Appurushîdo [Appleseed] (1988)

(On DVD, March 2008) I’m not sure how I managed not to see this film in two decades, but I’m glad I finally did: While I’m not going to say it’s a classic, it does feel like a historically important anime: It presents big (if sometime naive) SF ideas in the only form that could do it justice at a time where CGI was still a fanciful notion. Politically, it’s a bunch of pretentious nonsense with cardboard world-building, but it still works more than it doesn’t. Some sequences have aged well even despite the primitive animation, but I’m guessing that the brain does a lot of back-filling on behalf of the animators themselves. It amounts to a predecessor to Ghost In The Shell in more ways that one (the conceptual artist is the same, and the sensibility is identical), which automatically makes it interesting to whoever is a fan of SF, anime or animated films for adults.