The Mecha’s Blind Spot: <i>Patlabor 2</i> and the Phenomenology of Anime

Abstract

The giant “labors” (robots) and their human pilots featured in Oshii Mamoru’s “mecha” anime Patlabor 2 (1993) are split figures that reflect technology’s power to magnify or enhance the human while simultaneously threatening dehumanization. In Patlabor 2, these machines enhance perception while simultaneously creating new blind spots for the humans inside. Through his focus on vision (and its blind spots), Oshii’s labors become figures that critique the related technology of mass media and what Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenology of film defines as the electronic (as distinguished from cinematic) phase of visual culture. While some might contend that anime is itself part of this electronic milieu and therefore unable to mount such a critique, I argue that Patlabor 2 makes its point by an oscillation between the electronic and the cinematic.