This box set is basically three heavyweight champions of anime sharing the same corner of the ring. If someone wanted a crash course in why Japanese animation exploded onto the international stage, you could hand them these discs and disappear for a weekend. Between them, Akira, Ghost in the Shell and Ninja Scroll helped convince audiences that animation could be visionary, intelligent, violent, beautiful and completely unlike anything coming out of Hollywood.
Akira remains a jaw-dropping cyberpunk epic filled with psychic powers, biker gangs and enough visual ambition to make most science-fiction films nervous. Ghost in the Shell slows things down, delivering a hypnotic blend of philosophy, technology and futuristic intrigue that asks what it actually means to be human when machines are doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
Then Ninja Scroll kicks the door off its hinges with rogue swordsmen, supernatural villains and some of the most thrilling action sequences anime has ever produced. Together they form a kind of anime holy trinity, three films that remain as influential, exciting and conversation-starting today as they were when they first arrived.
