Anime Infuences In Knights Of Guinevere

After Dana Terrace had her groundbreaking animated series, The Owl House, cut short from its run on Disney Channel, she teamed up with Glitch Productions about doing her next project. The independent Australian animation studio already had several web series under their belt like The Amazing Digital Circus and Murder Drones which have not only gained fame on their YouTube channel but also on other mainstream formats like Netflix, so them working with Terrace seemed like a natural fit. Her new series was Knights Of Guinevere, a sci-fi dark comedy that pokes more than just a little fun at Terrace’s former Disney overlords. The plot involves Andi and Frankie, a pair of down and out friends who are trying to survive in a planet-sized amusement park where they come across a busted android of the park’s mascot Guinevere and the pilot shows the lengths they go to try and repair her as she reminds them of an another android they met as children. Whereas The Owl House was influenced by several anime titles, Knights Of Guinevere also borrows elements from some classics, particularly cyberpunk which of course reigned during the late 80s-90s. Aside from the obvious choices like Akira or Ghost In The Shell, there are some particular ones that deserve a look at if the KOG pilot won you over.

Two anime anthology films that are good points of interests. There is Neo-Tokyo from 1987, a short trilogy of separate stories where one segment named Construction Cancellation Order written and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo which is a social satire about a salaryman sent to South America to stop a huge project meant to set up a city in the middle of a swamp entirely operated by malfunctioning robots who want stop following their program to finish the construction of which the foreman robot sees even the company rep as a threat to their project. Another anthology is Memories entirely written by Otomo with a chapter titled Magnetic Rose directed by Koji Morimoto about space scavengers that discover an abandoned station that is supposed to be the resting place of a famous opera singer, but as the story goes on, we learn that the station’s main computer has gone haywire and projects an image of the opera star luring the salvagers into a trap and deludes one of them into believing they are the singer’s deceased husband. Both vignettes focus on the dangers of how allowing AI to operate on its own for a prolonged period can be hazardous if left without monitoring. Leaving out the human factor of a self-automated society can lead to disaster.

An underestimated but masterful anime movie that you can see traces of KOG is in the Metropolis anime movie from 2001 directed by Rintaro that was based on Osamu Tezuka’s manga. Taking place in the city of the same name, Metropolis is run by plutocrats where most of the general labor is handled by retro-looking robots leaving a good portion of the underprivileged masses out of work and rebelling against their industry. With the corporation having more power than the government, the regular citizens are swept away by the whims of the rich, so the citizens blame most of this civil unrest on the robots themselves making them seen as the lowest minority despite the fact that they were built only to serve mankind. As an underground movement rebels against the tyrannical Marduks lead by Duke Red, his latest creation, a robot called Tima has gone missing which was meant to be the centerpiece of a ziggurat that would leave the entire city subject to automation. Tima befriends a young detective who teachers her more about humanity which leads to her ultimately deciding to spare the people of Metropolis from the ravages the Marduks. A good deal of KOG is inspired by this hidden masterpiece by Rintaro, as well as the Fritz Lang 1927 movie the manga was based on, especially with its anti-fascist statement and how people tend to blame robots for their problems instead of the big businesses making the robots in the first place.

One anime/manga titles most generic are aware of is Alita: Battle Angel which is one of the few that managed to be remade into a successful live-action American movie. Prior to the Robert Rodriguez film, creator Yukito Kishiro allowed only a 2-episode OVA to be made of it because he wanted to focus more on the manga, even though the impact it left with US otaku is one of the biggest influences on cyberpunk, much of which Knights Of Guinevere was probably inspired by. In a dystopian Earth, the airborne city of Zalem rests above the ground level Iron City which lives of the scraps that get tossed down by the snobby tycoons above. A scientist finds the remains of an abandoned cyborg girl he names Alita in the trash to rebuild her only to find that she is a rare type designed by the military to fight wars on Mars. Alita’s strength and discovering her emotions puts herself and her new allies in danger as the despotic forces of Zalem are constantly bombarding her with violent strife. KOG begins as a mirror reflection about a mechanical maiden being recycled from rubbish and turning out to be more powerful than the mere mascot she was thought to be.

Without a doubt, the anime that a left significant impact on KOG was the original anime anthology masterpiece Robot Carnival from 1987. This had eight short stories, each directed by a different animator. Out of all of them some fit into the world Dana Terrace might have imagined, one being the opening and closing segments featuring a huge fully mechanized carnival-themed showcase modeled as the words "Robot Carnival" which dispenses exploding marching bands and automatic cannons laying waste to a small village in the desert with no idea where it came from and what its original mission was. Another part is titled Star Light Angel where a girl in a futuristic amusement park is captured by a giant robot while a park employee dressed as an android tries to save her. The mysterious chapter of Presence is about a robot maker who invents a female bot that seems to take on a life of its own, so he destroys it and years later at the end of his life believes his old creation is acting as his angel of death. The last story that is closely kindred to KOG is Nightmare where a drunken man runs for his life through downtown Tokyo which he believes is changing into a motorized monstrosity all at the whims of a robot wizard on a flying scooter, although whether this really happened is up to viewer, but it demonstrates how technophobia can lead to suspicion and fear of the misinformed.