I love seeing how companies market media. Saying Roujin Z is “from the director of Akira” isn't exactly untrue; the genius Otomo Katsuhiro did the mechanical design and script, and the result looks and feels like an Otomo work should, but he wasn't actually the director. That role fell to Kitakubo Hiroyuki, who honestly has enough credits of his own to warrant the DVD cover saying “from the director of Blood: The Last Vampire” or “Golden Boy”, but I guess Akira had most of the cache back then, even if there's barely anything to connect it to Roujin Z. For starters the latter is much closer to a comedy, and while things still revolve around the future of technology, a mechanical bed for seniors gone insane is a bit of a far cry from the complete annihilation of Tokyo and/or civilization. If they were really cheeky they could package it as the overture to Kitakubo's Black Magic M-66, as the government builds the precursors of the killer cyborgs, but I digress.
The “robot takeover” is a more farcical thing here, posing not as a top-secret military project but as a commercial technology, meant to care for Japan's aging population. Their ten-minute presentation of the Z-001 machine and how it takes care of all the inconvenient and dirty medical care for the elderly Kijuro Takazawa is somewhat undermined—if only to us as the viewers—by the fact that the same people had kidnapped him not one scene ago, as a guinea pig to showcase their crazy invention. Why him? Because it's funny for us to see a random senile old guy pining for his wife and developing more wrinkles by the day get picked out of his apartment by a bunch of suits, but more importantly because it gets his caretaker Haruko riled up against the system. More than Haruko, they managed to get her other patients into the game too, and boy did they find a crazy retirement home to mess with.
Although quickly enough a group of hacking retirees and their socially engaged volunteer nurse become the least of the government's issues, as first Takazawa manages to connect to the internet through the Z-001, then pilots it like a budget mecha suit, until finally the Z-001 even manages to develop a consciousness for itself. The whimpering voice of Takazawa soon becomes the signal of the quadropod bed rolling all around the city, barging through pachinko parlors in search of his dead wife while government agents try and figure out how to deal with the mess they made trying to solve Japan's aging crisis, and Haruko and her seniors chase the rogue Takazawa on the streets and over the net. Even as they play the crisis straight, it's clearly a comedy of errors that Otomo's characters and mechanical design are perfectly equipped to handle.
The insanity snowballs from there when the Z-001 takes on Takazawa's wife's identity and the government fractures into the merely grumpy and actively malicious, but there's no point to describing all the details. Roujin Z is a bite-sized work at just under 80 minutes, longer than many OVAs of the early 90's but still a sub-movie package. What worked for the time, I assume, was the irony. If Doomed Megalopolis' razing of Tokyo was ironic closing out the year of Japan's economic bubble burst, then Roujin Z's miracle of technology failing to solve Japan's aging population in spectacular fashion coming out at the exact same time is a smart second helping. Nowadays that irony is probably somewhat lost even as Japan's aging crisis hasn't slowed at all, but the mix of Otomo's messy machine, Kitakubo's timing and comedic use long shots, and a cast that can't seem to communicate to save their life is plenty to enjoy in a short time.