Q: What do Philip K. Dick and Cowboy Bebop have in common?
A: Hackers, cyberpunk flourishes, and now a leading animation director.
Shinichirō Watanabe, whose Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo are undisputed masterworks of the anime canon (and whose Kids on the Slope is also great, and whose Terror in Resonance I still need to watch) and whose face is apparently attached irrevocably to a few different pairs of bizarrely outdated sunglasses, will bring Japan’s second-greatest contemporary animation talents (with apologies to Makoto Shinkai; all hail Hayao Miyzaki) to a short animated film called Blade Runner: Black Out 22, which takes place during a power outage a few years after the events of the original Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?–adaptation-turned-Harrison Ford–vehicle and a few decades before the events of the upcoming sequel, Blade Runner 2049. (It also takes place a few more decades before the events of Cowboy Bebop, in 2071, but who’s counting!? Here’s a teaser:
The jury is still out on whether Rick Deckard could match Spike Spiegel in a fight (eh, actually, it really isn’t) and if Dick is actually the founder of SCRATCH, the migrate-to-electronics movement.
Big blasting replicant in the flames? Time will tell. | Sony Pictures Japan
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