Appleseed

A lesser adaptation of a Masamune Shirow manga, director Kazuyoshi Katayama's Appleseed doesn't come close to scaling the same cyberpunk heights as either of Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell features or Science Saru's recent The Ghost in the Shell television series (and, if we're being completely honest, this OVA isn't in the same league as Black Magic M-66 or Manga Video fav Dominion Tank Police either). Although Katayama's film fails to adequately translate the core appeals of the Appleseed manga - a beautifully rendered work that is, as the volumes go on, increasingly a futuristic, special tactics slice-of-life seemingly informed by newsagent holds on every motorcycle engineering or firearm magazine the author can lay their hands on - it does develop dropped threads about human estrangement in a seemingly perfect city built by androids. 

In a way this dull, chummy film even anticipates Oshii's Patlabor: The Movie (released the following year) by beginning with a stylised suicide that, in the fullness of the story, spells doom for this forward-looking city. Cop-turned-terrorist Calon Mauthos, who conspires with cybernetic criminals to hand over an enormous gun platform to deliberately ill-defined foreign interests, actually acts upon the alienation that is threaded throughout the first two volumes of Shirow's manga. This bubbling sense of disaffection with utopia was promptly dropped as Shirow developed as a draftsman of speculative weaponry, knife combat and muscular female physiques. Pleasantly rather than expertly realised by a pre-Gunbuster Gainax, this Appleseed plays like a bigger budget pilot episode for an unrealised TV series. Sort of like The Real Ghostbusters for Combat Magazine and Monthly GUN subscribers.