Welcome! It’s time for a new edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Here’s what we’re doing today:

• 1) Inside a sequence from Patlabor 2.

• 2) Animation newsbits.

With that, let’s go!

1 – War comes home

It’s a famous moment. People know it who’ve never seen the movie; excerpts on YouTube have millions of views. Last month, we shared a clip of it that went all over.

It arrives halfway through the anime film Patlabor 2 (1993). You watch as a political crisis spins out of control in 21st-century Tokyo, and martial law begins. The Japan Self-Defense Forces send tanks down city streets and hover helicopters near skyscrapers.

Then, occupied by their own military, average people continue their everyday lives. Tokyo becomes almost surreal.1

“The very existence of military vehicles within ordinary everyday scenes — where they must not be — creates an inexplicable feeling of unease,” noted one writer. “This is precisely the core of the film.”2

The director responsible, Mamoru Oshii, is better known for Ghost in the Shell. There’s a case that Patlabor 2 is his best film, though, and the martial law sequence is Exhibit A.

He was making a point about Japan here. It was a country accustomed to peace at home, despite its involvement in conflict abroad. “I wanted to describe that fake peace,” Oshii said. Many in Tokyo knew war simply as footage from elsewhere, images on screens. When soldiers enter the city in Patlabor 2, the line blurs between screen and daily life. Suddenly, nothing makes sense.3

The martial law sequence runs almost seven minutes, and Patlabor 2’s lead characters appear only in passing. Generally, we find them as bystanders, watching the military deployment get announced and then enacted.

Talking fades away after a while: Oshii’s powerful images and the music of Kenji Kawai take over. A montage of disconnected shots tells the story of the new Tokyo. “The Great Girder Bridge in Shinjuku. Silhouette of an armored truck [below it]. Everyday heavy traffic,” Oshii wrote of one. In another, he framed a tank like a “parade float.”

Meanwhile, elementary schoolers wave to a man in a war robot, which copies his movements as he waves back (to the “delight of the children”). And we see “military otaku,” one dressed in a