Micmacs.

Thirty years into his career, watching a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film is like attending a family reunion. His latest feature, Micmacs à-tire-larigot is no exception, as even those who've only seen the odd Jeunet film are bound to recognise at least a couple of the remarkable faces the director tends to employ. There's Urbain Cancelier and Belgian Yolande Moreau who both appeared in Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain; there's Louis-Marie Audubert, Rachel Berger, Stéphane Butet, Tony Gaultier, Stéphanie Gesnel, and Myriam Roustan who all appeared in Un long dimanche de fiançailles.

Then there's Jean-Pierre Becker, and André Dussollier who appeared in both Un long dimanche… and …Amélie; Patrick Paroux who appeared in Un long dimanche…, …Amélie, and Delicatessen; Gérald Weingand who appeared in Un long dimanche…, …Amélie, and Foutaises; and of course Dominique Bettenfeld, and Dominique Pinon who've appeared in practically everything Jeunet's directed in the past couple of decades. Never mind the stalwarts behind the camera, like editor Hervé Schneid, production designer Aline Bonetto, costume designer Madeline Fontaine, sound editor Gérard Hardy, location scout Aude Lemercier, stunt coordinator Rémi Canaple and the Cauderlier family stunt team, among others.

The familial impression is further strengthened by the director recycling scenes form his previous films, to a point where (for instance) Dominique Pinion appears to be appearing as himself, taking another turn in a role he's previously played. Yet the clear nods aimed at longtime fans don't turn Micmacs… into a "greatest hits" compilation. Instead, the impression is one of watching a new production by one's favourite small, local theatre company, as opposed to an internationally renowned film director's latest feature, which just happened to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Though the film's title (perhaps most closely translated as "Endless Shenanigans") may evoke the indigenous people of the Atlantic provinces and the Gaspé peninsula to many Canadians, Micmacs… is actually a diverting, light farce on the rather serious subject of manufacturing and trading in armaments. Its narrative follows the exploits of former video rental store clerk, who — aided by a ragtag band of allies — attempts to avenge himself on the two weapons manufacturers whose various lethal goods have unalterably altered his life.

It's not the most intrinsically merry premise perhaps, but — as director Jeunet has demonstrated in the past — polemics on serious subjects touching everyone's lives can more readily find an audience if they first manage to make it smile. Sending out an invitation that's hard to refuse is always more effective than beating people over the head with the issue. Besides, as a filmmaker, Jeunet has never been interested in creating anything except imaginary worlds and his films have never contained any "realistic" grit — care-worn and well-loved artifacts, certainly, but all of them well-maintained and retaining a shade of their original colour.

As it was to Orson Welles, to Jeunet film is merely a device for wonderment, a toy, a long row of treasure chests in the cinematic attic — one containing sets, another costumes, a third stories, and so on. Jeunet seems to endeavor to throw as many of them open as he possibly can with each of his films. However, among the familiar there are also brand new faces. For example, leading man Daniel "Dany" Boon, who walked on in the shoes of the films protagonist just as the originally cast Jamel Debbouze (perhaps best known to international audiences for his part in …Amélie) walked off.

Boon, currently one of France's greatest comedy stars and a filmmaker in his own right, owns his part (his character's younger self even portrayed in the film by his son Noé) to a point at which it almost becomes difficult to tell whether one's watching a film by Boon or Jeunet. But the latter's aesthetics and brand of narrative is ultimately unmistakable. (A long time admirer of sculptor and "electromechanomaniacal" device creator Gilbert Peyre, Jeunet specifically created the Micmacs… character Petit Pierre — a designer of ingenious automatons and contraptions — in order to include six of Peyre's creations in his film.)

Though written in merely three months by Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant (Jeunet's main writing partner over the past decade), the idea for Micmacs… dates back to the mid-nineties, when Jeunet and his collaborator at the time, Marc Caro, were editing their second feature, La cité des enfants perdus, near one of the arms manufacturer Dassault's factories. Frequently encountering Dassault employees over lunch in a nearby restaurant, Jeunet began wondering about their private lives. He tried to imagine these seemingly well-adjusted, educated, polite engineers, putting their kids to bed at night, having spent the major part of the day inventing ways in which to most effectively kill and maim other people.

Despite shunning realistic milieus, Jeunet pays a lot of attention to detail, and meticulously researching a subject even if he doesn’t intend to depict it in an entirely realistic fashion. After all, the emotions he seeks to evoke are quite real even if set in peculiar circumstances. Hence, the process of making Micmacs… included a visit to a major weapons manufacturer, and even incorporates an original soundbite from one of France's leading gunsmiths, expounding how much more profitable it is to wound or maim an enemy than it its to kill him.

Such pronouncements are being made in the real world, even though they may seem to have originated in a lugubrious nightmare. To Jeunet the obvious countermeasure to such intricately dedicated malevolence is a casual ragtag group of ingenious panhandlers; an improvised troupe taking on cynicism and detachment from ordinary life with a unique blend of comedy and acrobatics. In other words, Jeunet's response to evil is (as it was in his first feature, Delicatessen) to send in the clowns.

From a grander perspective, Micmacs… can be said to explore the impact and growing import of social networks in people's lives, and the manner in which they in some cases come to replace or serve as a substitute for a "normal" family. Not just in our personal lives but in society as a whole: new collectives are taking shape. As insubstantial as Jeunet's film may first seem, it celebrates the collective feats of the common man — what the self-appointed elites of our societies refer to as "little people", or, plainly, the vast majority of us — and the effect each one of us can have on our societies when we band together.

Elected representatives, and a media obsessed with what doesn't even qualify as gossip, are portrayed in Micmacs… as little else than a puppetry show of sedative propaganda. It's a film that clings to the ideal, now commonly considered quaint and naïve, that callous individuals not only deserve but — more importantly — can be held accountable. Not that Jeunet ever gets completely dogmatic: even the film's somewhat grotesque gunsmiths are shown to have intensely human traits. Neither is the film a Luddite call to arms against technology. Rather, it's a case of taking on hi-tech with a much lowlier variety; scavengers whose greatest assets are their communally accumulated wits gunning after an industry that's armed to the teeth with the latest gear.

But the sheer ingenuity the film's heroes rely on is complemented by precisely the kind of social networks the digital age has made possible. Never mind that the filmmaker himself has relied on cutting edge technology for special effects and editing throughout his entire career, Micmacs… being no exception with some 350 visual effects shots. Ultimately, Micmacs… isn't so much a story of asymmetrical class-warfare, as it is the indulgent creation of a born cineaste. From the Tex Avery intimation (Jeunet published a book about Avery shortly before the pioneering animator's death), to the half-dozen Max Steiner scores (that of The Big Sleep in particular) combined in its soundtrack, Micmacs… is as much about creating a world as it is about changing one.

Additional input by Mathias Luthi.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

More than a year after its premiere in Sweden, the first film based on the late Stieg Larsson's tremendously successful Millennium Trilogy, has quietly snuck onto screens in western Canada. So quietly, fans practically needed the hacking skills of Lisbeth Salander — the protagonist turned titular character in the international versions of both the first novel and film — to find out the film they had been waiting for was being screened at all.

Roughly seven months after its January 2009 Swedish premiere, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (the first of what is now a trilogy of films) had been seen by some six million people worldwide, making it the third most viewed non-English language film in the world at the time. So far, it has been seen by 1.2 million Swedes, 2.8 million Scandinavians in total, and practically as many Frenchmen (to whom it's known as Millénium — Le film) and Spaniards. It's been sold to and is being distributed in some 25 countries worldwide, including a number in which the novels haven't been received quite as enthusiastically.

A tremendous success for the 60 financiers, who'd invested nearly SEK 100 million (≈C$13.4 million) toward the films' production — something of a safe bet given that the three novels have sold more than two million copies in Sweden alone (a country of roughly 9.4 million inhabitants), with the first two becoming the third and fourth most bought books in the world during 2009, only slightly less popular than Stephenie Meyer's Twilight-series. (They've currently sold in excess of 27 million copies worldwide, 3.5 million in the USA alone.)

Being the first film in memory to win both the popular and the critics choice award for best film domestically, The Girl with ... also propelled Noomi Rapace, who portrays hacker Lisbeth Salander, to international stardom; her last international outing being her 1988 debut as a nine year-old extra in Hrafn Gunnlaugsson's Í skugga hrafnsins (Shadow of the Raven). But perhaps more importantly, The Girl with ... represents a tremendous success for contemporary Swedish cinema — a fact which will hopefully help usher in the premiers of other recent, fascinating Swedish films like Flickan (The Girl), Metropia, and Videocracy in North American theatres.

The film's plot is one fans of the series are already familiar with: Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist framed for libel, is employed by the industrial magnate Vanger to ostensibly write a family history. Though it soon transpires the true objective of Blomkvist's assignment is to examine for one last time the circumstances surrounding the mysterious disappearance of Vanger's niece Harriet in the summer of 1966. Blomkvist makes some headway in traditional journalistic fashion — scouring archives, conducting interviews, re-heating stale leads — but without the skills of the young, socially maladjusted hacker Lisbeth Salander, whom Blomkvist unexpectedly encounters in his path, he hardly would've got very far.

In a particularly interesting scene, which has Salander assembling data from hard copies stored in the Vanger family business archives, the connection between hers and Blomkvist's singular skills — as well as their similarly obsessive characters — is made perfectly explicit. Salander's skills at collecting information, like those of other hackers, are presented in their most basic form: stripped of the hip digital hardware, they're fundamentally a question of piecing together loose crumbs of information carelessly left behind, coaxing unity from seemingly disparate sources.

Superficially meaningless fragments of personal information, reflections of us all in accounts, transactions, logs, have for a long time — long before the advent of the digital era — made it practically impossible to live, to exist, to function on any level of our society without leaving traces behind. Traces an information specialist — a hacker, a skilled journalist, even your friendly neighbourhood librarian — can retrieve, compile, and amplify.

Brought together by their dogged persistence to stitch the "whole truth" together regardless of the cost, insisting "a truth" actually exists, Blomkvist and Salander — as portrayed in the film — manage to simultaneously both be and not be a couple. While the emotional tension between the two characters is maintained, both are allowed to indulge in the kind of freedom (no nagging wives, demanding family, insistent employers) usually reserved for crime-fighting duos made up of single males.

That the title of the film, and the novel it's based on, has been changed from the far more apt Män som hatar kvinnor (lit. "Men Who Hate Women") is perhaps an indication of the differences between Anglo-Saxon (especially North American) and European storytelling. Focusing on a central character may seem natural to an audience frequently exposed to tales in which in which the hapless mass (i.e. the majority of people) are delivered from the brink of oblivion by a "lone ranger", a man — for it is usually a man — guilty of massive fashion faux pas (such as leotards combined with cape), pumped full of some steroid or other, toting a supermassive ego, with a preference for solving problems by throwing his brawn rather than brains in gear.

But by singling out one of the main protagonists, the title draws attention away from the crucial notions Stieg Larsson appeared to advance in his writing; not only as a novelist, but especially as an investigative journalist. In fact, by centering on the individual — as most political discourse tends to do in North America, still enamoured with the inefficient and hollow notions of liberal individualism — it runs counter to the collective concerns Larsson, descended from a long line of real working class heroes, had advocated for his entire life. Expressly, the title change detracts from the complete lack of empathy for fellow human beings that Larsson sought to expose not just among Swedish elites, but among elites in every late-capitalist society.

Among Sweden's unremorseful (and unreformed) upper class Nazis, Larsson found the perfect culprits to illustrate his point. In the first book, and now film, they also happen to be distinctly despicable specimens who not only hate women, but do so with a passion, a zest, a taste for cruelty. Stemming, it seems Larsson argues, from the exaggerated sense of entitlement their powerful positions and — more specifically — their anti-humanist ideologies equipped them with. Which isn't to detract from the import violence against women assumes in Larsson's stories: his villains' barbarism isn't purely politically motivated. But on the whole, this type of violence — against the half of humanity most commonly disenfranchised, abused, and neglected — serves as the most obvious example of the self-serving cynicism of the world's monied elites.

Even more important is Larsson's attempt to address our societies' growing lack of what was once commonly known in Sweden as "civilkurage", literally "civil courage": the ability of the average citizen to actually demonstrate what they believe in by addressing, through their actions, perceived injustices and wrongs regardless of the consequences for themselves. Something as simple as stepping in between the couple fighting next door, or preventing a complete stranger from getting beaten up and mugged on a city bus. Things that shouldn't merely come naturally to engaged, educated, but above all idealistic Communists like Stieg Larsson, but every human being claiming to possess a streak of decency and a minimum of empathy for others.

The civil courage displayed by Larsson's other protagonist, his alter ego Mikael Blomkvist, contrasts with the notion of "neutrality", employed in a manner that helps expose the very notion of "neutrality" as a sham. The verb "hate", so commonly strewn around carelessly nowadays ("I just HATE when they do that!") is not only a very strong but also an active one, suggesting action, an open invitation for the fist that now always seems to hang ready in the air to land on whomever, or whatever, has raised our ire. "Neutrality", on the other hand, suggests a cynical, self-serving indifference. Which, though indisputably saves one from personally ending up in trouble, also by default — by virtue of its innate passivity — places one in the same camp as whoever is the strongest, whoever is winning. See someone being beaten up, avoid stepping in, and you may as well have contributed to the beating.

The fact that you didn't personally land any blows is a ruse, wrought forth only to protect your own conscience. You didn't beat the victim up — but you didn't prevent them from being beaten up either, when you likely could've. Nor did you prevent the victim from coming to as much harm as they did, had you only mustered enough courage to step in. It doesn't matter if you strongly believe in a society were people have the right to not get beaten up, if you continually allow beatings to be administered around you. You may as well try to get in some blows yourself. This essential insight into a crucial facet of empathy, is what Larsson seemed to suggest had been bred out of entire generations of certain types of people. They're indifferent not only to women's suffering, but everyone's.

The Nazi past Larsson invokes is an actable target precisely because Sweden currently faces problems in part created by the nation never properly dealing with its "neutral" stance during the Second World War, its extensive dalliance with Nazism, and the fact that it was the cradle for the state-sponsored pseudo-science dubbed "racial biology". Not directly involved in the war, not officially backing any combatant, the Swedish state officially maintained its indifference, while it and some of its most prominent citizens made considerably amounts of money trading with — in particular — Germany. Making the distinction between "neutrality" and "collaboration" practically negligible in hindsight.

What makes a discussion of Sweden's wartime manoeuvring even more difficult, is the insight — even among the most idealistic humanists — that it was precisely this self-serving indifference that left Sweden practically unscathed when it could easily have been overrun, occupied, and obliterated by any of the conflict's major powers, and as a result better positioned to create an enviable welfare-state for all than most other European states. Its infrastructure largely intact, its industry running white-hot, having profited form catering to all sides of the conflict, poised to provide and develop whatever goods and services Europe needed to rebuild: the fruits of past indifference enjoyed by practically all Swedes since. And envied by many abroad.

Larsson specifically exposes "neutrality" through the collaboration among the various members of the Vanger family (who to those knowledgable in Swedish affairs, seem an only thinly disguised incarnation of the Wallenbergs), linking their political fascism with physical, sexualised brutality. Larsson raises a question similar to the one raised by Danish film director Lars von Trier in his 1991 drama Europa, if in fact the very act of non-intervention, of not taking sides, of indifference ultimately represents more reprehensible choice than choosing the "wrong" side. This, as well as other aspects of Larsson's story are detracted from by the title change, pandering to an audience used to focus solely on "the hero" rather than "the heroics". (Curiously, in Germany the title of the first book and film of the Millennium Trilogy was given as Verblendung, referring to a state of mind in which one's completely blinkered by a twisted belief system, fanaticism, or prejudice.)

It's of course entirely possible that non-Anglo audiences are simply more accustomed to writers holding up mirrors which allow their fellow citizens to examine themselves, and the societies they inhabit. To North Americans in particular, "evil" isn't merely a term for the capacity to perform unspeakable acts of cruelty we all possess as human beings, but a specific entity, a quality that more often than not is believed to reside outside their own, immediate society. An assumption easy to make, especially when any homegrown "evil" — be it in the individual home or the community at large — is yet to be accounted for.

Larsson's villains aren't cave men, quite the opposite: they're prosperous, educated, presumably rational individuals. Representatives of society's elite, not in the least unique to Sweden, so far removed from the lives of ordinary citizens that they hold nothing but contempt for them. A contempt derived from the lingering suspicion that that they're besieged; victimised by a "nanny state" established to pander to those who only seek "handouts", which aims to wrest control of the world's finances and politics. In other words, an elite suffering under the delusion that a conspiracy of "inferiors" is attempting to take the power and privileges they consider their birthright away from them.

However, as far as the film adaptation is concerned, the translation of the title in some parts of the world may be its only true problem. Granted, as is often the case with film adaptations of (particularly popular) books, the changes to plot, timelines, and characters may grate on the hardcore fans, no matter how minor. Yet Danish writers Nikolaj Arcel's and Rasmus Heisterberg's distillation of the 566-page novel into a two and a half hour film, which manages to sustain its pace throughout, is quite impressive — especially given the amount of overwrought dramas lately meandering along on cinema screens.

Some of the changes may stem from the initial decision to turn the first part of the trilogy into a theatrical feature, while turning the remaining two into television films. A decision which also impacted the budgets and production quality of the two remaining parts, directed by Daniel Alfredsson, who served as second unit director on The Girl with.... (Interestingly, Alfredsson's style isn't entirely dissimilar to that of his brother Tomas, who's also recently reaped international success with his adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist's 2004 debut novel Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In).) Ultimately the decision to let The Girl with ... be helmed by Danish director Niels Arden Oplev, experienced with several television thrillers and crime dramas, likely allowed the Swedish particulars of the story to be advantageously approached form an outsiders point of view.

Instead of concentrating on getting all the specific details just so, Oplev instead has focused on bringing out the essential elements of the story. Which isn't to say that the film lacks in specifically Swedish scenography or in some manner misrepresents its setting. (The fact that actual television journalists Alexandra Pascalidou and Lisbeth Åkerman appear as themselves, albeit uncredited, not only discloses how much of an "in house" production this really is, but also enhance the realism.)

As the action decamps Stockholm for decidedly more rural locales held in the solid grip of winter, the lighting of master cinematographer Jens Fischer turns a suitable hue of chilly blue, while the more opulent domiciles feature interiors cluttered with the mahogany and Josef Frank designs so beloved by the Swedish upper class. Many of the exteriors were shot around the locality of Gnesta, and Södertuna castle in particular, leaving some of the locals hoping the international success of the film will make their community as famous as the Twilight-series has made Tuscan Volterra.

Michael Nyqvist may not "own" the character of Mikael Blomkvist in the same manner that Noomi Rapace "is" Lisbeth Salander — the black-clad, tattooed, pierced heart of the Millennium Trilogy — but he nevertheless conjures forth what may well be the film's only placid, never mind sympathetic, male character. More surprising, to those who only recall him from his sprightly roles in international films of the late 1960s and the 1970s, Sven-Bertil Taube emerges as a nestor of Swedish drama, elegantly infusing life into his role as the aging, ailing (and, perhaps, just a tad queer) magnate. Peter Andersson also manages to turn the exquisitely despicable lawyer Nils Bjurman into a truly unpleasant character. (Coincidentally, Andersson also appeared in a 1996 adaptation of Astrid Lindgren's Kalle Blomkvist-stories, the boy detective from whom this film's Mikael Blomkvist derives his derisive nickname.)

But it's Peter Haber who turns out the a performance every bit as compelling as Rapace's, though his has largely gone unremarked upon by North American critics. Previously mostly known for portraying the sympathetic police inspector Beck, in a series of television films based on the renown novels by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (who established the template of the police procedural crime novel as a means of social commentary with their series), Haber's cold-blooded psychopath, with a remarkable penchant for deliberately applied suffering, is delivered without an ounce of overstatement and oodles of icy insensitivity. Though the film concentrates more on the violence and less on the romance than the novel it's based on, shedding some of the subplots (including much of Mikael Blomkvist's womanising), it retains enough of Stieg Larsson's own engaging voice (and idealism); crucially reviving a genre in which violence — especially towards women — is often equated with entertainment.

Additional research by Tim Nieguth.

Dan O'Bannon, 1946-2009.

American screenwriter and film director Daniel O'Bannon has passed away. Perhaps best known for authoring the script for Alien, O'Bannon also wrote the short story comic The Long Tomorrow, illustrated by Jean "Mœbius" Giraud, which became a source of inspiration for the scenography of Blade Runner.

Rear View: Patlabor - the Movie.

From grandmaster Osamu Tezuka's Tetsuwan Atomu ("Mighty Atom", or Astro Boy), and Mitsuteru Yokoyama's Tetsujin 28-gō ("Iron Man #28", or Gigantor) - both original manga animated for TV in 1963 - to Gō Nagai's Majingā Z ("Mazinger Z", or Tranzor Z), and Tezuka-apprentice Yoshiyuki Tomino's epic Gandamu (Gundam), robot manga and anime have left an indelible impression on contemporary Japanese culture.

These transforming, combining mechanical warriors, often deployed to save Earth from invading forces, are Japan's answer to America's superheroes. But perhaps because they are mechanistic, and (largely) culturally neutral, they've managed to stomp into the consciousness of audiences worldwide. By the mid-1980s, animated television series based on Japanese concepts, like Voltron, Robotech, Gobots, and - above all - Transformers, provided an astounding boon to robot toys, comics, and merchandise internationally.

Japanese comics are created for a readership that shares very specific attitudes and customs, often virtually unknown outside Japan. Animation, on the other hand, has managed with its broad appeal to open overseas doors otherwise closed to Japanese comics, and have in fact become Japan's supreme goodwill ambassadors. Even when only available in Japanese, anime are usually more accessible than manga, not requiring ability to read Japanese or learning the often unique conventions of printed Japanese comics.

Manga also tend to be produced by a single artist, making them more direct and personal than anime, which are often a collective effort produced by teams, aiming for the broadest possible audience. While Japanese film in general has lingered in artistic and financial doldrums, anime has prospered on the back of the home video boom - to a point at which the Japanese animation industry easily dwarfs that of the EU or the USA - receiving a massive boost from the increased availability of video hardware in Japan in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Original Video Animation films (OVA's) begun appearing in 1983, aimed at the home video market, partially as a response to rising film and TV production costs, but also to the segmentation of the audience, with rising demand for original video material and more specialised programming. OVA's quickly became the niche for animation not mainstream enough to warrant a substantial TV audience, or lacking the budget necessary to produce a theatrical release.

Patlabor first appeared as a seven-part OVA series in 1988, the year most Westerners became aware of anime thanks to Katsuhiro Ōtomo's Akira, and Hayao Miyazaki's masterpiece Tonari-no Totoro (My Neighbour Totoro). Though the concept for Patlabor was one that manga artist Masami Yūki had been working on since the early 1980s, having earned notoriety with a parody of Gandamu, and wanting to further the riaru robotto ("real robot") approach of Tomino's creation - as opposed to the more fanciful sūpā robotto ("super robot") varieties.

Originally conceived as a light comedy set in space, the concept was pitched to a studio in the mid-1980s. Upon rejection, Yūki brought it down to earth and injected more realism with the help of scriptwriter Kazunori Itō, and designers Akemi Takada and Yutaka Izubuchi. The revised concept was picked up by Bandai Visual on the condition there would be a manga tie-in to the OVA series (in Japan, anime frequently act as ads for manga). All that remained was to find a director, and Itō suggested Mamoru Oshii. Despite some initial skepticism whether he could pull off realistic science fiction - given his background in children's fantasy - Oshii joined the group of artists now known as Headgear.

Banding together as a collective, the Headgear quintet managed to retain full control of their creation rather than sign it over to a production company or an animation studio. Though some of the the members have collaborated on other projects, Patlabor was the only one Headgear worked on as a group, ultimately spawning three feature films, an additional sixteen-part OVA series, a TV series, a 22 volume manga, a series of novels, many model kits, CDs, and much, much merchandise.

Essentially an ensemble police procedural (think Hill Street Blues with giant robots), Patlabor is set in the latter half of 1999 (then, a decade into the future), in a Tōkyō where humanoid, multi-purpose machines - basically oversized powered exoskeletons - known as "labors" are employed in all aspects of industry and heavy construction, which in turn has led to the use of labors for unsavory purposes. Consequently, the police has branched out with a new, special section equipped with patrol labors - "patlabors" - to combat labor crime.

The main protagonists are the officers of the Special Vehicles Section 2, Division 2, an outfit stationed on a strip of reclaimed land in Tōkyō Bay with the reputation of being a dumping ground for freaks and misfits. There's the overeager young officer, the nervous salary-man, the trigger-happy jerk, the wizened engineer, his whizz-kid protégé, the spunky yet naïve girl, the quiet giant, and the femme fatale. Presided over by a captain whose Machiavellian streak is obscured by slack attitude (mainly manifested by a rather relaxed choice of footwear), for whom the career-oriented captain of the far more professional Division 1 is an object of unrequited love.

Although this (first) film's plot concerns the suicide of the developer of a new operating system for labors - which may in fact be part of a sinister plan to disrupt Tōkyō's largest re-development and land reclamation project by causing the thousands of labors it employs go berserk - it focuses more on the characters than actual crimes, and Division 2's two youngest members, Asuma Shinohara (the overeager one) and Noa Izumi (the spunky naïve one) in particular. Though the youngest patlabor officer, Noa is in fact the projects oldest character, its heroine ever since development began in the early 1980s, and a member of what was then a rather scant set of strong female manga and anime characters.

Unlike manga, which permeate mainstream Japanese society (in the early 1980s, Japan used more paper for comics than it did for toilet paper), anime isn't something the average Japanese adult spends time watching. Unlike overseas, where anime are an entrypoint for an audience which - more often than not - is adult, the domestic target audience tends to be quite young. Despite this, Headgear deliberately chose a more "mature" style for what essentially was an "adolescent" concept.

Manga artists have always felt a kinship with filmmakers. In fact, many manga artists create stories as if they were making films, often incorporating every camera technique ever invented - many of them dream of directing and of the early days of Japanese animation when practically anyone who could draw could switch careers. Here's where the choice of Mamoru Oshii as director really paid off: this feature allowed him to utilise his considerable skills and further his style of philosophical longueurs interspersed with rapid bursts of ferocious action.

Fairly successful in its tightrope attempt to provide enough information for audiences unfamiliar with the Patlabor OVA's while avoiding boring committed fans to tears, the film's overall mood is more solemn compared to the original series, its palette cooler, less bright. Likely due to director Oshii's inclinations, biblical references rain down throughout the story like frogs on Egypt, while the mechanical action is mainly confined to the finale (hardware aficionados will find much more labor-on-labor action in the Patlabor manga). However, Yutaka Izubuchi's mechanical designs are among the most original and realistic, logically extrapolating on exisitng heavy equipment, and worth glimpsing even briefly.

In between labor battles and extensive dialogue, Oshii takes the audience on a tour of vanishing Tōkyō vistas, eminently commenting on the relentless, seemingly unyielding march of progress - a theme he would return to with similar adroitness in several later features, like his 1995 international breakthrough Gōsuto In Za Sheru/Kōkaku Kidōtai (Ghost in the Shell). However, Oshii's restrained and subtle manner also allows for scenes brimming with technical information and acronyms, requiring that viewers remain active; previous knowledge of the OVA's isn't crucial provided viewers pay attention.

Oshii has said the his films wouldn't work without composer Kenji Kawai's music, even claiming that Kawai's music is "half the film". Here the fairly conventional, upbeat soundtrack is complemented by Kawai's more ambient, meditative pieces, making Patlabor an excellent introduction to the style for which he and Oshii would later become famous. Curiously, the cast of voice actors are practically all middle aged veterans, portraying characters who pretty much all are half their age.

Like Japanese poetry, Japanese comics tend to value the unstated, allowing pictures alone carry a story. Mamoru Oshii excels at this seemingly spare approach, occasionally indulging in caricature to reveal the "essence" of a prevalent mood or situation. Though likely a nod toward fans of the original OVA's more comedic slant, the sudden simplicity can be bewildering, with serious exchanges suddenly drawn in an overtly "cartoony" style, or characters depicted as abbreviated caricatures against a hyperrealistic backdrop.

But Japanese manga - and their distant cousin anime - tend to be unashamedly emotional and human, representing the one space where the Japanese are allowed to "drop their mask" and indulge in fantasy. Often created by artists with little formal training, they tend to be very unpretentious, with few aspirations toward artistic excellence and fame. Their main aim is to entertain.

It's always hazardous to set a film in the future, particularly the near future. Though when 1999 did roll round there was little - apart from certain stylistic aspects - that dated the first Patlabor feature. In fact, though the Internet and cell phones are conspicuously absent, the film's environmentalist theme seems quite prescient. Land reclamation in Tōkyō Bay may not have been quite as aggressive as the film depicts, but some 20% (or, roughly, 250 km²) has been reclaimed over the past century.

While massive exoskeletons aren't yet employed in construction, heavy machinery has been known to be used for nefarious purposes - likely making police wish they did have patlabors at their disposal. Certianly, robotics research continues unabated, persistently improving and redefining robot capabilities, interfaces and roles in society. Unmanned vehicles fly over war zones, scour the ground for explosives, allow humans a broader virtual presence, while gaining more parity with them. This film ironically illustrates the folly of giant, humanoid machines, in a scene where a construction labour displays all the efficiency of a kid let loose among building blocks when engaged in the raising of a building.

Until the recent recession rendered it idle, Japan had the world's largest fleet of mechanized workers, with robots even being manufactured by robots in the facilities of Yaskawa Electric - Japans largest manufacturer of industrial robots (the closest existing parallel to Patlabor's Shinohara labor factory). In 2005, more than 370,000 robots worked in factories across Japan - roughly 40% of the world's total, averaging 32 robots per 1,000 human manufacturing employees. A 2007 Japanese government plan called for a million industrial robots to be installed by 2025; that won't likely happen now.

Yet, with nearly 25% of its citizens 65 or older, Japan is banking on robots to replenish its rapidly diminishing workforce and help nurse the elderly. The option to allow millions of workers in from overseas appears utterly unappealing to a society steeped in xenophobia (Japan has the lowest rate of foreign workers among the world's developed economies, at less than 2% of the workforce, compared to 15% in the USA, or 10% in Britain), even paying foreign workers to return from whence they came once recession has rendered them "redundant".

Japanese scientists and engineers, having grown up watching robot cartoons, are more than eager to create humanoid, robotic companions to care for the more than a million Japanese who will be over 100 years old by the middle of this century. Many of their projects tend to be far-fetched, concentrating on humanoid and other impractical designs, that likely can't be readily brought to market. Robots may be cheaper than human workers over the long term, but the upfront investment costs are much higher.

While the first Patlabor film may share a certain amount of technological skepticism with the majority of science fiction films - particularly in its prediction of the impact computer viruses and malicious code cold have - it's no reactionary dismissal of change. Rather, it merely advocates a reconsideration of the past's - and its artifacts - worth. It's brilliance lies not so much in its technical qualities, as it does with director Oshii's respect for the audience.

Oshii and his Headgear colleagues dare to tell a complex and ambitious story without explaining every last detail, trusting in the audience's own ability to work things out. This, ultimately, renders the fact that its anime inconsequential, for beneath the skillfully drawn veneer lies an ambitious, well-crafted crime story in a slightly futuristic setting. It just happens to be animated.