Whatever Happened To 80s And Early 90s Cyberpunk Anime?

Oh hey, Studio Trigger are bringing it back

All anime fans of a certain age and particularly those whose teen years were associated with and defined by certain subcultures, remember the first time they saw one of those classic iconic moments in 80s cyberpunk anime. Be it the incredible Konya wa Hurricane opening of Bubblegum Crisis, the twins’ iconic dance scene in Tank Police, or perhaps, on the tail end of that wave, as things got more introspective and we began to see the development of a more distinctly 90s style, the murderous hate mobs of Armitage III and of course any number of iconic scenes in Mamoru Oshii’s seminal adaptation of Ghost in the Shell, set to Kenji Kawai’s haunting musical score.

At the time this stuff was making its way to our shores, I encountered Cyberpunk 2020. Funnily enough, R. Talsorian Games also published a Bubblegum Crisis tabletop RPG in the 90s, borrowing heavily from the CP2020 mechanics and even featuring a Night City cameo. It was actually a delightful glimpse into the amount of work that went into the anime, as the RPG’s sourcebooks were bursting at the seams with unused concept art for the OVA, which they’d translated all the accompanying notes for in order to give full writeups of all sorts of fancy tech which never made it onscreen, and of course, throw some playable stats onto them! It’s fitting then, that CDPR, fresh off acquiring the rights to the setting and possibly with similar memories to mine, went to Studio Trigger (Founded by former Gainax employees, Gainax of course, while best known for the likes of Evangelion, having cut their OVA teeth back in 1988 with Appleseed) with their proposal for a tie-in anime to go alongside their digital adaptation of Mike Pondsmith’s classic tabletop game.

I could have scanned the VHS boxart for all of these, if I had the patience to dig through my cupboards

Of course, Trigger are not the only collaborators CDPR brought in on this project. Edgerunners also has a prequel music video, much in the spirit of BGC’s “Hurricane Live 2032/33” VHS releases. This video is produced by Studio Massket, who handled KA work for Trigger on previous productions like BNA. This work manages an intensely emotional story all its own, which fits into the wider setting of the show beautifully. A reminder of the amount of work these supporting studios who often don’t get a lot of the credit and recognition they deserve put into so many works we associate with the big names in the industry, providing a bunch of the tweening, background work, and more that rounds out these productions.

Cyberpunk anime of course never went away, Ghost in the Shell alone is probably responsible for a fair chunk of the interest that brought the genre a revival in the 2000s with the likes of Standalone Complex being followed by stuff like Psycho-Pass, but the bombastic in your face nature of the classics had already by the late 90s and stuff such as Lain, begun to be toned down with more of a fixation on the philosophy. Even the ultraviolent outbursts of Psycho-Pass lack the artistically over-the-top rough edges of its 80s counterparts, it’s too slick and clean. Like the “Singapore dialled up to 11” future dystopia it presents, the sort of “Clean” cyberpunk setting you might see in a Mirror’s Edge game, in stark contrast to 80s cyberpunk anime, which has very much its own rougher aesthetic of contrasting chrome and grime permeating it. On the topic of nostalgia for the genre, I was very pleased while writing this article to see Microsoft Flight Sim has brought back Kai Tak airport in a recent update, the iconic approach of the planes over Kowloon Walled City has inspired many recreations such as the scenes of planes overhead in Ghost in the Shell. A staple of the genre even as the airport itself closed 24 years ago, an anachronism so delightfully embedded in the heart of what we imagine when we think of the term. I could go on AT LENGTH about Kowloon Walled City and its influence on the genre, but that’s its own piece for another time.

The social concerns of the 80s, of course, are prevalent in the anime of this era, a fear of automation driving ever-increasing working-class unemployment, many of these stories specifically tap into this with robots replacing much of the workforce. Of course, as we saw, the dystopian cyberpunk future we ended up with in the real world took a very different track, robots are expensive, after all, while human beings are the single-use disposable plastics of labour, inexpensive and easy to replace, regardless of the wider societal and individual costs beyond a business’ bottom line. The cyberpunk anime of the 80s ironically turned out to in some tragic ways be more prescient about the fates of regular people in the world of the future than they imagined in terms of the Japanese economic bubble which would all too soon burst, leading to the ensuing lost decades still felt to this day.

Edgerunners and the world it depicts naturally reflect this shift in the real-life concerns media such as this has always addressed. But it does so in a manner which eschews the “Apple-isation” of the aesthetics adopted by turn-of-the-millennium cyberpunk works, which gave us the oppressively clean environments of games like Mirror’s Edge, and instead features an impressive reprise of the dirtier, more “real” feeling visual stylings of its predecessors which I am so here for.

(Side note – I once participated in an impromptu couples’ debate over a meal over which city we preferred, Singapore or Hong Kong, where myself and the boyfriend of the couple opposite us passionately argued in favour of the one that comes across to us as a real organic, living place, warts and all, rather than a theme park)

Of course, major respect goes out here to CDPR’s environmental art team for their impressive work in their crafting of Night City, as every locale in the show, every single shot, has backgrounds painstakingly reproduced frame-perfect from the game. I’ve literally walked around Cyberpunk 2077’s Night city retracing every single scene in the anime, and felt something every time I walked into a familiar room. Of course, as a player of the game since before Edgerunners was released, I also had a sense of belonging every time the show went somewhere I am already intimately familiar with.

The fact that the anime nails this in the translation to a 2D style with this old-school 80s cyberpunk aesthetic is a testament to how good both groups of artists are at their craft. The detailed mix of colourful and dirty captures everything wrong with this world. It’s a testament to the visual feat that the world pulls off that interest in the game spiked once more off the back of the anime’s release, with those who had perhaps not realised before what a delight it is just to inhabit these spaces – and, being drawn to them through watching this.

Edgerunners has the introspection and philosophy that good cyberpunk needs, to be sure, but like its most iconic character, Becca, it’s loud and in your face when it wants your attention. It’s playful, violent, and unashamed to be so. It makes no apologies for it. And that’s why we can’t help but love it.

-Amy

“While you were watching Naruto, I studied the Mantis Blades”

Whatever Happened To 80s And Early 90s Cyberpunk Anime?