Twenty years ago anime was such a weird, niche thing, now your mum watches One Piece.
Despite how mainstream elements of East-Asian society have become here, particularly anime, we are consistently still fascinated by the cultural clash of East and West, as we have been for years. The melting pot of globalisation has inspired classic anime like Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Redline, Samurai Champloo, Panty and Stocking, Black Lagoon, Tiger & Bunny, Baccano, Afro Samurai and more, and on the flip-side… throw a rock and you’ll hit a cartoon that has been inspired in some way by anime, it’s impossible not to.
Anything by Genndy Tartakovsky (Samurai Jack, Primal, Star Wars: Clone Wars, etc.), Teen Titans, Winx Club, Powerpuff Girls, Avatar the Last Airbender, The Boondocks, we could actually go on forever. The lines have been getting blurrier lately, like with RWBY, and a lot of shows just straight up referring to themselves as “anime”, despite being produced entirely in Western countries; like Castlevania, the upcoming Tomb Raider and Devil May Cry, etc. and believe us, we could argue the semantics of that until the sun burns out, but we’re more interested in the handful of times when this connection was at its most explicit; true anime anthologies inspired by Western works. How many of these do you remember, and why are they so sick?
Batman: Gotham Knight
Starting off strong, Gotham Knight is a collection of six shorts that supposedly fill in the gap between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight (but honestly that doesn’t make a lot of sense in the canon). This one is definitely style-over-substance, but what we have here oozes style, and is an excellent exercise in showing off fun ways to visually represent Batman.
The strongest short of the bunch, Have I Got a Story For You, is told in reverse chronological order from the eyes of four kids in Gotham, who each see Batman chasing a crook. One kid describes him as a terrifying living shadow, a shifting black mass disappearing and reappearing at will, another describes him as a literal Man-Bat monster, and yet another describes him as a robot.
All of these vignettes present Batman exactly as the kids describe, something that would be almost impossible to do as well in live-action, and that shows how Batman is perceived by the people of Gotham. The backwards order is a nice touch too.
More shorts include my personal favourite In Darkness Dwells, that sees Batman take on Scarecrow and Killer Croc in the Gotham sewers. The atmosphere of the sewers is so grimy and gross, accentuated by character designs by Takeshi Koike (presumed) that evoke Mike Mignola’s (Hellboy) work, and excellent compositing, an aspect of animation that is often overlooked. Deep black shadows and chromatic aberration used to achieve a filmic look make this one visually pop!
Finally, Working Through Pain is another standout, that sees a wounded Batman trying to find his way out of the sewers, intercut with flashbacks of him training to become Batman and ‘work through pain’. The final shot of him stumbling across dozens of discarded firearms is a poignant moment that’ll cut to the core of any Batman fan.
Batman is a perfect character for an anime examination like this. Each short is gorgeous in its own right, and speaks to Bats’ universal appeal. For follow-up material, see the Batman of Shanghai shorts on DC’s YouTube channel, and the Batman Ninja film!
Star Wars: Visions
Here’s one that we should all remember! We wrote a few articles on this when season one dropped, and you know, everything we said was correct. It was excellent, and the amazing creatives behind it, leveraging the vast possibilities of the Star Wars universe, seamlessly warped between comedy and drama, light-hearted and serious, dark and moody and serene, and every single one fit and felt so natural.
It definitely helps that Star Wars is already unashamedly inspired by classic Japanese cinema, so Visions was able to draw upon a rich history indeed, leading to insane genre mashups like The Duel, an actual ‘wandering ronin’ samurai type beat, but with lightsabers and the timeless style of Takashi Okazaki, and T0-B1, an homage to Astro Boy!
You can read our ranking of all nine episodes here. T0-B1 in particular ended up being a really special one, and if you liked that one you should probably rewatch director Abel Gongora’s latest work; the Scott Pilgrim anime! (Rewatch because you know you’ve already seen it a dozen times, it’s amazing.)
The Animatrix
The Animatrix is swelling with the creative spirit that defined the Matrix series, and perfectly captures what the Matrix series is all about as well as, if not better than, the actual trilogy! Supervised of course by the Wachowski sisters, this anthology features stories from within and without of the Matrix, but all of them feature the human elements that drive Neo, Trinity, Morpheus and the others to defy the nature of the Matrix, the desire to be free, curious, and achieve self-actualisation.
With the way the film trilogy went, there was definitely room to explore further aspects of the Matrix world beyond just the core cast, and these shorts provide just that. The best of these are World Record, directed and animated by the GOAT Takeshi Koike, about an athlete whose will pushes him past the limits of his own body so hard that he inadvertently breaks the Matrix, and Kid’s Story, about a young boy who feels the world seems more real when he’s dreaming than when he’s awake.
In addition to featuring a minute-long cut of animation from one of the greatest animators of all time; Shinya Ohira, it also adds a really nice piece of lore to the series that is actually referenced in Matrix Reloaded, that The Kid is the first person to achieve “self-substantiation”: escaping the Matrix without external help, emphatically proclaiming the message of this entire series, that we can’t be satisfied by a comfortable lie.
Beyond isn’t as heavy in subject matter, but is a really fun watch, featuring a ‘haunted house’ that is in reality a glitch in the Matrix, filled with anomalous rooms where the laws of physics, time, and common sense don’t apply. Second Renaissance is an excellent fictional history lesson, Program and Detective Story provide heaps of style, and Matriculated is an absolute gut-wrenching closer to round out the series. For follow-up… who knows what the future of this series has in store, if we’ll ever get that fifth film or not.
Halo Legends
The most mixed-bag out of this collection of collections, but unmissable for hardcore Halo fans! Seven stories from all across the Halo universe that really showcase just how rich and diverse this franchise is. Within the world of Halo, there are at least, like, twenty plot lines that could be their own series/film/game, which is why it’s so gratifying to get a glimpse into a handful of them.
From the Forerunners’ first encounter with the Flood and construction of Halo, the history of the human race, random soldiers locked in conflict, to seeing the victims of Dr. Halsey’s Spartan II program, the shorts can evoke hope, shame, sadness, elation, and all of it will leave you wanting to dive into the lore of Halo even more.
Finding the humanity in the strange inhabitants of this galaxy is something Halo Legends excels at. Highlights include Homecoming, where the layers of a Spartan II are peeled back as we get a glimpse into their ill-fated attempt to escape from the program, Odd One Out, a parody episode that introduces us to the hilarious Spartan 1337, who falls out of a Pelican and has to taken on a Covenant bio-weapon (which also has BONKERS animation that appears to be provided by industry legend Naotoshi Shida), and Babysitter, where a squad of ODSTs must form an uneasy partnership with a Spartan.
For further reading into Halo, there’s a really fun bunch of games you should try!
Hopefully what you’ve taken away from this is that our cross-cultural partnerships end up producing some incredible works, a creative spark born from one side that ignites an explosion of creativity elsewhere, combining the best sensibilities of both. Without this collaborative spirit, we might never have Metal Gear Solid, everything Megan Thee Stallion is doing, and… we might not have Supanova!
There’s a reason we’re obsessed with parodying, remixing, and homaging the great works from other countries, and the anthology format allows us to showcase the very best of this work! Let us know what your favourite anthological work is!
