Techno Police 21C - The 1982 crime mecha anime film

Techno Police 21C - The 1982 crime mecha anime film

Techno Police 21C o Technopolice (テ ク ノ ポ リ ス 21C ト ウ ェ ン テ ィ ワ ン セ ン チ ュ リ ー, Tekunoporisu Tuentiwan-Senchurī) is a Japanese animated (anime) film about the 1982 crime / mecha genre made by Toho Productions and released on 7 August 1982.

The opening of the anime movie involves an advanced robotic police team trying to recover a hijacked tank prototype. The film is a first presentation of an anime for a slightly more adult audience, at a time when there wasn't much competition and before clichés were established for this action genre.

The anime was made during the Cold War and then the tank was hijacked by a futuristic cargo plane and was designed to withstand a neutron bomb attack, even though its crew would have been killed by that weapon, as the tank was computerized to continue fighting autonomously. When it ran out of ammo, the robot's tank would automatically explode.

A point that distinguishes the animation studio of this film is that to save money, there are many monochromatic scenes. When the hijackers are in the vehicle they stole, everything on the screen is blue; when Eleanor starts bringing him back, everything on the screen is red. Another scene towards the start has the Techno Police Headquarters in blue.

Characters

Set in the early 21st century, the protagonist is Ken, a highway cop riding a motorcycle, in what is presumably the American Southwest, called to be part of the police force in Centinel City (the name derives from centennial, not sentinel), where it should only last six months. It can be described as fickle, although as the film progresses, it gets more serious. He is also known to frequently destroy his motorcycles in search of criminals; he is shown at the beginning of the film as he jumps from one into a truck, and when the film opens, his cycle is once again destroyed, barely making it to the station. An African American partner looks at the bike and asks "how many are there". Ken shrugs and replies that it could be the sixth that month.

Ken's team is made up of a woman named Eleanor and a husky man named Gora Kosaka (who, to Japanese audiences, has a female name) who grows flowers. Everyone has a robot to direct for police work, not a giant robot that they would control from the inside, but a robot that is crudely presented as stupid, as a computer has to be trained to do everything. Ken's, Blader, is blue and white and equipped with bullet cuffs, just like COPS 'Long Arm. Eleanor's, Scanny, is red and has a female figure, but whose face is made up entirely of flashing LEDs and which has two cables running from the neck and connecting to the computer sockets. Gora's robot, Vigobus, is larger, and stronger than the other two (at one point in the film, he lifts the tank around which the anime is built, and holds it motionless for several minutes with some effort; it lets go only when the tank becomes active again). These robots travel in the back of a large, six-wheeled, roofless, red and white police car. A trailer is attached to tow Gora's robot. Ken sits in the middle to guide him; Eleanor on his right and his other companion on his left.

History

The plot consists of a chase of a hijacked MBT-99A tank, designed by the United States Air Force. The hijackers, who appear inside the tank after escaping a recently committed bank robbery, were hired by an obscure group backed by a foreign nation seeking an advantage in their military. The tank carries six ATGM launchers, three on each side of the turret, and a laser machine gun, in addition to the rifled main gun. The tank steps are double-mounted (the step is split in half, forming four sets of steps for the tank).

Another tank involved is the MBT-90D, sent by the army to take out the tank. Despite having at least one platoon of these, the MBT-99 still escapes capture. The M-90Ds are armed with a three-barreled automatic cannon, three ATGM missile launchers, and a main gun, mounted on the front rather than on a turret.

The MBT-99 hijackers are forced out of Ken and his team. Eleanor then enters to study the tank, which starts up on its own, having been programmed by the hijackers to head to a dock and remove the end to encounter an enemy submarine. The remainder of the film consists of the chase through the city, resulting in the destruction of another bank and various collateral damage.

Production

Techno Police 21C was born in 1978 from an idea of ​​the founder of Artmic Studio Toshimichi Suzuki. Work has begun to develop the idea into a TV series as a co-production between Artmic and Studio Nue. The technology that will be featured in the series has been the subject of extensive research with the intention of making the future as believable as possible.

Unfortunately, the project ran into problems. After 4 years of development there was only enough animation produced for a single episode. The series was scrapped and, in order to recover some of the costs, the existing footage was compiled into an 80-minute film and distributed by Toho.

Set in a futuristic 2021 in the hi-tech yet violent and crime-ridden metropolis of Centinel City. A reckless young trafficker Kyosuke (Ken) is chosen for a special assignment away from his country home. He was chosen to become one of the first officers in a newly created arm of the SCPD, one that uses robotic assistants, known as Technoids, to give them an edge over criminals. Together with his robot Blader and the other Technopolice members Kosuga (Gora) (accompanied by the super strong Technoid Vigorus) and Eleanor (with the female robot hacking the computer Scanny), Kyosuke faces off against the well-equipped criminals who plague the city, including a prototype on the run military tank.

Of the staff who worked on the discontinued TV show, two are the most notable. The first is Joe Hisaishi, who provides the synth-jazz soundtrack and is well known in the West for creating the soundtrack for nearly all of Hayao Miyazaki's films including Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke and Nausicaa and Takeshi Kitano (Sonatine, Hana-bi, Brother). Working as part of the animation staff is Shoji Kawamori, who is now famous for his mecha designs, most notably the seminal Super Dimension Fortress Macross.

The Aoshima scale model kit company, in anticipation of the proposed TV show, had produced a series of plastic kits of vehicles and robots from Technopolice, including some designs that have never been animated. These were still released, in hopes of making money on the film instead. In addition to the 1/16 scale kits by Techroids and the 1/48 scale kits by Mazurka, Temjin and Roadranger, other merchandising items included a soundtrack, on LP and cassette and the eventual release of the film on both VHS and Laserdisc.

Undaunted by Technopolice's failure, Toshimichi Suzuki reverted to his original idea, a few years later reworking it as the OAV Bubblegum Crisis series, which fared slightly better but ultimately suffered a similar fate.

In 1983 Technopolice 21C was dubbed by those ubiquitous Hong Kong kung fu voice actors (see also Battle For Moon Station Dallos and Locke the Superpower). The company responsible for putting this new English track into service is unknown, they also made some changes to the film, moving the title card to the beginning and pausing individual shots of the opening credits to remove the Japanese text without shortening the time running or fooling around with music. The credits are also missing entirely, but otherwise the content of the film itself is unchanged.

This English language version was released on video in the UK by Mountain Video (Frankenstein, Dracula, Mazinger Z) under the slightly shorter title Techno Police. With the advent of the Video Recordings Act of 1984, the video was withdrawn from the shelves and disappeared into obscurity never to be republished.

The re-edited and re-dubbed scenes of Techno Police also appeared in the obscure Flash of Mountain Video! No.1 Video Comic and its Flash spin-off! Robot problem. These two tapes, released on VHS, Betamax and V-2000, were intended to advertise their children's collection by gathering short clips of them together in a mock comic on video format. Both numbers were released in 1983.

The American market wouldn't see Blader (now known only as Blade) in action until 1987, when Techno Police found its way onto the shelves thanks to Celebrity's Just For Kids label (Battle for Earth Station S / 1, Revenge of the Ninja Warrior), and later Best Film and Video. The version for the best film and video is slightly less edited, with some slight swearing.

Outside the English-speaking world, unreleased video versions of Technopolice 21C have been seen in France, Germany and Spain with cinematic programming in Cuba, which have been dubbed using English dubbing.

Technical data and credits

Regia Masashi Matsumoto
Written Yoshimitsu Banno
Production: Studio Nue, Artmic
Distributed from Toho
Exit date: August 7th, 1982
Duration 79 minutes
Country Japan
Language Japanese

Creator of the concept: Toshimichi Suzuki
Authors: Hiroyuki Hoshiyama, Kenichi Matsuzaki, Masashi Matsumoto, Yoshimitsu Banno, Yuu Yamamoto
Screenplay Supervisor: Mamoru Sasaki
Compose: Joe hisaishi
Performance of the acronym: Makoto Fujiwara
Character design: Yoshitaka amano
Mechanical projects: Studio Nue (Shouji Kawamori and Kazutaka Miyatake)
Animation directors: Kougi Ohkawa, Norio Hirayama
Artistic director: Geki Katsumata
Producer: Michio Morioka
Production: Toho Co. Ltd., Toho Eizou Co. Ltd., Studio Nue, Dragon Productions Co. Ltd.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/