From the original Patlabor OAVs (The Early Days, as it is typically dubbed, at least in the English world) is this effort, which I frankly could have sworn I’d posted about two months ago, but I apparently forgot entirely about.

I hadn’t actually watched the original Patlabor OAVs before, despite it being one of those things I’ve had sitting around on BD for a few years. It’s a particularly weird one given how many times I’ve seen the two feature films that follow-on from them – I’m one of those folks who started watching anime in the 90s, and it was only of those major VHS releases in the mid-90s that was being released back in the UK in complete isolation to the original series, and I’ve seen a whole bunch of the TV show, but somehow ended up not getting around to watching the OAVs even when they did become available to me.

But, anyway, back in September, the Barbican Centre in London was running a science-fiction anime season, and whilst the headline screening was basically the they somehow managed to swing a screening of the movie edition of Macross Plus in this space-year of 2019, I did end up sticking around to see the screening of the first Patlabor movie they had the following day, which seemed like a good excuse to finally get around to watching this thing.

Of course, after all this time, I don’t really have all that much to say about it – it’s excellent, but I’d imagine many people would already be aware of this. I kind of appreciated the extra context for characters like Matsui who appear sporadically in the movie but don’t really get that much time, whilst the specific tone of that second movie doesn’t feel like quite so much of a non-sequitur once you’ve seen the SV2’s Longest Day episode of the show.

Honestly, my major take away from revisiting Patlabor in general was more one of realising just how much of the heavy lifting the Kawai soundtrack is doing in that first movie, particularly during the finale. I mean, the long first-person shot of them driving through the Ark is neat and all, but I’m sure you could play the track The Ark from the OST to video footage of paint drying and it’d still seem like the most exciting thing you’ve seen that year. It’s sure making typing this blog post up feel more exciting, anyway.

But, anyway… sure is December, huh? I’ve sure not posted in a couple of months either, huh? Guess that’s a matter of 50% laziness, and 50% being busy. Work aside, as the post may suggest, there was the trip into London for some movies back in September taking up my time, then there was travel for SLA taking up a considerable chunk of October (I really like the new Shinkai flick, coincidentally. And Anemone is almost shocking good given how dire the previous Eureka 7 movie was). November… I don’t really want to think about lol.

But, whatever, I don’t particularly feel the need to force out writing anything these days, and honestly the amount of stuff I have anything to say about – or at least anything particularly insightful – is pretty minimalist. I’m sure there’s a bunch of Sakugablog posts you’ve not read yet that’d be a more valuable use of your time. I know there’s a bunch of stuff I’ve been meaning to get around to reading myself haha