from Ghost in the Shell (1995), the lengthy contemplative visual scenes, the extended philosophical discussions between characters, and match it with action scenes, when they happen, which was distinct and effective at its best. Together both films are admirable in their virtues, and it is not a surprise as well how greatly regarded the sequel is just by itself.  

 

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1) Patlabor: The Movie 2 (1993) Movie Review, written by Erick Kown for Beyond Hollywood, published on October 11th 2004.

#237: Patlabor - The Movie (1989)

 

Director: Mamoru Oshii

Screenplay: Kazunori Itō

Voice Cast: Miina Tominaga as Noa Izumi; Daisuke Gouri as Hiromi Yamazaki; Issei Futamata as Mikiyasu Shinshi; Kouji Tsujitani as Kataoka; Michihiro Ikemizu as Isao Ohta; Osamu Saka as Seitaro Sakaki; Ryunosuke Ohbayashi as Kiichi Goto; Shigeru Chiba as Shiba Shigeo; Tomomichi Nishimura as Detective Matsui; Toshio Furukawa as Asuma Shinohara; Yoshiko Sakakibara as Shinobu Nagumo; You Inoue as Kanuka Clancy

Based on the manga by Masami Yuki

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

I feel like I’m playing computer games against God.

Patlabor gets the time frame wrong – the film is set in 1999, and we have yet to get to “Patlabor” work mechs even knee deep into the Millennium – but this follow up to the 1988-9 straight to video series is still very relevant in its themes. Getting very good distribution back in the day through Manga Entertainment with its 1993 sequel, this Mamoru Oshii helmed work, with screenplay by Kazunori Itō, still comes with a lot of salient points decades on with the context and exposition raising many ideas. In futuristic Tokyo, the Babylon Project has been set up to reclaim land in Tokyo Bay, to overcome lack of land in the country and overcrowding, alongside the goal to turn the capital into a cosmopolis. In this world, as mentioned, it has giant bipedal robots but, even if there are some combat machines and a division of the police force, this is a reality where the “labor” is seen as the equivalent of farming and construction machines, the advancement of a bulldozer for a new age.

The film does presume you have seen the straight-to-video series before, but that never becomes an issue here, and as the Manga Entertainment release in the United Kingdom came for VHS and DVD, this was a rare case of a title where the lack of context was never going to be an issue. The film presents the world in a way anyone can quickly catch up on its set-up, in that, after establishing this context of a Japan which uses giant robots for practical use, there is the issue that they can malfunction, and that the police naturally also needed their own, and even divisions to deal with issues involving them, whether abused or out of control. Division 2, our lead team, are unfortunately the cartoonish group in their police force, and it shows their status when they strike fear into a construction worker they are trying to save from his labor going out of control. The recent spate of labor rampages, opening the film, is alarming for them especially Asuma Shinohara, the hot headed young police member, and his seniors, leading them to dig up the cause. It is Patlabor 2, the sequel, which is held the highest, as it became a far more serious political thriller, but this even as a lighter toned work has its pointed moments of relevance. Mamoru Oshii and his screenwriter Kazunori Itō here also have passages of introspection which would be seen in Oshii’s work before and especially grow in the time after Ghost in the Shell (1995) caught peoples’ attentions. Itō was not a stranger for the unconventional and the cerebral, future screenwriter for both Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor 2, as well as live action films such as one of the last of Seijun Suzuki's films, Pistol Opera (2001), an unsung and bizarre crime pastiche, to the late nineties Gamera reboots, and his name deserves to be nodded to for his talents with the narrative too.

This is also however a comedy too, which may surprise some, as until Vlad Love (2021), Oshii’s return to television anime, a large period of time in his directorial career in live action and animation, in mind to many titles of his never leaving his home land, focused more on cerebral and somber existential tones post Ghost in the Shell. The humour here from the previous stories in this franchise, following the misfits of Division 2, including female lead Noa Izumi and her beloved police mecha, does help this film greatly, especially as when the introspection does appear. It means a lot more when brought in when we can also appreciate these characters being ordinary police and even doofuses, especially in mind to the Division 2 leader Captain Kiichi Gotō, held in high regard as talented officer who ended up there for being too good, someone who turned this band of misfits into a family who fish in their off time outside and grow tomatoes on sight when not dealing with the labor rampages.

Central to its main plot, as more labors are going berserk, is the connection to new hardware software for them, its creator a mysterious man we never see a clear image of and is already dead in the first scene, having committed suicide, but we learn so much of regardless of this. He is the Harry Lime figure that Gotō has detectives from other police sections learn of, his tale emphasizing so much philosophy and existentialism Oshii and Kazunori Itō get into. Even spiritual ideas are there as explicit Old Testament references are rife throughout, including the Tower of Babylon, the building which God was said to struck down when humans dared to make a tower reach Him, re-contextualized in an existential debate here of Japan losing its consciousness as industrialization and capitalist grow progresses into the future. I dare not claim any true knowledge of Japanese culture, but even as far back as a film like Stray Dog (1949) by Akira Kurosawa, made just after Japan lost World War II, destroyed and forced to have to build back up over the fifties and sixties, that film touched on these ideas found here a long time after. Existential concerns beyond the film itself are found of the old Japan being lost as more metropolises and advancement leads to more of their consciousness being lost, something anime has covered greatly, and Oshii would get into the nineties further with even the consciousness of human beings. The sites the mystery man at the center of lived in, creator of a diabolical plant for countrywide labor rampages, turn out to be old buildings which are being demolished when the detectives reach them, emphasizing for the characters as much as the audience these grave concerns of old districts and communities disappearing without trace in the march for progression.

The reveal, full spoilers, also is uncomfortably realistic, that this is all due to software from a major business and tied to the government which has been coded with a deliberate hack to cause these rampages, which the government would happily like to deal with without hassle. Actually, and it says how more positive Oshii and Kazunori Itō especially were, or a drastically different attitude from Japanese business culture, that Patlabor could be seen as less realistic, all because of how quickly this is dealt with. No one pretends this has not been revealed, wishing to still have their boatload of cash from the deals, and deny malfunctioning hardware that could cause deaths ever came up, but that could be me merely being cynical.

There is a lighter touch to the first Patlabor film, especially as Patlabor 2 was a drastic change in tone even in terms of the character designs, but there is a lot to juggle which is a huge credit to the production. This is still an action film and a comedy, but one which has a mind to it, and even with the humour, you see the creativity Oshii had and could be neglected. The introspective scenes, including the symbolism of empty birdcages and abandoned old derelicts, are shown with incredible cinematic style through the animators of Studio Deen and Production I.G., and there are unexpected production choices here which caught me off-guard returning to this film. One of them, one of the best of the film, is the unexpected and inspired use of a fisheye lens for a comedy scene. A fisheye lens is an ultra wide-angle lens that produces strong visual distortion intended to create a wide panoramic or hemispherical image, and for obvious reasons, this would be something you had to animate, and back in this hand drawn era, it makes this an incredibly ambitious visual choice, especially as it is for a moment when a character snaps and gets into an argument with his senior officer, which makes the scene funnier.

Patlabor 2, as mentioned, is the big one of the films, the third film WXIII: Patlabor the Movie 3 (2002) not connected to the Oshii films with different collaborators, but the first film does deserve considerable praise.  It has to juggle the comedy and the moments of contemplative philosophy, really pertinent ideas of Japan’s technological advances, which is an ambitious task in itself within a film that is beautifully cinematic. This is before the personality is shown in how the film is made, let alone with its idiosyncratic visual touches, including a hair-raising moment evoking Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), and action scenes with elaborate mechanical animation, including the finale involving storming a heavily guarded location. The resulting film, all beautifully put together, is exceptional, and whilst this is absolutely a case of a film where multiple figures who are important to its virtues, this in context for Mamoru Oshii is also a good film to return to bring a perspective to him. As a person who I view as an auteur who brings his own voice to the work, Patlabor is fascinating to return back to in showing his flexibility.