Old Skool anime: Venus Wars
It’s 2089, and terraformed Venus has been carved into two hostile superstates: militaristic Ishtar to the north and laid-back Aphrodia to the south. Our hero, Hiro Seno, isn’t your average soldier—he’s a reckless monobike racer, like if Akira met an extreme motocross final. He's chilling at a violent sport rally when Ishtar tanks roll in and shred his city like unwanted sci-fi graffiti. Suddenly, he's a guerrilla biker, a reluctant soldier, and a one-man anti-tank nightmare—backed by the ever-plucky Earth reporter Susan Sommers, who's here for the Pulitzer but stays for the explosions. This is Venus Wars, a visceral visual feast from some of the industry’s all-time greats.
In the long shadow cast by 1988’s Akira, Venus Wars was released in its wake, one of the very first releases from the UK’s Manga Video label. On appearance, its intention as a follow up for Akira fans needing their next fix is pretty much nailed. Science fiction war? Tick. Futuristic motorbikes? You got it. Though never achieving the mythic status of Otomo’s cyberpunk opus, Venus Wars deserves a serious second look: not as a perfect film, but as an ambitious work straining toward emotional and political complexity under the surface of stylish futurism. Directed by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, a veteran of the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise, with a score from Ghibli-veteran to be Joe Hisashi, Venus Wars ticks more appealing creative boxes than many realise.
At its best, Venus Wars is not so much a war epic as it is a portrait of adolescence interrupted—a meditation on how war colonises the imagination of the young, even more effectively than land or resources. Hiro is not a hero in the conventional sense. He sulks, blames others, acts rashly—qualities that might be frustrating if they didn’t ring so true. His reluctant, meandering transformation is where the film finds some of its richest, most tragic notes.
Yasuhiko’s direction is visually assured, if narratively restrained. His Venus is one that feels fully realised: scorched, rust-red, and tense with political possibility. There is something eerie about this version of the future—a world where Earth’s colonial logic has simply relocated to another planet, with no real lessons learned. Tanks roll through city squares with blunt precision. Spectator sports turn into battlefronts. And journalists, like the aforementioned Earth reporter Susan Sommers, arrive to frame the carnage with pre-packaged detachment.
The animation itself, largely hand-drawn by a team of 1980s veterans, holds up remarkably well. The film’s vehicular design—particularly the monobikes and tanks—bears a brutalist sensibility, all blunt edges and mechanical heft. Joe Hisaishi’s score, a synth-heavy departure from his later, more pastoral Ghibli work, adds a layer of mournful grandeur to even the most frenetic sequences. Hisaishi’s compositions elevate scenes that might otherwise feel routine, reminding the viewer that even in the din of war, something human endures.
Yet Venus Wars is far from flawless. The plot’s structure is oddly slack; its first act is taut and thrilling, but the film’s middle meanders. There’s an awkward flirtation with romantic subplots that never quite land. More frustrating is how the narrative, in trying to be both character drama and political allegory, often short-changes both. Supporting characters remain largely undeveloped, and Hiro’s emotional evolution, while believable, lacks a true culmination. By the film’s end, one senses a chapter closing—but not necessarily a story concluding.
Still, these flaws speak more to the film’s ambitions than its failings. In the context of late-1980s anime, Venus Wars stood at a crossroads: it borrowed the dynamism and action of the mecha genre while attempting to deepen its emotional and philosophical stakes. It’s less interested in glorifying combat than in depicting its moral and psychological toll. That the film doesn’t entirely succeed in this aim is almost beside the point. It tried.
In the decades since its release, Venus Wars has hovered on the periphery of anime canon—a cult favourite, intermittently rediscovered by fans of classic animation and speculative fiction. Its recent Blu-ray restorations in both the UK and the US are part of a broader movement to reassess the overlooked corners of anime’s “golden age.”
Watching it now, over 35 years on, one is struck less by the spectacle than by the sadness. Beneath the smoke and chrome lies a story about youth devoured by ideology, cities reduced to terrain, and media turned into narrative machines. That the film delivers this with both visual brio and thematic melancholy is a testament to its creator’s vision.
