siderite I can't really badmouth the film, since it is made in 1988, I mean, My Neighbor Totoro and Dragon Ball Z come to mind from that time. But the animation is in the old school Japanese drawing style that looked so much like bad Disney, the sci-fi concepts are outdated and the story itself is nothing more than a cop story set in the future. It is not easy to find anything good that stands out, even if in itself is not a bad movie. It is just so boringly average that it becomes instantly forgettable.It does explore some aspects of humanity, as the story revolves around a fictional future city in which people are happy, but without choice. However it is difficult to buy into the story when terrorists and average people have guns and often turn to a life of crime. I mean, you have no choice, but you can buy a military robot suit and start killing people with high powered guns?The more recent reinventions of Appleseed are more watchable than this, I have to say. Perhaps there is a reason why the 1988 version is so difficult to find.

I B Masamune Shirow's best-selling manga is packed with political, ecological, technical, and literary references and subtexts, but it's also an enjoyable science-fiction adventure. Although this version was made on a limited budget, and is showing its age, it's still worth its shelf space. Gainax, whose artistic success with Royal Space Force: The Wings Of Honneamise (1987) the year before had established their reputation for excellence, made the video adaptation, although the quirky design touches they brought to their own film are absent in Appleseed. Olympus is 1980s Japan with robots, which nicely highlights many of the concerns Shirow is expressing. References to US shows and the classic science-fiction film Blade Runner (1982) are easy to spot.

SteveRaccoon The animation quality here is decidedly below par IMO, regardless of the age of the OAV. The plot itself makes sense, but the characters don't.This might sound picky, but considering that the city of Olympus is almost exclusively populated by living machines, would YOU feel comfortable there as a human? Would any machine ever emulate human arrogance, short-sightedness and greed quite so effectively? I doubt it. There are some pointers towards this in the movie, but only when the team can be bothered to put them in, by and large the 'bioroids' (or whatever they are) are interchangeable with human characters. Seems sloppy to me.The main characters seem to have some kind of emotional entanglement, though no light is shed on this. Little light is shed on the backstory at all, a great pity. The short length of the film coupled with the focus on mecha and the crime means that we don't see any character depth. The groundwork's all down, yet we're left with no finished product. A cropped version of this OAV would have made a great TV episode, once some character sub-plots had been established.The highlights of this short film are the mecha designs and the action/espionage.The flaws really start to show through once you've had a chance to digest all the goings-on, so I couldn't recommend this for owning, but it's certainly worth a watch or two! Whilst this review is mostly negative, I really do think it's worth your time to watch this, but it's not something to rush out and buy. In a nutshell: A watchable wasted opportunity.

apollo231 Nothing special to see here, the animation has being outdated and the plot is a typical futuristic era. This film has an original story, but if it doesn't have an original plot or characters, so in my opinion it's not worth seeing. I'm not saying that the movie was bad, it was just a typical anime story and I thought I watched this movie like a thousand times. So if you are looking for something original see another thing.