Dark Future Canon - What Constitutes and What Influenced Classic Cyberpunk? - Part 2: Foreign Influences and the 1990s

 

Asian cultures and countries played a big role in the imagination of genre fiction produced in the west. As time progressed, foreign media did as well. The entire catalog of John Woo movies from the 1980s and early 1990s defined cyberpunk coolness. Shadowrun especially took a lot of influence from Hong Kong cinema and martial arts flicks. A Cyberpunk 2020 character – as well as any Shadowrun character – would want to have gunfights that felt like The Killer or Hard Boiled. Hong Kong action films – simply by being filmed in Hong Kong – added a certain cyperpunk feel to them for their western audiences. 

John Woo's Hard Boiled (1992) was the pinnacle of gunfight coolness.

Anime, as a source of canonical entries into classic cyberpunk, entered the picture a little after Hong Kong action cinema, which was mostly due to the western market opening up relatively late. The quintessential cyberpunk anime – and also probably the most well-known Japanese animated feature film in the west – was Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988), based on his manga series of the same name. Akira was special insofar as it provided a lens into cyberpunk media as a whole, but through a distinctly Japanese lens. Where western cyberpunk media often projected Western cultural traumas into the near future – the stag-flation of the 1970s, the Vietnam war, Reagan/Thatcherism – Otomo’s work in many ways did the same for his post-war generation’s experience with the violent student uprisings in Japan, and with the deep-seated Japanese cultural trauma of the atomic bomb. 

Akira (1988) is still one of the most visually influential pieces of animation in western genre film.

What happened in anime in a broader sense, though, was that Japanese creators looked to western media, and took their own spin on things. At the same time that Otomo worked on Akira, Kenichi Sonoda and a team of writers and animators created the long-running original video animation series Bubblegum Crisis. The series took a strong influence from the existing western media cyberpunk canon, to the point that the lead character’s name was directly taken from Blade Runner, alongside a large selection of foley sounds used throughout. This was not a one-off thing, quite a few anime from the tail end of the 1980s up until the late 1990s were quite open about their influences. The 1995 OVA series Armitage III took it so far that the series’ main antagonist’s character design was a thinly veiled allusion to Blade Runner’s main villain Roy Batty, from the peroxide blonde shock of hair to the leather jacket. This series, too, employed the same foley libraries western movies like The Terminator, Aliens and Robo-Cop used. 

The four heroines of Bubblegum Crisis (1989) - wearing machines to fight machines.

Both Bubblegum Crisis and Armitage III took some influence from Blade Runner’s android tropes, each with their own spin. The former featured a team of three women vigilantes who take on out of control combat androids running rampant in Mega Tokyo, while the latter features a society in which anthropomorphic androids have taken on various roles within society. At the same time, Cyber City Oedo 808, AD Police and Genocyber – three distinct OVA series – all put their own spins on the broader cyberpunk genre. Cyber City stars three super-criminals who get recruited as special police operatives, much in the same vein as Escape from New York. Genocyber deals with the creation of an artificial life-form by a defense corporation, intended to become a super-weapon, echoing some story beats from Alien. And lastly, AD Police was a spin-off of Bubblegum Crisis and features similar themes, but with a stronger focus on police work. 

Armitage III (1995) features a hyper-sexualized heroine android fighting for her right to live against a corporate conspiracy.

Another entry in classic cyberpunk anime was the Battle Angle Alita original video animation, based on the manga series of the same name. While decidedly more post-apocalyptic, Alita still focuses on classic cyberpunk themes of post-humanism, cyborgs and low-life protagonists battling an overbearing, dystopian system of oppressive corporations and governments. The manga series itself unified a plethora of different influences from western genre media, first and foremost taking influence from the Mad Max movies and their general post-apocalyptic mood. The eponymous protagonist of both manga and anime (and, James Cameron produced movie adaptation in 2019) is a cyborg woman, found in a trash heap by a cyber doctor, who puts her back together and adopts her as an ersatz daughter. The anime adapts the story lines from the first third of the manga series, dealing with questions of morality in fighting crime in an anarchic city state, love between cyborgs and humans, and generally the issue of fighting an oppressive system. Alita featured some gruesome violence, but also a lot of quite stunning pieces of mechanical design, while wearing its western influences proudly on its sleeves. 

One of Battle Angel Alita's (1994) themes is if cyborgs and humans can love each other - a theme Armitage III also deals with.

And then Ghost in the Shell happened. The 1995 movie, directed by Mamoru Oshii who previously directed several live-action movies as well as two Patlabor – Mobile Police Force anime feature films, was probably the bookend to the classic cyberpunk era, the culmination of a almost twenty years of books and movies laying out a dark, dystopian but not too unlikely future. Based on a manga series by Masamune Shirow, the Ghost in the Shell movie made a number of remarkable choices. While the manga was fairly deep in its science-fictional implications, it was also very strongly Japanese in its sensibilities, mixing overtly and often gratuitously sexual scenes with somber reflections upon human nature and engaging with hard science fiction tropes before then swinging around and dealing in outright slapstick humor. The animated movie boiled the sexuality down to a few – odd – nude scenes, and excised the humor all together. The result was a hyper-technological, hyper-real, philosophical and gritty exploration of the human condition, corporate power and artificial intelligence. Ghost in the Shell left a deep mark, to the point where it directly and heavily influenced the Wachowski Sisters to making The Matrix only four years after its debut in Japan 

Moody, brooding and philosophical, Ghost in the Shell (1995) was the early pinnacle of cyberpunk entertainment.

After Ghost in the Shell things changed in cyberpunk media. The times themselves had shifted. The long 1980s were finally over, the malaise seemed lifted in the culture. Cyberpunk was now no longer futuristic, it was retro-futuristic. The futures imagined in the late 90s no longer quite looked as dire, worn out and gritty as the futures the 80s imagined. Things were looking up again. The specter of nuclear war had dissipated. The Cold War was over. The (American) economy was strong as never before. Reaganism seemed like a thing of the past. And life in the west - especially in America, especially if you were a member of the white middle class - was overall pretty good. There was not a lot to fear any longer except for the implications of a cloned sheep and the ominous predictions of various millinarisms like the Y2K bug.

Until two airliners crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City.

Next up I will look at the evolution of cyberpunk media past the 1990s up until the 2010s.