I tacked this cheap Blu-ray onto a Sentai Filmworks order for free shipping, hoping just for a coherent plot, knowing nothing about it. Boy was I in for a surprise! As the intro credits start rolling, I noticed the mention of composer Joe Hisaishi who would later do the scores for enormous films such as Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. I was quickly drawn in by the visuals and surprisingly decent voice acting; I often start an anime in English but if it sounds too poorly executed I'll switch to Japanese. Influences such as Akira, Megazone 23, and Madox-01 are readily apparent with the major difference being that Venus has a dystopian Mad Max law system which allows for activities such as gambling on dangerous monocycle racing. The illegal monocycle racing is extremely fun and I believe it made an impact on later film and games such as Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds, Square Enix, Poet Anderson, and perhaps even Star Wars Podracing. It just has that neat vibe you really didn't see much back then or even now for that matter. To top it off, one of the main characters is a reporter from Earth, hoping for an exclusive story but she's slowly finding out that life on Venus is rough. At one point she's in a sewer with her videocamera and I realized that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had come out just two years prior. I'm not saying she's April O' Neil but it's an interesting potential nod to the Western animated series. My biggest letdown was expecting to hear Cam Clarke at some point, given that he'd been in Akira and Ninja Turtles, but it's a silly one. This film has a lot to offer and while the action can get over-the-top, it's drawing beautifully well. If the soundtrack, visuals, plot, and voice actors don't interest you, I'd be surprised. In such a case, count how many times SONY is deliberately spelled wrong on electronics featured to avoid trademark infringement.
Review of Venus Wars
