The late 1980s up to the mid 1990s represented a real peak of cyberpunk in anime, with the obvious giant that is Ghost in the Shell joined by Bubblegum Crisis, Appleseed and Battle Angel etc but one OVA that can go overlooked seems to be Armitage III.
Armitage III (Amitēji Za Sādo)
1995
I think I can see why that might be so – Armitage just doesn’t seem as consistent overall, though the original four episodes are still pretty good; there’s mystery and tension, some nice reveals and great designs/scene setting with just enough character development for what I was after.
However, it’s still worth seeing if you’re a fan of the genre.
The classic ethical questions around Personhood are all there and in this series there’s some (not a heap) of political turmoil as a backdrop too, it’s a nice extra element to what is essentially a murder mystery at its heart.
The fight scenes are satisfying and the villain is pretty good too and Naomi herself is a great heroine though for me, her punk attitude comes across a touch forced(?) at times, I think she works better as a ‘conflicted’ rather than ‘cocky’ hero. Maybe it was some of the dialogue?
The OVA was edited down to one film and given a new English dub with some Hollywood folks (Kiefer Sutherland, Juliette Lewis) so I feel like the team behind the international release put some real effort into the series but Armitage III still seems to have more of a ‘cult classic’ status, rather than being as widely known as GITS.
As an aside, I did occasionally find her visual design to vary a little too much across promotional images/dvd art/episode/films, so much so that at times Armitage almost appears as two different characters (well, maybe not that different).
4 Stars
(Nearly ten years later a sequel film was made (Dual Matrix). You can see a jump in animation quality and the introduction of some CGI (mostly vehicles). And while I thought the story started a little slow (and Armitage behaves quite out of character at one important point) it was pretty good too, some of the fight sequences especially were great).
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I never had the chance to check out that series. I’ve heard about it for a long time and a couple people then recommended it to me, but it slipped through the cracks.
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I was the same with this one – it had been something I was aware of for a while but never found until last year. I definitely preferred the first but maybe both are worth seeing to have seen them, perhaps
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Gotcha. I certainly heard about it for a long time. It would be good to see both to compare and contrast everything.
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