Roujin Z

An odd feature-length anime which haphazardly mashes genres and ideas that, while curious, aren't completely successful together. I'm not sure if it was meant to be a comedy or a straight sci-fi nightmare, but it tries mixing elements of both and their clash hurts the whole.

The plot is out-there and interesting, a concerned rumination on the looming near-future in which young are outnumbered by old, their careers hampered by the need to care for aging family. To address this worry, and liberate the fresher generation, a major metro hospital has developed (what else) a fully self-contained cybernetic bed, complete with built-in exercise routines, bathing capabilities and self-defense mechanisms. Katsuhiro Otomo handles the screenplay and many of the mechanical designs, and boy, does it feel a whole lot like Akira in places. Particularly the last hour, when the bed inevitably gains sentience, staggers through the city with a test subject strapped to its chest and swallows up machines in a gale of techno-organic vines and limbs.

The crazier bits are nice to look at, detailed and smooth in motion (if not quite to the intricate level of Otomo's masterwork), but the flat character designs and overly simplistic storytelling leave a lot to be desired. Also, not entirely a knock on the film itself, but my copy randomly swapped subtitles for dubs around the halfway mark and the English voice acting is downright unbearable.

Roujin Z is a film that is entertaining, but if you have the English dubbed version of the film, there will be some inconsistencies in the dialogue. Example: The movie takes place in Japan, with obvious visual references and talk about the beach at Kamakura, but the English dialogue also talks about various American things.

The film is basically a hilarious take on the robot gone insane story, where an experimental bed for elderly patients become simply a mental bed. The characters are especially enjoyable, including the old guys at the nursing home who often have a "Grumpy Old Men" style of insulting.

Roujien Z starts out being a wonderfully vicious satire of society's treatment of the aged. We see a young nurse taking care of an almost vegetative geriatric, one of the many old and infirm that would be in a nursing home in the USA. He is then selected to be the guinea-pig for a new, completely automated caretaking robot, a sly jab at the dehumanizing sterility of geriatric care. The story maintains its high energy and grinning cynicism until the robot goes insane and decides it is the old man's wife; from here it becomes a rather confusing action movie before pulling itself together in time for a poignant ending. Still worth watching, if you can find it.

A simple movie straightforward message to the viewers, personally didn't feel anything from the movie I think a bit more could be done to show it more effective to the viewers. The artwork was awesome, Japanese old-school art is always great.

It was a cynical comedy that was depicted serious problem of an aging society and care for them. A nursery experiment by robots was done in the name of Ministry of Health and Welfare. They said that pushing to nurse them was just exhausting time of youger people, so the robots would solve all of them. Recently I watched a TV program. It showed the possibility of AI would serve as someone to talk to them. That's why I couldn't laugh over it as just a fiction.

Of coure, the thoughtfulness is a vital to care them. If you would take for own parents and elderly parter, I don't think all of them have love with the care completely. That's just an another thing.

I felt a prototype robot acted like Tachikoma from Ghost in the Shell. Just it had one of parts like a brain, so was it Otomo's design type? It seemed to be influenced by Kubrick, Ghost in the Shell and other works about robots. But it was convincing as much as it won them!