When Japan's Top Animators Made a Thrilling Cyberpunk Commercial for Irish Beer: Watch Last Orders

[demmiblue]

When it came out in 1995, Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell showed the world what the art of Japanese animation could do with the kind of gritty, tech-saturated, globalized cyberpunk visions popularized in the previous decade by William Gibson and other writers. The film's particularly successful release in the United Kingdom got some culturally savvy marketers in Ireland thinking: why not use this sort of thing to sell beer?

But rather than ripping it off and watering it down — all too par for the course in advertising — they hired animators straight from Production I.G., Ghost in the Shell's studio, to create a whole new animated cyberpunk reality, the one in which Last Orders, the minute-long spot above, takes place. The 1997 commercial tells the story of six samurai rushing through a cityscape that has everything we've now come to expect from this genre: forests of high-rises, bustling streets, mysterious women, artificial humanoids, the technological everywhere merged with the organic, and neon signs aplenty.

http://www.openculture.com/2018/01/when-japans-top-animators-made-a-thrilling-cyberpunk-commercial-for-irish-beer-watch-last-orders-1997.html

[FSogol]

1. What says Irish Beer better than Japanese Cyberpunk Anime?