The 10 Best Cyberpunk Anime of All Time
You’ve read all of William Gibson’s novels. You’ve seen Blade Runner so many times that you can quote it verbatim. You’re on your 30th play-through of Cyberpunk 2077. Like any scrappy citizen of a hi-tech, low-life future, you’re itching for a new score—something to get you through the Bad New Days of tomorrow. What you need is cyberpunk anime, neon-drenched digital worlds to jack into when real life starts feeling like dystopian fiction. These are the 10 best cyberpunk anime of all time—and who knows? Maybe they’ll offer you some coping mechanisms for surviving the modern era. Starting your own lawless biker gang sure sounds therapeutic!
Ghost In The Shell
Ghost In The Shell is the gold standard, a quintessential cyberpunk anime franchise. Directed by Mamoru Oshii, the 1995 film Ghost In The Shell single-handedly changed the face of sci-fi anime forever. It’s the story of Motoko Kusanagi, a cyborg who works for Public Security Section 9, a clandestine government organization that combats cyberterrorism. After the populace comes under attack from a hacker named Puppet Master, Motoko and her team mobilize to take down the threat. While the film features more action sequences than you can shake a circuitboard at, it also offers an equal amount of philosophical questions. What’s the nature of the human soul? Can consciousness be digitized? If your body is replaced by cybernetic parts like some human ship of Theseus, are you still yourself? There are no easy answers—not every problem can be solved with a bullet. Sorry, Motoko, I know bullets are kinda your thing.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
One of the leading cyberpunk anime of the 21st century, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is a ten-part tragic romance that takes place in the world of the Cyberpunk 2077 video game. Set in dystopian Night City, the plot follows a young man named David who struggles to survive alongside his single mother. After a tragedy leaves David alone in the world, he decides to throw his hat in with a team of edgerunners—cybernetic mercenaries who sell their skills to the highest bidder. Seduced by the money and power that come with the job, David is ultimately led down a dark and criminal path towards self-destruction. This series will make your heart pound, your palms sweat, and your eyes water—all normal biological functions. David wouldn’t know, he traded his flesh and blood for machine parts a long time ago.
Ergo Proxy
An esoteric gem, Ergo Proxy is as cryptic as it is underrated. The story is set in the domed city of Romdeau, where humans and androids live protected from the ecological disaster beyond the walls. After a mysterious virus causes the robot population to become homicidally self-aware, Re-l Mayer is dispatched to investigate alongside her android partner Iggy. While on the hunt for answers, she encounters augmented humanoids known as “Proxies,” said to be the next step in human evolution. Dark, dreamy, philosophical, and pulse-pounding, this anime feels like a Phillip K. Dick novel that got a mid 2000s cybergoth makeover—I mean that as the highest praise.
Trigun
Trigun is technically a Western, but peel back the rootin’ tootin’ exterior, and there’s cyberpunk circuitry underneath. It’s the story of Vash the Stampede, an outlaw with a sixty billion double dollar bounty on his head—an astronomical sum in any universe. Yet despite his reputation for being a walking natural disaster, he’s actually a really nice guy. Well, “guy” may not be the right word here. His supernatural gunslinging abilities suggest that there’s more to Vash than meets the eye—he might not be fully human. Beneath the grit and gunfights, the series’ cyberpunk tone stems from its sense of quiet desperation. It’s a show about little people trying to get by in the vast and unfeeling future—place just as hostile as any stretch of Western desert.
Psycho-Pass
A textbook cyberpunk title, Psycho-Pass is set in a near-future metropolis where government surveillance is the norm. Monitored by a complex AI known as the Sibyl System, civilians are assigned a “crime coefficient,” a numerical value based on their likelihood to commit, well, crime. If a person becomes mentally unstable, their crime coefficient rises, leading to their arrest or execution. The plot follows Akane Tsunemori, a rookie cop tasked with tracking down “latent criminals” before they can resort to violence. What happens when a serial killer shows up whose crime coefficient never rises above normal levels despite his rising body count? You call in a group of legally sanctioned criminals to hunt him down like human bloodhounds. It’s Blade Runner meets Minority Report—you’re gonna love it.
Akira
A neon jewel in the cyberpunk anime crown, Akira gives Ghost In The Shell a run for its money. Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, the film follows a group of biker gang teens living in Neo-Tokyo—rebuilt from the old Tokyo after it was destroyed in a modern world war. Lawless teen Tetsuo is content revving engines and cracking rival gang member skulls, but his priorities change when he’s contaminated by an escaped government experiment. After developing telekinetic powers at an alarming rate, Tetsuo begins to lose his grip on reality—threatening to tear the world to shreds unless his comrades can stop him. Ultimately, this is a cyberpunk story of friendship. Friends don’t let friends turn into cosmic horrors and rip apart the fabric of the universe now, do they?
Megalobox
Megalobox is set in a world that’s beginning to show signs of cyberpunkerky. The wealth gap is widening, the poor are poorer than ever, and the rich profit from morally dubious new tech. The newest bit of bread and circuses for the masses is “megaloboxing,” a sport where corporate-sponsored cybernetic fighters duke it out for supremacy. When all hope of social mobility seems lost, a working-class hero named “Gearless Joe” comes along—a young man whose lack of technological augmentation is his greatest advantage. It’s sci-fi Rocky, the story of a poor underdog waging a one-man war against the tech industry, punching his way to victory the old school way—with flesh and bone.
Serial Experiments Lain
Like Megalobox, Serial Experiments Lain is set in a world where cyberpunk dystopia is just beginning to take root. The story follows reclusive middle schooler Lain, whose days of isolation are interrupted after she gets an email from a classmate—a dead classmate. The formerly deceased girl claims she’s received new life in The Wired, a digital realm that resembles the early 2000s internet. The girl also swears she’s found spiritual enlightenment in cyberspace, and that God is hidden deep within the circuitry. A new interpretation of the phrase “deus ex machina,” Serial Experiments Lain is the story of one little girl’s search for enlightenment in the bowels of the machine. The answers to all her existential questions are crackling somewhere in the circuitry, but she’ll be shocked by what she finds.
The Animatrix
An anthology that takes place in the same world as The Matrix films, The Animatrix fills in the narrative gaps. Ever wonder how the robots took over? Check out The Second Renaissance sequence, and you’ll find out. Harrowing, horrifying, and deeply human, The Animatrix provides a play-by-play of exactly how the Wachowski’s world went to hell in a virtual handbasket. While the world of The Matrix could be considered post-cyberpunk (because the machines won), The Animatrix gives glimpses into a bona fide cyberpunk past. A past where humans built robots to make life easier… until robots stopped listening. Then things got a lot harder for us. Be warned, the film features some seriously disturbing scenes, with atrocities committed by humans and robots alike. Humans were the instigators, but once the robots took the nickel-plated gloves off, we never stood a chance.
Cowboy Bebop
While Cowboy Bebop avoids sprawling cityscapes that cyberpunk is known for, this star-faring series captures that genre at its core. The stage is set in a recently colonized Solar System, where the long arm of the law hasn’t quite reached distant worlds, and Earth’s cosmic backyard feels more like the Wild West. Bounty hunter duo Spike and Jet know that crime pays—especially when criminals can be turned in for cash. While the pair chase down do-badders, they also attempt to get distance from their own shady histories. If there’s anything this series will teach you, it’s that the past can’t be outrun forever. Loneliness and lawlessness are space cowboy’s only companions on the starry trail. Like William Gibson’s Night City, everyone in this universe is out for themselves.
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