Ani­mé Beyond Aki­ra: The con­struc­tion and destruc­tion of cyber­punk Tokyo

The destruc­tion of Tokyo looms large in ani­mé cin­e­ma of the spec­u­la­tive vari­ety. The Japan­ese cap­i­tal is remade into Neo-Tokyo fol­low­ing the nuclear explo­sion that kicks off 1988 cyber­punk clas­sic Aki­ra, while cult ani­ma­tions of the same era such as Cyber City Oedo 808 play out in cap­i­tal cities of their own mak­ing. A pop­u­lar exam­ple is Ghost in the Shell​’s New Port City, a fic­tion­al metrop­o­lis which comes with­out either the destruc­tive back­sto­ry of its pre­de­ces­sors, nor the feel of Tokyo itself, designed as it was to be more of a stand-in for the state of Hong Kong.

For those look­ing for an actu­al sci-fi depic­tion of Tokyo, then, it’s best to look back at an ear­li­er ani­mé work, one relat­ed to the world of Ghost in the Shell, but of the entire­ly dif­fer­ent Pat­la­bor fran­chise. Released a few years before Ghost in the Shell, and com­ing from the same cre­ative part­ner­ship of direc­tor Mamoru Oshii and writer Kazunori Itō, Pat­la­bor 2: The Movie was both a fol­low-up to the 1989 orig­i­nal also put togeth­er by the duo, and a con­tin­u­a­tion of the equal­ly child-friend­ly TV show of the same name. Despite there being no chang­ing of the guards between films, the gulf in dif­fer­ence between Pat­la­bor 2 and its pre­vi­ous incar­na­tions could hard­ly be any big­ger, with the 1993 movie eschew­ing the pat­tern of pro­ce­dur­al-style plots for some­thing of a more cere­bral bent.

The Pat­la­bor fran­chise cen­tres around the crime-bust­ing efforts of a group of human police offi­cers and their fleet of so-called Patrol Labors, walk­ing ​‘mecha’ suits designed to keep the streets of Tokyo safe. The genius of Pat­la­bor 2 is the del­i­cate polit­i­cal nar­ra­tive it man­ages to spin around these clunky robot con­struc­tions. While this in part is due to their very sparse use through­out the sto­ry, the absence of Labors soon comes to define the film, as ten­sion ris­es in a ver­sion of Tokyo placed under mil­i­tary coup. Bridges are destroyed, cit­i­zens are trapped, whilst the police strive to work out who is real­ly pulling the strings behind the siege. As the sit­u­a­tion becomes more dire, the high­er the need to deploy the last-resort of the mecha, whose mil­i­tary might is demon­strat­ed through the vio­lent flash­back to a failed peace­keep­ing mis­sion; just as high is the threat in them being rolled out by the ene­my fac­tion. Once again, we find the destruc­tion of Tokyo loom­ing on the hori­zon, with only the unwieldy pow­er of tech­nol­o­gy to blame.

Speak­ing on the vio­lence and vio­la­tion upon Tokyo in the film, not­ed city and cul­ture com­men­ta­tor Col­in Mar­shall argues that Pat­la­bor 2 ​“depicts real­is­tic attacks on a real­is­tic Tokyo for the same rea­son it has to min­imise the screen time tak­en up by mecha fisticuffs – because of its aspi­ra­tions to real-world rel­e­vance.” Such rel­e­vance is also helped by a vision of Tokyo in 2002 that’s very much like the Tokyo of 1993. For Mar­shall, the film while ​“set in the future – now, of course, long past – man­ages to keep the exag­ger­a­tions of the then-exist­ing built envi­ron­ment to an absolute min­i­mum. No ele­ment of its depic­tion of Tokyo stands out quite as imme­di­ate­ly as its realism.

This real­is­tic city set­ting sits in well with Oshii’s aim to define what Japan stood for in the post-war and Cold War peri­od. Pat­la­bor 2 asks if the country’s future would or even should see it play more of a role on the mil­i­tary world stage, tak­ing part in the sort of peace­keep­ing mis­sion that haunts the bit­ter antag­o­nist, a for­mer sol­dier who has cho­sen to betray both city and coun­try. Tokyo is used as a stand-in for Japan, a place lit­er­al­ly and fig­u­ra­tive­ly frozen between one era and the next, at a stand-still due to the siege, and soon cov­ered in the first snows of win­ter. The film has the same styl­is­tic flour­ish seen in GitS, con­jur­ing a dreamy ambi­ence from snowy city scenes and lin­ger­ing shots of Tokyo’s indus­tri­al under­bel­ly. The cam­era seems to act like one of the many birds that haunt the film, a hov­er­ing vis­i­tor sur­vey­ing the city as it grinds to a halt.

From where present Tokyo ends in Pat­la­bor 2, Rou­jin Z begins, a 1991 ani­mé writ­ten by Kat­suhi­ro Oto­mo, the auteur behind Aki­ra, and direct­ed by his assis­tant on that project, Hiroyu­ki Kitakubo. It’s also a film where the spec­tre of the mecha reap­pears, this time in the form of Z‑001, an ultra-advanced hos­pi­tal bed which hous­es the geri­atric guinea pig Kijuro. The pro­to­type hous­es, med­icates and enter­tains the frail fel­low like some kind of farm ani­mal, in a demon­stra­tion on how to solve the prob­lem of a city packed with elder­ly res­i­dents. This vision of ear­ly 21^st cen­tu­ry Tokyo is tee­ter­ing on the edge of chaos, with young ​‘stand-by’ car­ers sum­moned from around the city to any emer­gency at the push of a but­ton; when old hands tap too much, the nar­row streets become quick­ly clogged with city ambu­lances answer­ing the call.

This urban chaos is height­ened when, like in Pat­la­bor 2, Tokyo’s indus­tri­al char­ac­ter is ulti­mate­ly used against itself, with the rogue mecha and air­planes of the Oshii movie replaced by the every­day build­ings and vehi­cles that pop­u­late Rou­jin Z’s Tokyo. In a style rem­i­nis­cent of Akira’s cli­mac­tic trans­mo­gri­fi­ca­tion scene, an out of con­trol Z‑100 begins to assim­i­late arti­fi­cial fea­tures of the city, grow­ing in size into a ram­pag­ing giant of patch­work scrap­page. Otomo’s mes­sage couldn’t be clear­er – Tokyo has grown phe­nom­e­nal­ly, but at the expense of all its res­i­dents, with young and old pit­ted against each oth­er in a war for space and resources. As in Pat­la­bor 2, the con­flict is an inter­nal one.

Sim­i­lar­ly height­ened in the movie is a ten­sion between old and new, as high­light­ed in a flash­back scene when Kijuro dreams of his deceased wife. This sequence is set in a more idyl­lic time, with a pas­toral vision of Japan that restores all the human­i­ty miss­ing from Kijuro’s present day home. ​“Rou­jin Z’s depic­tion of the city is one of the old meet­ing the new,” agrees Isaac L Wheel­er, cyber­punk author and Edi­tor-in-Chief of influ­en­tial cyber­punk site Neon Dystopia. ​“There are no mas­sive sky scrap­ers, but there is a mod­ern sense of sprawl,” he con­tin­ues. ​“The urban land­scape of shop­ping cen­tres and cramped apart­ments jux­ta­pos­es against the coun­try­side with its sense of calm – at least until the robots show up.”

In both ani­ma­tions, the spir­it of the past can’t be escaped from. At play are dif­fer­ent lev­els of Tokyo in simul­ta­ne­ous exis­tence, giv­ing what Wheel­er finds in Pat­la­bor 2 to be ​“a real feel­ing of his­to­ry, of many hid­den places that have come into exis­tence.” This lay­er­ing of past, present and future is what marks out these films as unique in the ani­mé sci-fi canon. Destruc­tion may lurk in famil­iar yet fan­tas­tic forms, but the con­struc­tion remains – a grit­ty, breath­ing Tokyo, alive with real­ism, and not going away any­time soon.