Roujin Z

_Roujin Z_ is a wonderful film and a must-watch for devotees of 90s cel animation. Hiroyuki Kitakubo and Katsuhiro Otomo borrow liberally from Shinya Tsukamoto's _Tetsuo: The Iron Man_, released two years prior. Kitakubo and Otomo strip a great deal of the nihilism and anxiety from _Tetsuo_, but the ambivalence toward technological advancement and militarization remain intact.

The film's narrative also borrows a bit from the structure of Sophocles' _Antigone_, with the heroic nurse Haruko challenging conventional state-sanctioned morality with an uncompromising worldview of her own.

Overall, highly recommended.

Anime with a typical apocalyptic ending.

An odd feature-length anime which haphazardly mashes genres and ideas that, while curious, aren't completely successful together. I'm not sure if it was meant to be a comedy or a straight sci-fi nightmare, but it tries mixing elements of both and their clash hurts the whole.

The plot is out-there and interesting, a concerned rumination on the looming near-future in which young are outnumbered by old, their careers hampered by the need to care for aging family. To address this worry, and liberate the fresher generation, a major metro hospital has developed (what else) a fully self-contained cybernetic bed, complete with built-in exercise routines, bathing capabilities and self-defense mechanisms. Katsuhiro Otomo handles the screenplay and many of the mechanical designs, and boy, does it feel a whole lot like _Akira_ in places. Particularly the last hour, when the bed inevitably gains sentience, staggers through the city with a test subject strapped to its chest and swallows up machines in a gale of techno-organic vines and limbs.

The crazier bits are nice to look at, detailed and smooth in motion (if not quite to the intricate level of Otomo's masterwork), but the flat character designs and overly simplistic storytelling leave a lot to be desired. Also, not entirely a knock on the film itself, but my copy randomly swapped subtitles for dubs around the halfway mark and the English voice acting is downright unbearable.