Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime by Christopher Bolton

Author:Christopher Bolton [Bolton, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
Published: 2007-11-25T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 7.2. The screened view from inside Tsuge’s cockpit.

As the rockets strike Tsuge’s group, the bipedal labors double over and fall like human figures, more human in fact than the immobile pilots inside their cockpits. Throughout the scene, the film cuts back and forth between the noise and carnage outside, and the dark interior and cool green displays that are all that Tsuge can see. Over the radio he hears the anguished cries of his men screaming “Captain!” But the sounds are distant and distorted, filtered through layers of static.

When one panicked pilot realizes his labor is about to be destroyed and screams, “I can’t eject!” he voices the fears of the whole scene and eventually the whole film: that the humans will be trapped permanently inside their mechanical shells. The opening scene of the first Patlabor film might indicate the next step, when the human pilot has become totally absorbed, leaving only an empty chair — a point at which the human- machine hybrid we have become retains no inward or outward human traces at all.

This opening scene is followed by a credits sequence that shows a labor pilot in a virtual training exercise, and the same elements are featured: the goggled pilot, the labor’s cameras, and the cockpit displays that show a flickering virtual world (Figure 7.3). From this opening, the film goes on to become entirely dominated by these kinds of images.

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