A lot of people talk about how many Hollywood movies and television shows are inspired by anime and manga. It’s impossible to ignore when everything from The Lion King to Avatar has some influence in the anime world. But there isn’t as much talk about when the opposite happens, when anime are inspired by movies coming out of Hollywood.
This happens a lot more often now, when everything is so easily accessible around the world, but there are several well-known older anime that have surprising roots in Western films. Here are 10 nostalgic anime that were inspired by Hollywood movies.
10 Fist Of The North Star / Mad Max
Fist of the North Star has almost a word-for-word identical plot as Mad Max. Both series take place in a post-nuclear war wasteland, where there’s little food and drinkable water, and everyone is constantly fighting over it. Where Mad Max spends a lot of time with characters with guns and cars fighting each other, Fist of the North Star takes more of a martial arts approach, giving it its own spin on the concept.
9 Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory / Top Gun
The Mobile Suit Gundam franchise in general borrows heavily from other films, as discussed further below. But Stardust Memory takes on a different tack from some of the other series. It follows a group of soldiers who are training to be pilots, with varying levels of success.
The main character, Kou, is widely considered to be the best of the rookie pilots, but he’s noticeably chastened when things go wrong and he has to work his confidence back up even through tragedy.
8 Lupin The Third / The Magnificent Seven
Lupin the Third has tons of influences from James Bond films to the novels of Agatha Christie. But one of the bigger influences is The Magnificent Seven, since that also features a team of people with different skill sets who work together against bigger opponents. Where The Magnificent Seven were ultimately heroes, Lupin and his gang, though also heroes, are also thieves who get roped into mysteries and other troubles.
7 Golgo 13 / James Bond
James Bond is the main character in many Hollywood movies, and like Golgo 13, he goes on a lot of missions and adventures in those. Golgo 13 is a professional assassin who travels the world getting his job done. He’s often being tracked himself, and he has a team of people he works with who make him gadgets and help him modify his weapons and vehicles to better get the job done.
6 The Big O / Batman
This 90s anime is very clearly based on The Dark Knight as seen in 90s movies and television like Batman Returns and Batman: The Animated Series. The main character is a vigilante working in a city full of corruption, not dissimilar to Gotham, and he has a butler who aids him as he fights crime in a giant mech suit called The Big O.
5 Astro Boy / Pinocchio
Osamu Tezuka is often considered the father of manga in Japan. His style, which mimics Disney style in a lot of ways, has heavily contributed to the way that manga characters are drawn even today.
So it’s no surprise, given his affinity for the Disney look, that his manga stories sometimes copy Disney stories too. In the case of Astro Boy, the story is very similar to that of Pinocchio. Instead of a puppet, however, Astro Boy is a robot who strives to be more human.
4 Mobile Suit Gundam / Star Wars
Mobile Suit Gundam began airing shortly after the release of the first Star Wars film. The references and influences in the series are obvious. Almost the entire series takes place in space, it features a teenage boy who’s a prodigy piloting spacecraft he’s never piloted before, and the Gundams all fight with laser swords that look suspiciously like lightsabers. That’s not even to mention that Char Aznable’s character design looks like someone just copied Darth Vader’s. There’s even a revelation about a villain actually being a family member of one of the heroes.
3 Metropolis / Metropolis
Katsuhiro Otomo’s Metropolis doesn’t even bother to hide its influences. It’s based, very loosely, on a 1949 manga by Osamu Tezaku, but Tezaku’s manga also has its own influences, being inspired itself by the 1927 film. Both film versions of Metropolis take place in a futuristic city in which part of the population are oppressed for the sake of keeping an upper echelon of people living comfortably. 1927’s Metropolis features a working class rebelling against this status quo while the oppressed folks in the 2001 version are robots.
2 Bubblegum Crisis / Blade Runner
Blade Runner has defined the cyberpunk genre in many ways, and there are very few cyberpunk texts and films out there that aren’t in some way influenced by it (as seen by the next entry on this list). Bubblegum Crisis ponders similar themes as Blade Runner, with humanoid robots working for humans and often becoming weapons in their hands. It’s got a noir feel, with a focus on police dealing with robot-related crimes, not unlike Blade Runner itself.
1 Ghost In The Shell / Blade Runner
Ghost in the Shell is an even more famous example of an anime clearly influenced by Blade Runner. The series also deals with ideas of what it means to be human in a world where anyone can replace the biological parts of their bodies with robotics. It also deals with the moral implications of treating robots like people or the opposite: treating beings that seem to think for themselves and have feelings as objects.