Cyberpunk: Edgerunners comes from the franchise that brought the world the beloved tabletop RPG and the chaotic mess of a video game that was 2077. The franchise is making its first proper leap to the screen, and it's doing so with the perfect style, look, team, and sense of history.
Cyberpunk has been around for decades, though it was named back in 1983. Only five years after Bruce Bethke coined the genre's moniker, writer Mike Pondsmith and publisher R. Talsorian Games laid claim to it with a hit tabletop game. That bold titling decision ensured that the franchise remained inseparable from its genre, even as both grew much more popular.
Edgerunners is an anime adaptation of the same universe occupied by the original RPG, all of its sequels, and the CD Projekt Red game. It's the first television adaptation of the property to be produced, and it comes to Netflix via the beloved Studio Trigger. Trigger is best known for its bombastic visually spectacular series like Kill la Kill, BNA: Brand New Animal, and Promare. The pitch of a Cyberpunk anime created by Studio Trigger is a no-brainer and fans are thrilled. A lot of big video games choose to head for the top shelf with movies or 10-episode live-action streaming series. Dozens of properties will be doing that over the next few years and plenty more will likely be promised and left unfinished. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, however, is the rare example of a great adaptation pitch.
Anime is not the origin point for the cyberpunk subgenre. It originated with mostly American literature in the 80s, which was inspired by the New Wave movement in sci-fi. The defining work of the genre in the United States is Dave Gibson's Neuromancer, but Japan joined the world of cyberpunk before it even had a name. There are two distinct movements in Japanese cyberpunk. Live-action films covered the movement with a focus on the music. Punk films popped up with tiny budgets and full music videos, combining the nascent rock movement with cheap practical effects. Anime, however, was the more successful and longer-lasting medium in the subgenre.
Cyberpunk in anime began with its most iconic entry, Katsuhiro Otomo's 1982 manga series Akira. The series was a near-instant runaway hit that vastly exceeded expectations and became the entry point into the world of manga for most western nations. The anime film adaptation was released six years later to comparable rave reviews and went on to be one of the most significant works of animation ever put to the screen. Akira is hugely influential, not just a watershed moment for anime in the west, but an inspiration to creators in the film's homeland. Akira inspired a wave of manga and anime features in the same genre, some of which have gone on to enormous fame in their own right.
Anime has been the medium that introduced most hardcore fans to the cyberpunk subgenre. Akira started the flood, and its influence is still felt in modern entries forty years later. The year after the beloved film was released, Masamune Shirow's landmark manga Ghost in the Shell began serialization. That widely beloved series has since been adapted into countless films and TV series, many of which are counted among the most beloved anime projects in the medium. Its one attempt at live-action success failed horrendously, but it has had a huge impact on live-action cyberpunk. Reportedly, the Wachowskis brought Ghost in the Shell to producer Joel Silver as their primary source of inspiration before making The Matrix. Ghost in the Shell and a ton of other anime examples of the genre consistently do it first and do it better than their live-action counterparts.
One of the unfortunate parts of cyberpunk created in the west is the way it depicts Japanese culture. Alternating between fetishizing and demonizing the perceived technological progress of the nation often lands the subgenre with some unpleasant orientalism. The evil mega corporations are almost always Japanese tech conglomerates, their villainous owners are almost always Japanese men ripped straight from early 20th-century cinema. Letting Japanese people craft these stories will almost always tamp down this issue, resulting in more inclusive and less insensitive material overall.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners enters into a long tradition of its medium and genre and proudly proclaims its intentions to succeed. Cyberpunk can work on film, on TV, in video games, in music, and in almost anywhere else, but anime is and has always been the best home for the genre. Manga artists were codifying cyberpunk before it had its name. Anime creators made some of the best examples ever to hit the screen. When Cyberpunk set out to bring its world to the screen, to introduce a new audience to the genre, it made the right choice by heading straight to Studio Trigger.
