[caption id="attachment_4434" align="alignnone" width="497"] Ha. Tengo el brazo! ¿Qué es esto? Oh, no ... Rocket Punch![/caption]

A few mornings ago, I was having breakkfast at McDonalds, and sitting a seat away from Maurice, who up and said to me, "Hey Stanley, you like old things. There was this cartoon I liked..."

Maurice is someone I see, and talk to in McDonalds. He's a polite young man, at least ten years younger than I am. He was born and raised in El Salvador, and came to Canada at the end of the 1980s. English is his second language, and he's soft-spoken to boot, so I often strain to catch his entire meaning. But this time, there was no doubt he was describing a Japanese mecha anime.

I quized him about the look of the giant robot, the human characters, and the basic plot. At one point, he described a chubby robot, and I thought he was referring to the granddaddy of all super robots, Tetsujin 28-go (renamed Gigantor for the US) from 1956, but no, the chubby giant robot he was referring to wasn't the star, but a secondary character.

◄ The fourth in a series of posts. Previously: Patlabor: The Movie

[caption id="attachment_3028" align="alignnone" width="497"] Nono, the starry-eyed girl, is on fire![/caption]

Title:		Aim for the Top 2! DieBuster
Studio:		Gainax
Air date:		October 3, 2004 – August 14, 2005
Episodes:		6

DieBuster is a six-episode OVA produced by Gainax to help mark their 20th anniversary as a studio -- it is a sequel to their ground-breaking 1988 six-episode OVA GunBuster (my review).

Tens of thousands of years after the events of Aim for the Top! GunBuster, when the Human race desperately fought malevolent space monsters to a standstill, the Space Monsters are still out there; still a threat. Humans are restricted to the massively terraformed planets and moons of their solar system. When they look into their night skies, they see the wall of Space Monsters as the so-called Red Milky Way. The only thing keeping the Monsters at bay is a fraternity of psychically-gifted teenagers known as Topless, and the ancient, and awesome biomechanical Buster machines only they can pilot.

◄ The third in a series of posts. Previously: GunBuster

[caption id="attachment_3104" align="alignnone" width="497"] One of the Police Labors getting a thorough going-over for maintenance.[/caption]

Title:	Patlabor: The Movie
Studio:	Studio Deen / IG Tatsunoko
Air date:	1989
Episodes:	1

In the Patlabor universe, Labors are sophisticated, heavy machines, usually in humanoid form, that allow their human operators to perform difficult, or dangerous tasks, with dexterity, precision, and power. By 1999, when this movie takes place, Labors are commonplace, in heavy industry, on construction sites, even on the battlefield. Police forces have also had to become experts in Labor technology, to both use it themselves, and to solve crimes involving the ubiquitous machines.

The story opens with a dramatic suicide, and follows with an even more dramatic take-down, of a military Labor, which has run amok without a human operator. Enter the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department's small, but capable, 2nd Special Vehicles Section (SV2), after a Tokyo construction Labor, again without a human operator, turns itself on and goes berserk, right in front of a member of the SV2. These operator-less malfunctions  are happening as Greater Tokyo is in the midst of a massive, and "Labor"-intensive, urban renewal program, including the Babylon Project, which is constructing islands in Tokyo Bay.

[caption id="attachment_3107" align="alignright" width="186"] The Microsoft, I mean the Hypersoft, um, the Hyper Operating System, which has a virtual monopoly on Labor Computers.[/caption]

SV2 learns that all the malfunctioning Labors -- in fact 80 per cent of the 60,000 Labors in the Tokyo area -- had their computer systems upgraded to a revolutionary new OS, the Hyper Operating System 1.0, and that the genius programmer who wrote it, just committed suicide by jumping off the Babylon Project's HQ in Tokyo Bay.

As evidence mounts of a deliberate plot to cause all the Tokyo Labors to malfunction simultaneously, SV2's commander, Captain Gotoh, and his small team have to solve the mystery, and stop the threat, without causing a panic, and without running afoul of powerful political and business interests.

Real Robots done real good

Patlabor is a franchise which began life as a manga (1988-1994), and was adapted into a 6-episode OVA (1988-1989), and anime series (1989-1990). That's to say the Patlabor universe was well established by the time of this 1989 movie, so it starts right in telling the story as if it's happening in the real world. So no giant magically-powerful robots piloted by precocious,dysfunctional children, just robots as work-a-day machines, requiring regular maintenance, and operated by trained, adult professionals, like crane, or backhoe operators, except police Labor operators get GIANT handguns with explosive shells, they have to load manually with both hands.

[caption id="attachment_3111" align="alignnone" width="497"] Investigating the mysterious programmer. Nothing flashy. Just the facts ma'am.[/caption]

Patlabor: The Movie, and the sequel Patlabor 2: The Movie (1993), differ from the rest of the Patlabor franchise -- in a word, the movies are cinematic. Where the other Patlabor anime, as I recall,  gets pretty frantic, and almost slapstick, the movies both hew to thematic, and visual realism. The world of Patlabor movies is full of nuts and bolts, and personal issues, and political agendas. The mecha is a big part of the characters' lives, but they have lives. The pacing, and direction of both films, by Mamoru Oshii, is never cartoony. The scenes of the investigators methodically tracking the programmer's past -- which are among my favourite scenes in any anime -- are in deliberate contrast to the rest of the action. They move through the film slowly, with little dialogue, but against stunning visuals, and haunting music by composer Kenji Kawai.

Both movies have high production values, across the board -- animation, music, sound work -- the movie budget is really on the screen. If there is a flaw, it's one I think is common to many anime films  of this period, trying hard to be taken seriously -- they talk a lot.

Director Mamoru Oshii, and composer Kenji Kawai worked together on both the Patlabor films, and, two years later, in 1995, on the Ghost in the Shell movie.

Next in the series: Aim For the Top 2! DieBuster ►
Patlabor Next Generation live action film announced for 2014 ►

With the mecha anime-"influenced" American action film Pacific Rim scheduled to open just days from now, I've been thinking not so much about whether I'll like Pacific Rim, but about the mecha anime series I already like. Here's the first of a series of posts then, on my favourites -- not exactly in order of preference.

[caption id="attachment_2846" align="alignnone" width="497"] Renton, and, Eureka, on the Nirvash, surrounded by sky fish.
[/caption]

Eureka Seven

Title:	Psalms of Planets : Eureka seveN
Studio:	Bones
Air date:	April 17, 2005 – April 2, 2006
Episodes:	50

In a distant future on an Earth-like planet, where people and machines can literally surf the sky, both civil war, and alien invasion are in progress. Government, and rebels oppose each other using giant robot-like craft called LFO. The rebels are personified by a group called Gekkostate, led by a swashbuckling character named Holland; he, and most of his group are former soldiers from the military forces they now fight. This civil war is a result of the ongoing invasion/infestation of the planet by an alien something called Scrub Coral, and it's manifestations called Coralians. The authorities treat it as a threat to be destroyed, and have suppressed the truth that Scrub Coral is sentient, and may be seeking coexistence with humans. The rebels are trying to reveal the truth -- they believe coexistence is the only path for survival.

[caption id="attachment_2852" align="alignnone" width="497"] Eureka and Renton falling head over heels for each other.[/caption]

At it's heart, Eureka Seven tells the story of a 14-year-old boy, Renton Thurston, and Eureka, a turquoise-haired, lavender-eyed, Coralian girl; how they grow and mature, how love blooms between them, and how their love becomes the fate of their world. When the pair first meet, Eureka is with Gekkostate, piloting the giant robot-like craft called Nirvash typeZERO. Renton just happens to have a device called an Amita drive, which can awaken the full potential of the Nirvash. That Amita Drive has previously, and inexplicably, displayed the word "Eureka" to Renton several times.

[caption id="attachment_2851" align="alignnone" width="497"] Here's all of Gekkostate. Holland is the one with the cravat.[/caption]

Eureka Seven unpeels it's vast story, and the hidden connections between it's ever-growing cast of great characters, over the course of 50 episodes. We're talking the fate of the Human species, whether it will end in hope or dread. Eureka Seven is very much a mecha anime, in that giant fighting robots piloted by children are front and centre in the story, but it is anything but mechanical storytelling. It takes a character-driven approach to telling an epic tale. It also has a sense of humour.

The animation in Eureka Seven is at a consistently high level. The large number of aerial combat sequences are treated very three-dimensionally. The character designs are all visually interesting, and sometimes downright arresting. As is normal, for an anime which will spawn toys, each character has a stock costume; abnormally, in Eureka Seven, several characters change their look radically to underline changes in their outlook on life. The music is a high point. The soundtrack is integral to the scenes.

I can't say whether I consider Eureka Seven to be better than Neon Genesis Evangelion. I think thematically, and dramatically, NGE aimed higher than it could possibly reach, meaning, I think lots of it is incredibly great, and some of it is not so great, while I think Eureka Seven attains a consistently high level from beginning to end.

The original Eureka Seven was followed up by a theatrical anime in 2009: Eureka Seven: good night, sleep tight, young lovers, subtitled Pocket Full of Rainbows. It is set in an alternate universe, to say the least, and features all the principal characters from the original series, but in completely different roles; it is both mesmerizing, and confusing. I wonder if it's the universe as reimagined by Eureka, and Renton, but that would be telling. In 2012, a proper sequel series began, called Eureka Seven: AO -- I haven't seen this yet, but it's by the original studio, Bones. The original series has been available on DVD for years, here's a link to a six-disk boxed set on Amazon. ► Click the images to enlarge them.

Two technical points: I prefer to watch anime in the original Japanese, with English subtitles; the Japanese voice actors, or seiyu, are often remarkable performers. In the case of Eureka Seven, the Japanese cast is fabulous. The character of Renton, is voiced wonderfully by Yuuko Sanpei, a woman who specializes in voicing adolescent male characters. There are series where I think the English dubs are just as good as the original Japanese, such as FLCL. However, what I found exciting and profound about Eureka Seven in it's original Japanese, became dull and wooden in the English dub. Yikes!

Next in the series: Aim for the Top! GunBuster ►