When on the hunt for the best cyberpunk anime of all time, you need to keep some things in mind. First, robots are cool. Second, lasers are cool. Third, number one is likely to be Ghost in the Shell.
This list is going to be appallingly biased because we are talking about art here, people. If you don’t understand the concept of subjectivity when it comes to such things, I can’t help you. So, will there be robots? Will there be lasers? Will the adventures of Major Kusanagi and friends be number one? Read on to find out.
The best Cyberpunk anime of all time
14. Blame!
While Blame! tends to fall into a more science-fiction category than cyberpunk, I have always considered both its environment and themes as the almost inevitable end destination of what a lot of cy🦹berpunk explores. After becoming massively reliant on a self-sustaining and automated structure to live, mankind finds itself reduced to the grit between the cogs.
The arrival of a mysterious stranger gives a small tribe a chance to make big changes before their own inevitable destruction. This also contains one of the most ridiculous pistols in anime history. It’s just awesome in general, so it is on the list. My article, my rules.
13. No Guns Life
No Guns Life is a noir-detective story about a man with a giant gun for a head. That sh🥂ould be enough to hook you on its own, frankly. Juzo Inui is a cyborg known as an Extended, built to fight an absolutely brutal war. Now that the war is over, he has taken on the role of a Resolver. He looks to help normal people when they run into problems with other Extended.
Everything is fine as long as he keeps his head down and stays off the radar of the various powerful factions who might have an interest in him. This all falls apart when a young boy needs his help and Juzo isn’t the type of guy to walk away when challenged. Before long, he finds himself face to face with a past he tried to leave behind. This is a fun time, and not enough people have seen it.
12. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
Studio Trigger hit a home run with Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. The series is set very specifically in the CD Projekt Red version of Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk universe, brought a great cast of characters that lured the audience in, made you emotionally invest, and then delivered an incredible personal finale for each and every one of them. The hook of the series is the focus given to the things that people will do to succeed within the ruleset of their environment, no matter how detrimental tౠhe resultant victories might be. Does all the damage really matter if you are winning?
11. Ergo Proxy
You know the story: bad thing happens, the human race is now on the verge of extinction, and we all live in weird little dome cities. It is a tale as old as time. In Ergo Proxy, humans and androids do what they can to survive a dystopian nightmare until a virus results in some of the androids committing murder. Unknown to most, a third element exists in this complex equation: the titular Proxies, almost god-like in nature and perha🔯ps capable of turning the fate of humanity around. This series has become required viewing for animation students over the years, with ꧒layers of life-like subtlety that sometimes feel left behind in the industry.
This one can be quite dense and will leave a lot up to the viewer. They are not afraid to explore philosophy just for the sake of doing so, so settle down and catch what you can. Ergo Proxy is ultimately an expl♒oration of the question that lies at the very heartᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ of cyberpunk: what does it mean to be human?
10: Psycho-Pass
I have seen Psycho-Pass unfairly referred to as being worth the first season only. While there is certainly an argument that Season 1 had the stronger cast of characters, this doesn’t mean that the later seasons have nothing to offer.
Psycho-Pass is ultimately a show about relationships and how we choose to define them. Everything is viewed through the lens of expectation, as all members of society are scanned; those likely to commit crimes are called “latent criminals,” and it becomes necessary to maintain a clean hue to your Psycho-Pass to avoid a run-in with the law. At the heart of the system is Sibyl, an AI that determines everyone’s fate via advanced tech called cymatic scanning.
While it is easy to focus on the societal, cultural, and psychological themes of Psycho-Pass, the heart of the series is about the ebb and flow of relationships and how we establish or demolish boundaries in our behavior based on available knowledge about individuals and institutions. The conclusion of Pyscho-Pass is that, ultimately, people cannot exist in the domain of each other’s influence and remain static, no matter how cruel the incentive to do so.
9: Paprika
In Paprika, a new form of technology that allows people to view each other’s dreams is co-opted by the main character in a bid to help people outside of the psychiatric center where she works. Things start to go wrong when the machines are stolen, and it is up to our heroine to help solve the mystery of who stole them.
Paprika leans heavily into surrealism to confuse and disturb the viewer, with some scenes playing out in the almost quick-switch nature of dreams. As characters are forced to question what is real and what isn’t, so is the viewer, with things becoming even more confounding as the movie explores the impact that both the real and the unreal can have on each other.
8: Bubblegum Crisis
It’s hard to imagine a release schedule like the one Bubblegum Crisis got happening today, but this saw eight episodes released between 1987 and 1991, covering a single season. The story explores Tokyo, which has been split in two by a massive earthquake, with both halves warring🦄 so brutally that the country of Japan was to be annexed.
The main focus lies on the Knight Sabers, an all-female group of hardsuit-wearing warriors who take on rogue robots known as Boomers. Just an all-around fun time, and a sterling example of anime of the era. It would spawn an assortment of other Bubblegum related things, and some other adjacent series like the A.D Police series and Parasite Dolls.
7: The Animatrix
The Animatrix was a big deal when it came out in 2003. Produced by the Wachowskis t🐻hemselves and pulling in some of the best directors and animators that Japan had to offer, this very much felt like the two directors paying back their inspiration by giving them time to shine with an IP that was, at that point, utterly enormous.
A range of short stories explore themes, occurrences, and historical meaning within the universe of The Matrix, and it is likely that this was the first anime movie for a lot of folks out there who were coming of age and had yet to experience classics that are yet to arrive on this list. The contrasting styles and apparent fun that everyone seemed to have with the subject matter make thꦐis an engrossing watch. Also, the soundtrack from Don Davis and Junkie XL just slaps.
6: Battle Angel
At barely over 50 minutes of runtime, Battle Angel tries to get a lot of the Battle Angel Alita manga covered in too short a time, but that is the only knock on it. It’s a fun romp through a weird world where young Alita finds herself taking on some denizens of the Scrapyard. I will say that the brisk pacing doesn’t allow for tremendous character development, as you move between story beats quite quickly. Still, the animation is wonderful, the action is cutting, and the voice acting is incredibly endearing.
5: Serial Experiments Lain
Serial Experiments Lain is an interesting fish when it comes to how you wish to define cyberpunk as a genre. In much the same way that cyberpunk will often explore what it means to be human, Serial Experiments Lain does an interesting jo🍸b of exploring what it means to be real. If a human being is little more than a reaction to a stimulus, with no way to confirm shared perception, then which is reality: the reaction 🤡or the stimulus?
After receiving messages from a supposedly dead girl at her school, Lain sets off on a journey to explore just such questions, embracing mystery and confusion on the hunt for what is true. The series runs through challenging themes like loneliness, the difficulty of connection even when that loneliness is conquered, mental health, and the aforementioned conflict of the human condition. Being a product of the ’90s, there is a deep obsession with existentialism and surrealism that has somewhat fallen by the wayside ever since.
4: Appleseed
The Appleseed manga has resulted in a bunch of different anime adaptations, and frankly, all of them are a good time. The 1988 original will always be one of my favorites, as it was the second anime that I ever saw. Another adaptation arrived in 2004 and had a sequel called Appleseed Ex Machina just three years later. We’ve had a series and another movie since then.
For the most part, Appleseed really leans into the whole “the world is awful, but this giant awesome city will keep you safe, except for all the murder” trope. Dual protagonists are badass Deunan, a normal human woman, and Briareos, a former human man. Briareos gets dumpstered in various ways, depending on the adaptation, and is now in an experimental cyborg body.
Most of the movies deal with large-scale threats that are likely to kill everyone because some character has gone off the rails one way or the other while also exploring how the change to Briareos impacts his relationship and friendship with Deunan. I honestly cannot think of any of these adaptations that I wouldn’t recommend.
3: Ghost in the Shell
Ghost in the Shell is another property where you have a lot to choose from. There has been a huge amount of output around this franchise with five animated moves, a live-action take (kinda weak, frankly), four different series, and then a bunch of straight-to-video stuff that ties into it all. The top recommendations would be the first animated movie, the sequel Innocence, and the Stand Alone Complex series. Frankly, bad Ghost in the Shell is still better than a lot of 💜other anime on its best day.
The original is a masterclass in animation, tone, world-building, and character development and has one of the greatest soundtracks in anime history. It truly is a fabulous exploration of how much of our humanity we can lꦍose before we are no longer hu🌞man and how the power of othering people is often a tool used by the most monstrous members of society.
2: Cowboy Bebop
An absolute classic; its scope and scale are a bit bigger than most cyberpunk, but we can sneak it onto the list because of its noir-infused detective vibes, dystopian setting, and wondrous explorations of philosophical issues like loneliness, separation, and existentialism. Director Shinichirō Watanabe hit this one out of the park and then proceeded to direct Samurai Champloo as proof that lighting does, in fact, strike twice. Often left unsung in the conversation is Keiko Nobumaoto. She was in the writer’s room on Cowboy Bebop as head writer and would also write on Watanabe’s other revered works, such as the aforementioned Samurai Champloo and Space Dandy.
Cowboy Bebop followed an episodic format, with most episodes having some form of self-contained tale to tell and an overarching narrative being spun out across all 26 installments. Cowboy Bebop is often used as a way to get people who have a formative inte🙈rest in anime to experience exactly how fun, energetic, emotional, and provocative i✅t can be, and is rightly considered one of the finest examples of the medium.
1: Akira
Akira is, for many people of my generation at least, one of the Big Three when it comes to the first anime that they ever saw and the thing that got them into anime in the first place. In college, everyone knew someone who had Akira, Fist of the North Star, or Ninja Scroll on VHS.
Akira has done so much for anime that an assortment of lies and embellishments have swirled for years in an attempt to explain why it has been so impactful. The reality is that this is just good art. It is anime done flawlessly, from the story and characters, the tension building, the trust in the audience, the absolutely one-of-a-kind soundtrack, and incredible visuals that helped push the entire medium forward. Akira managed to penetrate deep into the mainstream long before anime had become just another form of entertainment that we all had easy access to on the inte🌱rnet, which was a feat in itself.
