Digibro has a video called Aesthetic is Narrative, which defends liking an Anime for mostly purely superficial "aesthetic" reasons even if the writing doesn't hold up to scrutiny. But the Anime in question there was Kabanei of the Iron Fortress, which I haven't gotten around to watching yet.
This year I watched the Metropolis Anime, and it is an Anime that keeps getting refereed to as something visually impressive but not all that well written. And I think that film is far more worth defending for it's purely Aesthetic accomplishments then a show about Steampunk Zombies.
The movie version of Akira is also an Anime film that is visually groundbreaking but who's plot doesn't hold up to scrutiny. But Akira is not dismissed on those grounds nearly as often as Metropolis is, which I think is unfair given how Metropolis's plot holds up better then Akira's due to it only being inspired by a much larger Manga and not really an adaptation. Metropolis's disadvantage is having not as many Nostalgia points since it wasn't an entire generation of Americans' first exposure to Japanimation. It seems to me like Japan doesn't revere the movie nearly as much, we in the West sometimes put Akira on the same level as Miyazaki, which I suspect would be laughed at in Japan.
The Metropolis film takes Themes from two prior works named Metropolis, the 1927 Fritz Lang silent classic, and a 1949 Manga by the Grandfather of modern Manga&Anime Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka's Manga was inspired in concept by the the idea of the Lang film, but Tezuka hadn't actually seen it. So that's what makes this film drawing on both a very interesting experiment.
Pause and Select did a video on how they relate to each other on a Meta Level, but it kind of doesn't hold up that well once you've actually seen the movie.
My point about the Film's Aesthetic appeal however is that it's not just inspired by those two works named Metropolis, but by the greater tends they represent. It's the Art Deco style Sci-Fi of the early 20th Century, meeting the Mid 20th Century art-style that defined Manga and Anime for decades. The Metropolis Manga was one of Tezuka's earliest works, but this movie drew on his entire legacy, and is perhaps the best example of seeing his style applied to modern Anime techniques.
And in the process of doing all that style blending, it is also a film that I can tell uses both hand drawn animation and CGI, but I honestly can't tell which parts are which, it seamlessly blends them better then any other Anime I've seen.
And it has some fun Music as well.
If I made a 3x3 of only Anime Movies, this would probably make it.
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