has anyone else seen gunhed
i don't know if i would say it has any story similarities to ff7 but some of the grungy industrial visuals have a similar vibe to midgar (also, it's got some sweet robot miniatures)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Netsphere/comments/yi8f9c
(that's talking about the mangas blame! and biomega but you can see screencaps from the film)
I actually ended up watching it for the first time back in June, just after re-reading through
BLAME! &
Biomega again though I'd apparently never seen that particular Reddit thread before.
I was doing some poking around at some early mecha anime design influences like Shoji Kawamori, who's mentioned in that Reddit post as the person who built some of the physical props for that movie. I think I also ended up down a rabbit hole around the key people who influenced the look and feel of machinery and mech design, and he was one of a few people whose work I was digging into at the time.
I think I actually got onto that track when I was checking out earlier intersections of Moebius' inspirations connected to
Alien, crossing over through
Dune and other Western science fiction media filtering in to Japan between the early '70s and late '80s, as that influenced a lot of details in Miyazaki's manga
Nausicaä which is a MASSIVE influence on
Final Fantasy in general (like why Chocobos exist), but it's also a pivotal detail in Hideki Anno's own field of work as well. While doing that, I I ended up watching the OVA
Dragon's Heaven as well as checking out
this rather thorough dig into that OVA by Kenny Lauderdale (who has a few other REALLY interesting looks at older and especially more obscure anime). Those influences all cross over with
Wings of Honneamise,
Five Star Stories, and a couple of the early
Gundam films around the same time, which I also watched as those were all directly mentioned as influences to
FFVII.
All of those fed into and helped to shape anime around the same time as
Gunbuster which hits on how foundational Anno's stuff prior to
Evangelion still was as well as the importance in digging into the things that influenced it, as those were all a big part of shaping the designs that came to inform the more industrial and mechanical elements of
FFVII like Midgar and the Shinra Army robots along with films like
Patlabor 2. This was all happening at the same time that the
Devilman &
Violence Jack style of anti-hero had moved into Western Fantasy with
BERSERK while it also had its direct Western counterpart in the post-apocalyptic
Mad Max films, all of which were influential not just to
FFVII, but also to Tsutomu Nihei's manga.
With
Gunhed, I mostly checked it out as I wanted to get a sense of the inspirations that VERY heavily influenced Tsutomu Nihei's particular approach to the endlessly sprawling industrial architectural frontier, in tandem with the
Mad Max-style wandering hero archetype, and how those draw a lot from both the 80s cop films that Ridley Scott was making at the time after
Blade Runner, as well as how Mamoru Oshii's
Kerberos Saga portrayed a more near future-focused version of those things in Japan amongst other things.
BLAME! &
Biomega are much more artistic vignettes, but the core DNA of the cool biker hero like Kaneda from
AKIRA and Minami Kotaro from
Kamen Rider BLACK, are prominently present at the center of the type of heroic individual that Cloud's grown from as well, and some elements of that archetype are around in
Gunhead as well.
With
BLAME! &
Biomega especially, it's clear Nihei really connects with and both of those manga centrally focus on that type of the wandering hero that has a lot in common with Cloud but with very different ways in which it emphasizes those particular things. While I think
Gunhed's Texmexium definitely gives
Avatar's Unobtanium a run for its money in terms of the weirdest material resource out there, it's an enjoyable watch for an '80s movie from what I can remember (not sure if I made any direct notes about
FFVII when I watched the film and if I did, I don't have them immediately on hand from just a cursory Ctrl+F glance through my haphazard amalgamation of various things I've got laying around).
While I haven't checked out that link on
Evangelion &
FFVII, I can say quite confidently from what I've ended up digging through a few years back that there are a lot of important design parallels but that's also because Anno is extremely central to anime as a whole in Japan often seen as Miyazaki's successor as
THE person within the industry itself, and it's easy to see why when you look at just how many pieces of the development of various themes and styles he was involved with and how those grew along with his work. While there is a VAST amount of overlap, it's easiest to see the influences of
Evangelion on
FFVII because they're both contemporary to one another and had a massive impact in the West at around the same time – but they're really just two important pillars of a series of developing trends that touch on an entire landscape of things that Japan was focused on at the time.
It's why I decided to approach my analysis of the changes of the original
FFVII into the
Remake Project by looking at the landscape of that design language and its evolution as a whole, and while there's a particular focus over the last half century-ish from the late '60s & early '70s being the most foundational in building the groundwork for how things looked and were being talked about at the end of the '80s being the most directly influential. Even then, there're a number of things that have lingering pieces going back into the 1930s & '50s as well, like the Arthur C. Clarke 1953 novel
Childhood's End – which not only was a clear influence on ideas in the manga
Towards the Terra in ways that shaped both
Chrono Trigger and
Final Fantasy VII, but there are a lot of key elements of existential concepts that almost certainly inspired the entirety
Evangelion's Human Instrumentality Project and helps provide a much more clear understanding of the mindset going into losing oneself within that massive collective consciousness even as those same things shaped the concept of The Lifestream as an amalgamation of psychic energy migrating between Planets in
FFVII, or the cumination of those themes with the Gorgom's Creation King in
Kamen Rider BLACK representing those concepts in a way that influenced how
BERSERK represented the "Idea of Evil" in the swirling wills of the deceased that near-perfectly mirrors the final confrontation at the North Crater.
All of those are a big part of why things like the Whispers / Feelers in Remake are still wholly in-line with all of the foundational mythologies and influences that the original game was built off of, but they're being used in a landscape that's different and told by people who have different perspectives on that experience with age, much in the same way that the
Rebuild of Evangelion is probably the most similar type of project both in how it's retelling that story, but also by how the sociopolitical environment in which both Eva & FFVII were told were the same, and they're being re-told again in roughly the same space about a quarter of a century later, but when a lot of those struggles have become more deeply institutionalized rather than things collapsing and so there's a different way to talk about those things and where the dangers and struggles of confronting that type of a situation lie, and what exists at the end of that journey.
It's one of those things were it's hard to point to just a single thing, even when there's a veritable mountain of things that stand out on its own like with
Evangelion, as that itself and how it characterizes a lot of details are a continuum of other manga that are just as much an influence to FFVII from a totally different direction, it's been one of those things where I've just decided to go full in to the deep end on all of it.
On a bit more of an Evangelion & FFVII-note:
As
Rebirth is just on the horizon, I'm really looking forward to the middle chapter as it defines everything about where the final chapter goes. While the final
Rebuild of Evangelion film was a long time coming (thanks in combination to being existentially difficult and to
Shin Godzilla), I think that the way that
Rebuild ended is something that I've been thinking about a LOT in terms on
FFVII, and what sort of ending we'll end up getting from everything.
While the late-'90s were centrally defined by
Princess Mononoke,
End of Evangelion, &
Final Fantasy VII all having a very cosmically-focused conclusion centered around the, "everything comes to the brink and then leaves you stranded in a new world that's neither just the natural world nor the one that was being carefully orchestrated by those in power to consume it" as a defining theme. However, the end of
Rebuild of Evangelion tackles that with a much more personal focus that instead prioritizes how you can actually cope with something of that magnitude rather than leaving it like an unanswered question and an open trauma – which is that it's all just a part of learning how to grow up and rely on other people as the world changes around you.
While manga like
BERSERK &
Pygmalio certainly have a more overt focus on that type of journey from a story and mechanical standpoint (with
Pygmalio's being completed and
BERSERK's remaining in the hands of Miura's best friend after his own passing), I've always found in telling that despite their significant differences, the core trauma that Shinji & Cloud struggle with is the impulsive urge to just run away and disconnect from everything & everyone else.
While on the surface they don't have nearly as many visual similarities as say, Dragon Ball Z's SS2 Gohan & Cloud do, and Shinji is a far cry from ever even pretending to be the attractive motorcycle-riding silent protagonist in the way Killy is in
BLAME!, like Biggs comments on in Remake is that deep down and behind that survival mechanism he puts up as a front to try and be strong enough to face his own manipulation by a sinister and authoritarian regime with strong Christian overtones, Cloud is really still just like a kid and the
Remake project puts a lot more emphasis on the psychology of that side of the story that reflects how EXTREMELY SIGNIFICANTLY the extent of our understanding of issues like PTSD and other traumas have changed in the last 30 years.
That's why I've really enjoyed approaching things from just a VASTLY pulled back perfective, because you can see that a lot of the authors who created these works felt like the characters they portrayed, especially when it comes to Anno &
Evangelion, and even Kentaro Miura describes that both Guts & Griffith in
BERSERK are facets of himself. That's why when looking at how that story is a reflection of Cloud and all the understanding being put into who Sephiroth is in order to provide a clearer picture for the
Remake Project, it helps to emphasize WHY Cloud shapes himself into the quintessential "cool" character like
Killy /
Mad Max /
Guts, that doesn't really have any direct parallel of that archetype in
Evangelion. That's the core of the fundamental part of who Cloud TRULY is that has a lot more in common with Shinji.
This is the design detail that's why it's important to show that Zack isn't really like the image of how Cloud imagines a SOLDIER, and even when it boils down to THE Legendary SOLDIER Sephiroth who he still idolizes in his own traumatic way after the Nibelheim Incident... Sephiroth isn't really like that either. They're both just kids who went through a ton of messed up stuff and clung to the same coping mechanisms and are trying to reconcile that similarity in the same way Shinji has to confront Gendo as his dad and learn how to move on with the traumas of losing people he loved – which is something that is approached in a way that's fundamentally different between
End of Evangelion &
Rebuild.
Suffice to say, this is why it was the
Rebuild of Evangelion that made me take my time and wait through for the whole
Remake Project trilogy to be completed before getting to finish turning my own
FFVII research project into something that's able to be completed and look at it from a wider perspective, since that's been so necessary in addressing the interconnection of how so many of these things are essentially their own visual design language for discussing the traumatic struggle that's foundational not just to adaptations of Western Fantasy but core to all of Western Literature as well as to Japanese cultural history.
As I have few opportunities to share any of that beyond my occasional reemergence onto the forums to tl;dr about them when the opportunity spontaneously presents itself like this when there's a mention of some obscure detail that gives me a satisfying avenue to talk about a little bit of the things that I'm still spending my time on, I just wanted ta say thanks, hito – as
Gunhed is something I don't think I'd've ever gotten to chat about much otherwise, and it's nice to get to mention all of this before
Rebirth actually gets here and absorbs all of my time away from older films & manga for a while.
X 
