Fist of the North StarFist is CP? Fuck I had no idea, my first anime movie ever, LOVED that film!
Zangetsu.. I love The Guyver movies.Dude... The Guyver was the shit back in the day
Fist is CP? Fuck I had no idea, my first anime movie ever, LOVED that film!
Quote"Transhumanism is about how technology will eventually help us overcome the problems that have, up until now, been endemic to human nature. Cyberpunk is about how technology won't."
— Stephen Lea Sheppard of RPG.Net, on the relation between transhumanism and cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is a Speculative Fiction genre centered around the transformative effects of advanced science, information technology, computers and networks ("cyber") coupled with a breakdown or radical change in the social order ("punk"). A genre that is dark and cynical in tone, it borrows elements from Film Noir, hard-boiled Detective Fiction and postmodern deconstruction to describe the Dystopian side of an electronic society.
The plot will more than likely take place Twenty Minutes into the Future in some City Noir, Industrial Ghetto or Crapsack World that tends to be marked by crime, cultural nihilism and bad weather, where cutting-edge technology only ends up being used by everyone for the sake of selfish profit and pleasure ("the street finds its own uses for things").
Heroes are often computer hackers or rebels, antiheroes almost to a man. These characters — "criminals, outcasts, visionaries, dissenters and misfits" — call to mind the private eye of detective fiction. This emphasis on the misfits and the malcontents is the "punk" component of cyberpunk. On the other hand, major villains are almost inevitably Police States or multinational conglomerates led by powerful businessmen with a number of gun-toting Mooks and corrupt politicians (or even an entire nation) at their beck and call.
If the work dates from The '80s, there's a good chance that there will be a theme of East Asian economic dominance, with the evil corporations being sinister zaibatsu (possibly masterminded behind the scenes by yakuza) and Asian-sounding brand-names liberally scattered around. Examples from the Turn of the Millennium and beyond are likely to swap Japan out for China.
Expect the scientific philosophy of transhumanism to be a feature, what with Artificial Limbs and cable jacks in the skull that allow access to artificial realities. Artificial intelligences and artificial humans (sometimes corrupted) are everywhere, while Everything Is Online. This leads to a theme of "loss of distinction between real and artificial" on which philosophical and existential conflicts about transhumanism can arise, such as questions on the nature of identity and "What Measure Is a Non-Human?."
The genre's vision of a troubled future is often called the antithesis of the generally utopian visions of the future popular in the 1940s and 1950s, but keep in mind that it is not a term that should be applied to every Speculative Fiction dystopia or Bad Future ever in the history of the genre, and does not need to always have an anvilicious Science Is Bad message to it.
Cyberpunk tends to be pretty hard on the Mohs Scale of Sci-Fi Hardness, usually lingering between a 4 and a 5. This makes it one of the more realistic genres of sci-fi, but also makes older stories be very prone to Zeerust. William Gibson himself, considered the godfather of the Cyberpunk genre, has said that he was massively shortsighted on the advances in technology that would occur over the next three decades. The infamous "three megabytes of hot RAM" in Neuromancer are laugh-inducing to a modern audience who consider an eight gigabyte MP3 player to be one of the cheap and low-capacity ones.
Cyberpunk is also quite distinctive in its focus on Social stories in Asimov's Three Kinds of Science Fiction. It certainly has Gadget and Adventure stories within the genre as well, numerous in fact, but Cyberpunk is a genre that focuses heavily on the impact of technology on society itself, possibly more than any other genre of sci-fi. Given that it's a more cynical genre than others, it particularly focuses on the negative impact of technology on society, but with the emergence of Post-Cyberpunk, portrayal of societal impact of technology has become more neutral and sometimes even positive. It's hard to condemn speculative technology when it becomes actual technology and we realize that, hey, it's not so bad.
Is Fist Dystopian or post-apocalyptic? I'm kinda leaning towards the latter since everything I see in Fist is pretty much in ruins. And Dystopian societies usually reflect an intact civilization, but with its very foundations crumbling apart from within (that which cannot be seen as easily as a post-apocalyptic world). But who knows, you might be right. Heck, it could be both.
Of all the recommendations here I can't think of any that have not been mentioned yet. Is Astroboy (Tetsuwan Atomu) considered a light form of cyberpunk?
Tetsuo the iron man
This times a million. The only cyberpunk you need that isn't Blade Runner.
(I mainly referred to a few main written texts of reference, and there was one in particular I found really interesting. If you're interested I can post the name up later).
Surething. I'd like to check it out.
It really isn't.
Quoth the geniuses at TV Tropes:
Cyberpunk is a Speculative Fiction genre centered around the transformative effects of advanced science, information technology, computers and networks ("cyber") coupled with a breakdown or radical change in the social order ("punk"). A genre that is dark and cynical in tone, it borrows elements from Film Noir, hard-boiled Detective Fiction and postmodern deconstruction to describe the Dystopian side of an electronic society.
The plot will more than likely take place Twenty Minutes into the Future in some City Noir, Industrial Ghetto or Crapsack World that tends to be marked by crime, cultural nihilism and bad weather, where cutting-edge technology only ends up being used by everyone for the sake of selfish profit and pleasure ("the street finds its own uses for things").
Heroes are often computer hackers or rebels, antiheroes almost to a man. These characters — "criminals, outcasts, visionaries, dissenters and misfits" — call to mind the private eye of detective fiction. This emphasis on the misfits and the malcontents is the "punk" component of cyberpunk. On the other hand, major villains are almost inevitably Police States or multinational conglomerates led by powerful businessmen with a number of gun-toting Mooks and corrupt politicians (or even an entire nation) at their beck and call.
If the work dates from The '80s, there's a good chance that there will be a theme of East Asian economic dominance, with the evil corporations being sinister zaibatsu (possibly masterminded behind the scenes by yakuza) and Asian-sounding brand-names liberally scattered around. Examples from the Turn of the Millennium and beyond are likely to swap Japan out for China.
Expect the scientific philosophy of transhumanism to be a feature, what with Artificial Limbs and cable jacks in the skull that allow access to artificial realities. Artificial intelligences and artificial humans (sometimes corrupted) are everywhere, while Everything Is Online. This leads to a theme of "loss of distinction between real and artificial" on which philosophical and existential conflicts about transhumanism can arise, such as questions on the nature of identity and "What Measure Is a Non-Human?."
The genre's vision of a troubled future is often called the antithesis of the generally utopian visions of the future popular in the 1940s and 1950s, but keep in mind that it is not a term that should be applied to every Speculative Fiction dystopia or Bad Future ever in the history of the genre, and does not need to always have an anvilicious Science Is Bad message to it.
Cyberpunk tends to be pretty hard on the Mohs Scale of Sci-Fi Hardness, usually lingering between a 4 and a 5. This makes it one of the more realistic genres of sci-fi, but also makes older stories be very prone to Zeerust. William Gibson himself, considered the godfather of the Cyberpunk genre, has said that he was massively shortsighted on the advances in technology that would occur over the next three decades. The infamous "three megabytes of hot RAM" in Neuromancer are laugh-inducing to a modern audience who consider an eight gigabyte MP3 player to be one of the cheap and low-capacity ones.
Cyberpunk is also quite distinctive in its focus on Social stories in Asimov's Three Kinds of Science Fiction. It certainly has Gadget and Adventure stories within the genre as well, numerous in fact, but Cyberpunk is a genre that focuses heavily on the impact of technology on society itself, possibly more than any other genre of sci-fi. Given that it's a more cynical genre than others, it particularly focuses on the negative impact of technology on society, but with the emergence of Post-Cyberpunk, portrayal of societal impact of technology has become more neutral and sometimes even positive. It's hard to condemn speculative technology when it becomes actual technology and we realize that, hey, it's not so bad.
No offense, but that looks more horrible than Tank Girl's live action adapation.
Which is a happy coincidence that they both co-star Malcolm McDowell.
Well, I'd be disappointed if a Fist of the North Star film turned out to be a pacifist wunderland-fantasie.
Or "Pachifist" for that matter
Hardware
Tank Girl rules.
Cyborg 2 (1993) is pretty sweet, basically an early 90s low budget take on Blade Runner/The Terminator, with a young Angelina Jolie as a prototype cyborg who receives words of wisdom from a staticy TV displaying a cyberpunk Jack Palance. Pretty dope.