It's always wonderful when classic, out-of-print anime make their way onto legal streaming services. While a full-blown restoration on a nice home-media format would obviously be ideal, the fact that we can sit here in the year 2025 and watch Manie Manie: Neo Tokyo at all is something to be thankful for, even if it's just a 480p stream on Crunchyroll. This is one of those iconic anthology films from the anime boom of the late 1980s that I've heard about often enough but never had the chance to see until now. If nothing else, it is an absolutely essential artifact for anyone interested in the history of the industry, seeing as it contains some landmark work from three of the medium's most renowned elder statesmen.

What's important to note for anyone unfamiliar with projects like Neo Tokyo is that this is an animation anthology in the strictest sense of the term. What we've got here are three short pieces that run between about ten to twenty minutes apiece, and there's really nothing whatsoever tying them together narratively, thematically or stylistically (save for the flimsiest of framing devices provided by Rintarō's short). The project was ostensibly created as a celebration and adaptation of author Taku Mayamura's short fiction, though there aren't any translated works of his that I have access to that could verify how faithful any of these films really are, and I have a sneaking suspicion that the directors are playing very fast and loose with any source material.

In short, don't go into Neo Tokyo expecting any kind of traditional moviegoing experience. Instead, what you have are three bite-sized exemplars of talented artists getting to cut loose and show off their skills. Your experiences are likely to vary wildly with each one, since they truly do stand apart from each other. The first, Rintarō's Labyrinth Story, is easily the most experimental and playful of the trio, at least so far as pure animation is concerned. Sachi and Cicerone's adventure through their abstract dreamland of spectres, sludge monsters, and sinister circus-folk has nothing at all by way of plot or character development; it is one hundred percent a mood piece, and you have to be down with the mood that Labyrinth Story is trying to create if you want to get anything out of it.

I'm rather inclined to enjoy surreal sojourns like this one, especially with such fantastical and creative imagery being animated with such lush precision. The exaggerated character designs and dynamic use of perspective make the whole sequence feel like some dark storybook that has come to life. The only complaint I have about Labyrinth Story is that I wish it were even longer, since I could have basked in a full-length feature of this wonderfully weird imagery. I'm also not sold on its function as the collection's frame story. We don't revisit Rintarō's short in between the other two segments, and the coda that it provides doesn't add up to more than a transition into the end credits. Still, if you took the extra couple of minutes that stuck to the end of the movie and reunited it with the rest of the short, you'd have a stone-cold classic of 1980s animation that is worth the price of admission to Neo Tokyo all on its own.

Next up is Running Man, which is decidedly not a stone-cold classic of 1980s animation, though that isn't to say that Yoshiaki Kawajiri can't cook up an entertaining little morsel of cyberpunk ultraviolence. The man was responsible for BioHunter, Ninja Scroll, and Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust after all. He knows how to draw grim violence like few others in the business do. It's just that, outside of the sheer spectacle of it's admittedly incredible racing sequence, there's not a whole lot going on in Running Man that will leave a lasting impression. The story of Zack Hugh, champion of the Death Circus, is as bone-simple as it gets: Zack is really good at racing these hellish nightmare cars, probably on account of his terrifying psychic powers, and he uses those powers to kill all of his competition; in a final fit of delusional madness, his powers lead to his own destruction. Zack isn't even a character so much as he is a heaving, grunting, muscular symbol of violence and pain.

What hurts Running Man the most, I think, is simply the passage of time. The images and themes of this short weren't even particularly novel back in 1987, but they were at least in vogue with the trends of the decade. Now, it is difficult to see the film as much more than a mere rough draft for the kinds of truly landmark cinematic moments that films like Akira and Ghost in the Shell would cement in the public consciousness in the coming years.

Speaking of Akira, we end on a much higher note with Katuhiro Otomo's Construction Cancellation Order, which is easily the most narratively ambitious of Neo Tokyo's chapters. I feel like the visuals of this film are just a touch more reserved than the two that came before it, which might be on account of Otomo's relative inexperience compared to Rintarō and Kawajiri, but the fleshed-out story more than makes up for any other shortcoming. It runs twice as long as either of the other films, and that extra room to breath goes a long way towards making Construction Cancellation Order feel much more like a proper film, even if it still clocks in at under thirty-minutes.

It's still a simple story, obviously, since Otomo only has so much room to work with, but I loved Tsutomu Sugioka's bleak and darkly funny quest to halt the runaway construction operations of Facility 444. Not only am I crazy about Otomo's lovingly animated technology and the lush backgrounds of the city, but this is the only one of the stories to have anything substantial to say thematically. After all of the ridiculous nonsense that Tsutomu goes through at the behest of the company that employs him, the short ends with a punchline that is simply perfect. If any of the shorts are going to resonate with a broad audience of modern anime viewers, I imagine it will be Construction Cancellation Order.

Even if you aren't sure about the other two projects, though, I still implore you to check out Neo Tokyo if you have a genuine love for the medium of animation a. It may be uneven, as every anthology film is bound to be, but this collection still stands tall as a time capsule for an essential era in the history of Japanese anime. Plus, it's not even an hour long, so you don't stand to lose much of anything if one or more of these films doesn't impress you as much as they (mostly) impressed me. Who knows? If enough people show interest in Crunchyroll's standard-definition stream of the picture, we might be able to convince someone to put this out on a proper disc with a remaster and the old English dubs.