Shinichiro Watanabe got to direct a Blade Runner short for the upcoming movie, Blade Runner 2049. It rules.

Blade Runner: Black Out 2022 is a short that fits in between the original movie, which took place in 2019, and the new film. This short is part of a project to fill in key historical events that took place between the two movies. The last one showed the rise of the Wallace corporation, while this short’s aim is to explain the fall of the Tyrell Corporation. The event that would lead to the Tyrell Corporation’s destruction is referred to in the title of the short; Black Out.

On to the plot:

The short takes place three years after the end of the original film. We are quickly briefed on some events that happened since then. One, the Nexus 6 has been retired. In case you don’t remember, these were the model of Replicant that Roy and his gang were. Two, that the Tyrell Corporation has moved on to the Nexus 8, a new model of Replicant with a standard human life cycle. And finally, three, that this new Replicant’s deployment in society sparked the Human Supremacy Movement. The film doesn’t explain what exactly triggered this, but I would assume the creation of nearly indistinguishable Replicants with human-length life-spans would naturally trigger some of the societies deep-rooted fears of being made obsolete. It is also explained that this movement utilized the Replicant Registration database to identify and hunt down the Nexus 8 Replicants. This intro is backed with some excellent animation showing disgruntled civilians beating Replicants.

We then cut ahead. Some thugs are cornering a Replicant in an alley, and a guy we later learn named Iggy (who looks like a younger version of the character played by Lennie James from the 2049 trailer) jumps down to her rescue. I’m not going to walk through the entire plot point by point, but here is the general gist of what goes down in this short. Iggy and the girl steal a gas truck and drive down a highway. We learn that they plan, along with the help of a human ally, to detonate an EMP over Los Angeles – this would ostensibly wipe out the Replicant Database – while simultaneously destroying the magnetic backups housed in the facility they are taking the truck to. We see Gaff in police headquarters and learn that the military is now in charge of hunting down deserters; Replicants were being used as soldiers. During a flashback – featuring some fantastic animation from Shinya Ohira – to Iggy’s time in the military, we learn that both sides of the conflict were using Replicants as soldiers, and that the right eye of a Replicant has a serial number on it (Iggy references this earlier when he says, “perfect right eyes” to the girl). We then jump to the facility they are bringing the truck to. The girl jumps down and delivers a fight scene reminiscent of Pris’s flips from the original, but this time with the fluidity and possibility of distinctly inhuman movement that animation offers. Iggy takes out guards with his guns and then watches as the girl is killed. During this, there is cross-cutting to the command center that the EMP was launched from, and we see the guy helping them sabotage the EMP trajectory, so it’s positioned over LA. Iggy moves the truck into position in the facility while the EMP is simultaneously detonated over LA. Flying cars drop out of the sky, and the city enters Black Out. Iggy walks out of the fire and destruction caused by the truck, now sporting an eye-patch and holding his right eye in his hand.

The short ends by explaining that it would take years after the fall of the Tyrell Corporation before the Wallace Corporation would take over production of Replicants. This is the event covered in the previous short.

So, to just come out and say it, I absolutely loved this short. It’s an absolute joy from start to finish. Seriously. This is awesome.

It’s the kind of thing I’ve always wanted to see but never held out hope for. And it’s all made even better since Shinichiro Watanabe directed the short. Shinichiro Watanabe is best known in the West for helming the space-western anime Cowboy Bebop. Bebop has had the unique pleasure of penetrating Western pop-culture because of its placement and importance in launching Cartoon Network’s late-night television block Adult Swim – alongside shows like Space Ghost. A key reason that Bebop caught on with the West has to do with how absolutely Western it is. Watanabe fills the series with references and homages to Western cinema, and the relative Japanese-centric cultural elements one might expect from anime is almost nonexistent for long stretches in Cowboy Bebop. Bebop’s reputation precedes it by now, and I don’t want to dwell on a show that is familiar to even the furthest from the anime sphere for too long, but I think it’s worth pointing out that, without Blade Runner, the show likely wouldn’t exist. Watanabe’s vision of Mars and most of the other planets traveled to in the show, is clearly inspired by the original movie; the cities look like slummier, less metropolis-like towns that one might find outside of the main cities in this imagined future. Even some of the tracks on Yoko Kanno’s legendary OST for Bebop sounds like more jazzed-up versions of the laid-back tracks from the calmer parts of Vangelis’s soundtrack.

Other than Bebop, Watanabe has helmed a multitude of projects. His directorial debut was the OVA (Original Video Animation; they’re like prestige mini-series released in theaters) Macross Plus, a show in the Macross anime universe (the West will recognize Macross by its American name, Robotech). The show, while featuring transforming robots (this is where Transformers took Star Scream from) and areal dog-fights, is aesthetically a Blade Runner throwback in many regards. It’s interesting to note, as well, that this show features a giant hologram woman, with colorful hair, which looks awfully similar to a shot in the Blade Runner 2049 trailers. Watanabe has also helmed: Samurai Champloo, which is a hip-hop fused Samurai TV series; Kid’s on the Slope: a coming of age story of jazz obsessed high schoolers; Terror in Resonance: a show about disaffected youth perpetrating acts of terrorism in modern day Tokyo; and Space Dandy, which is a show about a guy named Dandy and his travels through space while accompanied by a talking cat and sentient vacuum cleaner. To say that Watanabe’s work is varied would be an understatement. I point this all out because while it’s clear that Watanabe himself is highly influenced by Western culture, as evident by quite a bit of his work, so too are the animators he brought on board for this short.

Animator names aren’t something that really penetrates the dialogue of anime for American fans unless you’re amongst die-hards and fanatics, but I find it particularly interesting who Watanabe decided to recruit for the short. Kouichi Arai, Mitsuo Iso, and Hiroyuki Okiura all contributed key-animation cuts (key-animation is essentially the main drawings for an animation sequence; these guys are the reason that certain parts are better animated than others) to Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, the anime TV-Series based off the manga by Masamune Shirou, as well as classic anime staples like Neon Genesis Evangelion, FLCL, Mobile Suit Gundam, and Watanabe’s own series, Cowboy Bebop and its related movie. Ghost in the Shell, in all its various adaptations and iterations – 1995 masterpiece directed by Mamoru Oshii; Innocence, the sequel to the film, based on Shirou’s sequel manga; two seasons of prestige TV anime and a movie inspired by the original manga and films; as well as now a new series of OVAs and a feature-length film featuring a new interpretation – are clear by-products of the splash that Blade Runner made in 1982. Of note as well, due to their tie to arguably the biggest anime in the west, are Shinji Hashimoto and Tasuyuki Tanaka. Both men contributed legendary animation cuts and scenes to Katsuhiro Otomo’s seminal 1988 film, Akira. Akira, much like Ghost in the Shell, is a direct by-product the original Blade Runner. Akira’s inspiration can be gleaned by simply starting the film and watching the introduction to neo-Tokyo, a city that would fit perfectly next to Ridley Scott’s vision of Los Angeles in 2019.

I think it’s fair to ask, as this point, why I would spend the time researching and writing this portion of the review. Short answer: I’m a massive anime fan, and this stuff is fascinating to me. I don’t think this covers it, however, because it’s not just my love of anime that made me interested in this. Blade Runner is the main reason that I love film and science fiction as much as I do It opened my eyes to an entire world. And that isn’t a unique experience owned only by me. Blade Runner has stuck around for as long as it has because of how incredibly vivid a vision of the future Ridley Scott managed to capture in the movie. Its influence on Western culture is well known and chronicled by now, but Blade Runner was and still is so powerful that it punctured cultural boundaries and bled into the minds of creative people in the anime industry all the way across the Pacific in Japan. I think this short manages to capture a microcosm of that film’s influence: a director whose career can be directly tied to the original film, and animators who made their mark in the industry working on projects that only existed because of it. Blade Runner is a special film, and if this short is any indication of what’s coming down the pipeline on October 6th, Blade Runner 2049 will be a special film as well.