One of the traditional differences between American and Japanese animation is their portrayals of advanced technology. America has shied away from it, favoring creatures, fairytales, and preindustrial societies. You can count Disney’s 2D sci-fi titles on one hand. Anime, however, has always been captivated by vehicles, robots, and futuristic cityscapes, and it portrays them in a way all its own.
Take the early motorbike chase in 1988’s Akira, one of the most impressive sequences of animation ever made.
Those colossal, impossible apartment buildings, with their rows upon rows of living spaces.
Those stocky motorbikes, with their light trails and wakes of destruction.
Behind it all, a writhing tangle of cables and wires, and a people on the brink of revolution.
It’s brutal, but hypnotically beautiful. You could call it cyberpunk, absolutely, but then it’s a unique flavor of it, an otherworldly kind. I call it, uncreatively, the anime feeling. It can also be found in Ghost in the Shell, Evangelion, Battle Angel, and other contemporary Japanese titles. I’ve been disturbed and tantalized by it since I was young.
I think it’s the feeling of having gone too far. The feeling of technology unleashed, reproducing boundlessly, smothering humanity between its vulgar growths. People can live in its neon world – even enjoy it, like the bikers in Akira initially do – but they’re not valued in it. Machines don’t exist to serve humans; humans exist to feed the machines.
Flesh is outdated and outmatched in this world. When one of the punks is thrown off his bike, and his arm breaks under the wheel, my body reels. But the scene doesn’t dwell on it; that’s just what happens when flesh meets tech. We exist at the mercy of something much stronger than we are.
It feels like we’ve become so advanced that we’ve awakened something ancient. Perhaps a better name for the anime feeling is cyclical cyberpunk.