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Roujin Z
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Let's care for the elderly… with robots!
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:CreationDate: 2012-09-23 19:38:47
:Id: anime/review/roujin-z
:tags: - anime
- review
:rating: 4
:original: https://www.easternkicks.com/reviews/roujin-z
Written by OOTOMO Katsuhiro (大友 克洋, "Akira", "Memories",
"Steamboy"), directed by KITAKUBO Hiroyuki (北久保 弘之, "Robot
Carnival", "Golden Boy"), this is a tale about old age, AIs,
transforming robots, the welfare state.
The story: an elderly man get chosen to be put into a prototype
mechanised medical bed, which should provide him with full
life-support and assistance, much better than what could be
accomplished with more manpower-intensive care in a standard
hospital. Haruko, the nurse who used to assist him, is sceptical. The
AI in the bed is very keen to help the old man, and with some
unexpected input from a team of sprightly old hackers in the
retirement home, it takes on the personality of his deceased wife, and
decides to bring him to the beach. And, given that the bed is
essentially a transforming robot capable of incorporating whatever
machines it finds, stopping it is not an easy task.
This movie is an interesting piece of anime history: it was originally
released in 1991, 21 years ago, just 3 years after Akira. Japan had
been feeling the pressure of its ageing population for some time
already, and it's no surprise that writers like Ootomo, with a SF
slant, would think of technological solutions. But, like any good
writer, Ootomo did not just assume that technology would "magically"
solve all problems. Technology is designed, built, and deployed by
people, and people make mistakes, people have personal goals, people
have different opinions. And the road to Hell is paved with good
intentions. Accordingly, this movie shows, with humour and without
lecturing, that complex problems require complex solutions. Properly
caring for the elderly requires human-level intelligence and empathy,
and if your self-improving AI is to meet the challenge, it may well
learn to empathise, and do anything in its power to make the old man
happy. Building the bed out of what is, essentially, a military-grade
multi-purpose assault tank might not have been, in retrospect, the
smartest of ideas :)
I don't think that releasing `Solid State Society`_ and Roujin Z to the
English-speaking world just three weeks apart was an intentional
choice, but they are very close thematically: they are both reflecting
an the consequences to society of having too many old people who can't
look after themselves, and who have no family to look after them. Both
movies present technological solutions (or would-be solutions) to the
issues, both movies deal with AIs, man-machine interfaces, and the
importance of "humanness". If you can stand the 20 years of distance
in the drawing and animation techniques, I strongly encourage you to
watch both: they're good "food for thought".
.. _`Solid State Society`: ../gits-sac/
