Patlabor is one of my favorite anime, as it follows the de-idealization of giant robots from Grendizer to Gundam to technology on the edge of the quotidian.
I did not recognize the fanservice tropes when I saw it the first time and the second time I realized those tropes were a lot older than I knew. (Like the scene where two women compete over their bust size and then over their ability to hold their liquor) Despite that, it's just great. I wish they'd make an anime remake and not just a live action like
For me, Patlabor 1 and 2 are thrillers who happen to have mechas in them. Despite the name and the prominent role of the Labor Patrol department the movie is about the police work done by the Patlabor police force or the counter-terror unit in part 2. As a thriller you know who the baddie is from early on. The conclusion is not therefore not the unveiling of the culprit as it would be in a crime movie, but the neutralization of the well-known culprit, quite often by force (why is that?) Here you see mechas battling it out against a fortress, but it could just as well be a SWAT team storming an appartment block and it would be entertaining all the same. I would place it under "color" and I agree, it can make all the difference ;)
Right, Patlabor is strong even without the mechas.
Something I find amusing about the series is almost half the time they are dealing with ghosts instead of criminals. (Thus Patlabor is much about the uncompleted legacy of the past as it is about the problem of the near future.) Ghosts and ghost stories are huge theme in anime that you might miss because the portrayal of ghosts in anime and western culture are very similar qualitatively, but quantitatively I think they turn up a lot more. It's much like the way religious professionals turn up more in anime than they do in comparable western media. (e.g. "Cherry" the Priest is a major character in Urusei Yatsura in fact he and his niece Sakura were developed before Lum and Ataru were)
>Iron Blood Orphans is probably the most 'realistic' in the genre.
Save Barbatos' waist circumference. /s Joking aside, while it still succumbs to a lot of genre and franchise cliches, I have to agree that it did a lot of things more maturely than preceding series. The ending is one of the most refreshingly grounded in the franchise (which is probably why so many fans hate it).
Operation British in MSG started a strange trend where Australia gets left with large crater marks in basically every Gundam timeline, and many non-Gundam properties.
The whole colony drop scene in MSG just terrified me as a kid. It was the first time I saw large scale human-on-human violence expressed in such a medium, and I was not ready for it. Then I realized "oh, this is a metaphor for the US nuking Japan".
I feel like Netflix and the western market is having a slow positive effect on annoying fanservice in anime. One can hope. I find it incredibly irritating.
I can accept a certain amount but then there are series like High School DxD which are nothing but fanservice. The real engine of fan service today are vtubers and mobile games which I think are likely to infect anime because the “minor leagues” of anime and manga art are the fan artists that show up on sites like pixiv and Danbooru and it is pretty rare to see anything people want to draw a lot on Danbooru that is really an anime.
