
Its film noir sensibilities make it unlike many other animes. But that doesn’t stop it from being an amazing series. (It’s unclear if putting “Wayne” right in her name is another Batman homage, but it certainly seems possible.) Dorothy Wayneright, an android who comes to live with Roger Smith after the first episode and who, like Motoko Kusanagi of Ghost in the Shell, has a complicated existential relationship with her sense of self. It also posits a similar question with R.

The show often asks what it is that makes us human-is it the culmination of experiences from our lives, or what we do here and now? This loss of memory is central to the Big O’s theme. In what is known only as The Event, everyone in the city lost their memories 40 years prior to the start of the show. Art deco is everywhere - from protagonist Roger Smith’s Batmobile-like car to even the titular Big O itself.īig O all takes place in and around Paradigm City, the remains of New York surrounded by a post-apocalyptic wasteland. That Gotham City style seeps into everything about the art direction of Big O. It was styled after Batman: The Animated Series instead of traditional Japanese anime the characters look like they could walk into Gotham City and be right at home.

Sandwiched between Dragonball Z and Cowboy Bebop, Big O took a different tack with both its storytelling and its aesthetics. The Big O is an anime that wears its inspiration on its sleeve: it’s a film noir series drenched in art deco stylings that manages to simultaneously question the nature of human existence while also answering that age-old question: What if Batman had a giant robot?īig O hit American airwaves during the early 2000s, the heyday of Cartoon Network’s Toonami.
