Of the returning characters featured in Blade Runner: Black Lotus, the most prominent one seen in the series’ initial two episodes is Doc Badger, the pawn shop owner portrayed by Barkhad Abdi in 2017’s Blade Runner 2049, who aids Elle in her attempt to navigate the strange and unfamiliar world she finds herself in in exchange for protection against a local gang of lowlifes. The atmospheric composition of select scenes, like Elle illuminated in the green fluorescent glow of an automated delivery truck’s headlights or the climatic courtyard fight at the end of second episode wherein Elle brandishes a katana while lit in ethereal neon red, are particularly striking, as are the numerous easter eggs and iconic locations seen throughout Elle’s introduction to the city.
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In the hands of Aramaki and Kamiya, the first and second episode of Blade Runner: Black Lotus already boast a marked improvement over the directors’ previous series Ghost in the Shell:SAC_2045in terms of its visuals and action.
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The world will certainly look a little familiar to Blade Runner fans. And yet, something unexpectedly is triggered deep inside of Elle’s programming, allowing her the ability and strength to overpower and kill her would-be executioner before fleeing aboard an self-driving delivery truck bound for Los Angeles in search of refuge and answers to her own mysterious nature.
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Though she does not immediately understand herself, Blade Runner fans will recognize why Elle cannot fight back: she is in fact a “replicant,” a synthetic android created to impersonate and serve humans who, after the events of Blade Runner, were prevented from doing harm to humans even in self-defense. Mercilessly hunted for sport by a group of gunmen, Elle finds herself mysteriously unable to do any harm to people chasing her. Set in the year 2032 - 13 years after the events of Blade Runner and 17 years before the 2017’s Blade Runner 2049 - Black Lotus centers on the story of Elle, a young woman who awakens in an abandoned building in the desert with a lotus tattoo on her shoulder and no memory of how she got there. A 13-episode CG animated series directed by Shinji Aramaki ( Appleseed) and Kenji Kamiyama ( Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex), Blade Runner: Black Lotus may not be the anime that fans of the series had hoped for or imagined when it was announced back in 2018, but it nonetheless proves itself worthy of the distinction.
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Nearly four decades after Scott’s film first premiered in theaters, and only four years following the release of Denis Villeneuve’s 2017 follow-up, the inevitability of a Blade Runner anime has finally been realized. The idea of an anime not only inspired, but explicitly set in the universe of the 1982 sci-fi noir then was never truly a question of “if,” but rather only a matter of “when.” From iconic films like 1995’s Ghost in the Shell and 2001’s Metropolis, to lesser known but no less influential works like Mobile Police Patlabor and the 1987 OVA (original video animation) Bubblegum Crisis, the popularity and maturation of anime as a globally recognized artform and the aesthetic precedent of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner are inextricably bound to one another.
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That visual language would go on to inspire not only a generation of filmmakers, but animators as well, as Blade Runner’s indelible cultural footprint was seen and felt through innumerable references throughout some of the most popular works of Japanese animation.
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Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? laid the foundation for the visual language that defines so much of cyberpunk to this day. Before either William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades anthology, or even the novel by Bruce Bethke from which the genre would go on to derive its very name, Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Philip K. To say that the cyberpunk genre as a whole owes an immeasurable debt to Blade Runner feels like an understatement.