So I've been hosting movie nights for the 20somethings at work...which created a question.

[sir pball]

Showing them things that they generally don't know. We started with Clue, universally adored, I mean, Tim Curry…but then, since we're all kind of geeky, we took a side tour into anime and cyberpunk. Our most recent weekly plays I pick the movie), in order, were Ninja Scroll, Blade Runner, Akira, and the 1995 Ghost in the Shell.

Ulterior motive here…show them a great pure anime film, a great pure cyberpunk film, and then two of the greatest anime cyberpunk films of all time. I asked them to decide between Akira and GitS, which is the better "cyberpunk film that's an anime" versus the better "anime that's a cyberpunk film" and gave them until Monday to decide.

So, six twentysomethings vs. you guys…what say you? I'll update Monday when I have all their answers…and I'm not telling you mine until then.

[JoseBalow]

1. Akira!

[sir pball]

3. Respectfully disagree!

Make no mistake, Akira is an S-tier film…artistically it's almost incomparable, as a pure anime it's hands down the best.

But as a cyberpunk film, IMO it falls a little short; the plot is definitely cyberpunk-adjacent but goes a little light on the tech as well as going into supernatural/inexplicable phenomena, body horror, and lot of other things that diverge from CP. It does all that excellently, I'm not looking down on it, but it's more than CP is a part of the film, rather than it being a CP film.

GitS, on the other hand…hoo boy, it. may be more cyberpunk than Blade Runner. It straight gives Neuromancer a run for the money in my book. And the animation, while not Akira-level, isn't exactly bush league either.

[sdfernando]

2. I'm old...not into anime or cyberpunk

even though my entire career was in computer tech.

Loved Clue but I will go with the original Blade Runner. Rutger Hauer was truly amazing!