Patlabor: The Movie (1989) (2024)

Popular reviews

• Review by Jude ★★★★

  mechanical "Labors" aligned like pagan idols in an Ark who, its prow sloughed off, reveals itself to be another Tower of Babel, collapsing into the sea under the weight of capitalist, idolatrous folly. a man falls to his death, his demon soul attached to a red-eyed crow, and a flock of birds gathers to commemorate a second Fall not much later. computer viruses play the part of original sin, no trace of the holy to be found anywhere but in the exquisite aesthetics of oshii's elegantly orchestrated pageant, although who is to say what it all means, capital-M, in the end....not i, certainly

• Review by YI JIAN ★★★★ 3

  I'm drooling at the 80's anime aesthetic, so many gif-able moments, the art style is more Akira than GitS, background and everything are spectacularly done, ruins and wreckage drawn with such attention to detail. Quite dissatisfied with the lack of robot action and a solid conclusion, but that could be my fault for not watching the series first? Eh, for now the visuals alone are enough to please me.

• Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★½

  After the insistence of several colleagues here in LB I finally watched this movie which is based on a popular anime series that I haven't seen. Maybe because of this, from the beginning, I didn't enjoy the movie as much as others. On top of that, I am not yet completely enamored by the style and the anime in general. However, I am always willing to check out something new.

  Even for someone who is not familiar with the series, the movie does a good job of introducing you to this world. A world that I must say was quite fascinating, enough to hold my attention. While I'm not the biggest fan of Pacific Rim or Transformers the idea of…

• Review by comrade_yui

  a prosperous future for the 21st century....

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• Review by Sonic Yoda ★★★★

  There's something really satisfying about this sort of late eighties, high contrast, noisy anime. An early hit from Mamoru Oshii, this film deals with some pretty high concept stuff (destruction of history, mass urbanisation, the fear of technological advancements) that its goofy presentation can sometimes mask. It's actually quite nice watching an Oshii film with more expressive/cartoony characters that the director rarely deals in. If you compare this to Ghost in the Shell, with it's expressionless and difficult to relate to characters, this is a bloody Godsend. Hugely enjoyable mecha action coupled with some loveable, comedic characters and those patented Oshii moments of serenity (you're treated to some beautiful scenes of the old city), this is another fantastic film that fans of the director should check out.

• Review by cameron fetter ★★★★½ 1

  gorgeous animation, terrifyingly cyclopean biblical reference, tight and engrossing plot, the perfect mix of political spookiness, a small amount of superb mecha action. i think i like the ova more than this but this is pretty fucking good

• Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★ 2

  I feel like Patlabor might be a hard sell for some folks, because while it's undeniably a mecha anime, it's not actually very futuristic, and it's certainly not about extravagant space adventures. It shifts focus to the application of piloted mechs called Labors in the industrial and municipal sectors of society, using their impressive technological power to boost economic development and manage the more mundane aspects of everyday life.

  In this sense, the anxiety at the heart of the premise seems to be something along similar lines to Godzilla: what if our efforts to improve our lives had disastrous unforeseen consequences; what if our hunger for scientific and technological development turned against us? Here we see a revolutionary new operating…

• Review by Jake Cole ★★★★

  This almost feels like early Anno more than Oshii, even though the latter's visual stamp is all over its extraordinary use of exaggerated wide-angle distortions and especially the multivalent and expressionistic use of lighting. But otherwise a film about a future of dreary manmade islands of steel plating and concrete tended to by giant mecha, where outrageously high-body-count robot crimes are investigated with all the dull bureaucratic procedure as present-day detective work, feels as much a precursor for Neon Genesis Evangelion's heartless organizational structure as Ghost in the Shell's own existential questions of the human endeavor as a kind of Argo subject to constant, body-altering revisions via technology. This is often quite funny in its deliberate slowness even as the…

• Review by Mario 🎃 ★★★★

  Who's protecting our human rights?
  Cops don't have any.
  Makes sense. Why would pigs have human rights?
  Animated Movies Ranked
  8.0/10

• Review by Harrison Wade ★★★★½

  Light glows like television static, caught by waves and screens. As if to alert us to the strangeness of this wold, Patlabor begins with a suicide made to look natural. A man leaps from a ledge of a city under construction, into the sea. But the shot, from above, makes his jump look like he's stepping off the vertical plane and onto the ‘natural’ horizontal one. The world is no longer built for humans, but machines (Labors) and code.

  And it’s no longer machines that will cause the apocalypse, but their operating systems. If Oshii knows how to make this incorporeal fear visible—through flashing screens, abstracted digital visuals—he knows that it derives from something human. The interludes, here, show detectives moving through a suspect’s homes. Their dark interiors are overexposed by the light outside that glows like static. There’s (over)development in all the margins, so it’s fitting that Patlabor ends with a curious antonym—a stunning movement towards collapse.

• Review by louferrigno ★★★★ 2

  The original Patlabor OVAs were runaway success each and every time a new individual episode dropped within a sea of tough competition, and while it's easy to assume that great, clever writing was a chief reason for it being such an applauded series consumers kept wanting more out of, the more likely reason was the fact that each tape sold for ¥4,800 (or roughly $15 dollars in 1986 money), which made the series a more cost-effective commitment than the other OVAs selling for ¥8,000 to ¥10,000 (or $25 to $31). Smart, realistic writing was the hook, and after 6 episodes Mamoru Oshii, alongside the rest of studio Headgear, now had enough profits to construct the bait that announced itself as…

• Review by mulchlord ★★★★ 2

  i hope nothing bad happens involving this megastructure named "Babylon