The Best Steampunk Anime and Manga

This is partly because Japanese creators have never felt obliged to obey Western genre customs officers. They borrow Victorian machines, Belle Époque streets, airships, automata, alchemy, railways, impossible cities, military uniforms, brass fittings, walking castles and ancient technology, then cheerfully weld them to Shinto echoes, European fantasy, post-apocalyptic landscapes, mecha tradition, ecological dread, school uniforms, sky pirates and at least one small animal that knows more than it is letting on.

The result is that some of the most important steampunk-flavoured works in the world are not “pure steampunk” at all. They are borderland contraptions. This is not a flaw. It is where the good machinery lives.

The obvious place to start is Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky, one of the great animated adventure films and one of the most important steampunk-adjacent works in any medium. It has airships, sky pirates, lost technology, mining towns, ancient robots and a floating city that looks as if myth, engineering and bad imperial decisions have been left alone together for several centuries. The film’s world is not Victorian Britain with Japanese subtitles. It is its own retrofuturist dream, drawing on industrial Europe, mythic adventure and Miyazaki’s lifelong fascination with flight.