Ever started a sequel to a favourite series and found something …off with it?
That’s what happened to me starting Patlabor: the New Files. As soon as I saw the shot above, from the series opening theme tune, it felt off. That wasn’t the Noa I remember from the original OVA series or the television show. Having now watched the first two episodes this feeling persists: none of the characters I remember look quite right while the animation itself feels slightly cheaper and stiffer too. To be fair, these are only minor defects and on its own it’s perfectly servicable, but it put me off nevertheless.
Patlabor is important to me. Manga Entertainment brought out the first two movies in the early nineties and these were among the first anime I watched consciously as anime; I think I also watched at least some of the original OVA series. The television series as well as the rest of that original OVA I watched when I got back in anime in 2015-2017, leaving The New Files as the only major Patlabor series I still needed to watch. If you’re familiar with the franchise, you know there’s quite a tonal difference between the OVAs, the movies and the television show. The OVAs tend to be serious near future science fiction, while the television series is somewhat more goofy and more slice of life. The movies meanwhile are much more philosophical in nature, with the second one being a sort of Ghost in the Shell before Ghost in the Shell. The central concept of each is best summed up by the opening narration of The New Files:
“Labor” is the common name for robots developed for industrial use.
Their use became widespread in construction and civil engineering,
but Labor-related crimes skyrocketed as well.
To combat this, the Metro Police created a Patrol Labor unit:
The Special Vehicles, Section 2.
This was the origin of the Patlabors.
The New Files starts where Patlabor: the TV finishes, with a rematch with Griffin, a mysterious black Labor which fights the police as a sort of sales demonstration. Originally the first OVA was published just after the television series had ended, so this would’ve been fresh in the viewer’s memory still, but I finished watching it in 2017 and almost a decade later the details had somehow slipped my mind. It was fairly easy to get back in the swing of things nevertheless, but that feeling of unease remained. Part of that was that the cast just didn’t look like themselves, part of it was the awkward character animation. Characters are posed stiffly and while the animation on the whole is decent, at times it just doesn’t feel as fluid as I expected. It took me the best part of these two episodes to get used to it and actually enjoy the story. Even below average Patlabor is still a cut above most anime.
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