The 1995 film is my only experience with the series, so this was sillier and hornier than I was expecting, and it was interesting to see scenes from that reappear here in very different contexts.

Stylistically it’s a really pleasing blend of modern and old fashioned in a lot of ways. 1980s designs with very current animation; datamoshing and Deep Dream-esque effects alongside more familiar representations of digital and analogue artefacting; not updating the timeline so that 2025 is still part of the cyberpunk future; leaving in the comic’s footnotes knowing that most viewers now can pause at will if they want to read them.

That last part is limited, though. Where a comic lets the reader go forward at their own pace and reread easily if needed it can be hard to keep up with the show when it is throwing around political intrigue and worldbuilding at a rapid pace.

Don’t get me wrong the film looks incredible and those moody, lingering shots are absolutely gorgeous and haunting, but it feels like at some point in painstakingly animating all of this they forgot to make the rest of the film. What I thought felt like the midpoint of the plot thrusts straight into the the ending.