Anime for Fans of Philip K. Dick

Tracing some of PKD’s key works and themes through the anime they inspired

In our house, when I was growing up, two authors dominated my father’s bookshelf: Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick. Given that both helped to create or reinvent genre fiction as we now know it, they aren’t the strangest bedfellows. My father’s favorite film was Blade Runner, and throughout my upbringing he often expressed his belief that Dick was a genius. Because I was precocious and idolized my father, I was determined to agree, and read as many of Dick’s books as I could in high school. I did not understand all of them at the time, but I really wanted to. 

Philip K. Dick is one of those authors whose cultural impact has been immeasurable—but that also means certain aspects of his work have been glossed over with time. His prose was often clunky, and he wrote as many duds as classics (to be fair, he was extraordinarily prolific). His mental health struggles and habitual drug use certainly altered his storytelling, for better or worse, and I don’t think it’s controversial to say that he rarely wrote women well. Even so, it’s not difficult to muster respect for the mind that gave us so many brilliant and terrifying possible worlds to ponder and explore. PKD’s best works aren’t just interesting—they are deeply contemplative, even spiritual, and force readers to confront the illusory nature of daily reality.

Dick’s influence has also reached Japanese creators, just as Asian cityscapes, philosophy, and technology inspired his own work. Inspiration has never been a one-way street, especially between creatives in niche genres. The hardcore sci-fi writing community has always been a small, dedicated group, and that was even truer in the past, in the days when science fiction was widely dismissed as juvenile by the so-called literary community. While gatekeeping has often been an issue in the SF community, many science fiction authors have also used their platforms to encourage new ideas and foster upcoming voices.

Ursula K. Le Guin, who graduated from PKD’s high school the same year he did, wrote The Lathe of Heavenas a homage to his work. When PKD, who often struggled significantly with making a living, found himself in a hole, Robert A. Heinlein offered to buy him a new typewriter. This is where, for me, the SF community is at its best. Not quashing creative people or viewing them as competition, but recognizing that interesting people with great ideas, given support, can help lift the whole genre. 

A similar camaraderie has long been a core aspect of creating anime and manga. To this day, retracing the trajectory of a great career often leads back to a burgeoning artist being mentored by an experienced one. Dai Saito of Eureka Seven got his start working with Shinichiro Watanabe on Cowboy Bebop. Eiichiro Oda was mentored by the (deeply problematic, for reasons we won’t get into here) author of Rurouni Kenshin before going on to write One Piece. Groundbreaking director Sayo Yamamoto (Yuri!!! On Ice and A Woman Named Fujiko Mine) was offered work by Satoshi Kon the moment she graduated from college. More recently, three separate assistants to Chainsaw Man mangaka Tatsuki Fujimoto have gone on to write fantastic, genre-expanding manga: Tatsuya Endo (Spy x Family), Yuji Kaku (Hell’s Paradise), and Yukinobu Tatsu (Dandadan).

It is impossible to know whether the merit of any artist’s legacy is more dependent on their own work as it stands, or on the work that it inspires in turn. Would most people care so much about Philip K. Dick if it weren’t for Ridley Scott? Who knows. And what about works inspired by the works inspired by the author? Oh, boy. It grows and grows, stretching beyond immeasurable. In an interview, PKD claimed, “The two basic topics that fascinate me are ‘What is reality?’ and ‘What constitutes the authentic human being?’” It is actually harder to think of great science fiction anime that don’t address these questions in one way or another than it is to name the ones that do.

To limit what would otherwise be an endless list of titles that might appeal to fans of Philip K. Dick, I will focus on just a handful of his 45 novels and dozens of short stories and their themes (if folks are interested, I’ll reread the damn books and do a part two in the future). For now, here are a few anime recommendations for fans of PKD.

Cyber Noir Imaginings

Let’s start with the obvious. Psycho-Pass, written by Gen Urobuchi, is about as direct a tribute to Philip K. Dick as an anime could be. While some compare it to Blade Runner, and the film is certainly an influence, I’d argue the series has more in common with Dick’s novelette “The Minority Report”and its Precogs. In a futuristic society, people are arrested based on their potential for criminality rather than crimes actually committed. Akane Tsunemori has begun working for the Public Safety Bureau’s Criminal Investigations Unit, accompanied by Enforcers, potential criminals used to carry out the government’s dirty work. While Psycho-Pass’s second season is so bad that people choose to pretend it does not exist, the first season is mostly excellent, and addresses the same moral quandaries posed by much of Dick’s canon. When a person can be legally dehumanized by society based on actions they have not taken, what can justice even mean?

It might be cheating to throw Shinichiro Watanabe in the mix solely because he directed Blade Runner Blackout 2022, a short film that serves as a bridge between the iconic 1982 Ridley Scott movie and its acclaimed Denis Villeneuve sequel. But Watanabe was influenced by PKD decades ago, as is evident in his work on cult classics like Cowboy Bebop and later, Space Dandy, as well as in his foray into the Macross universe. Watanabe has cited PKD’s science fiction as a major influence and as recently as 2025 expressed his continued interest in adapting more of Dick’s work. Watanabe is known for his cinematic approach to animation, and his nods to Hollywood and film history have often helped him appeal to Western audiences as well as Eastern ones. Like PKD, Watanabe seems determined to depict the future as gritty even when it is beautiful, granting his imagined worlds a rusted edge.

And I’m pretty sure I would get pushed off a rooftop if I wrote a piece like this without drawing parallels between Philip K. Dick and director Mamoru Oshii. While it would be easy to name-drop Ghost in the Shell (I’ve written more extensively about Ghost in the Shell here) and leave it at that, Oshii has more in common with the PKD oeuvre than cybernetic detectives, hiveminds, and psychometry. There’s a similar, indefinable unease present in works by both creators. In his experimental cult-classic Angel’s Egg, Oshii imagines the world as a surrealist post-apocalyptic hellscape that leans further into science fantasy than science fiction. There, scavenging to survive on the world’s decaying surface, a girl is determined to protect a massive egg, hoping an angel will hatch from it. Thematic nods to the terrors of birth and fragility of young life run rampant in Dick’s work, too; famously, his twin, Jane, died weeks after they were born.

Another creator who has claimed PKD as a major inspiration is Dai Sato, who wrote for both Bebop and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Sato was the chief writer of Ergo Proxy, a deliciously gothic cyberpunk anime from 2006 that questions what might happen if androids develop sentience enough to commit murder. While investigating android crimes, detective Re-l Mayer uncovers government experiments that are being conducted on humanoid creatures known as Proxies. I remember being overwhelmed by the aesthetic charms of Ergo Proxy, its soundtrack (which included Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” as an ED), and its general moodiness, which more than made up for the more convoluted aspects of its storyline. Dai Sato also wrote one of my favorite mecha series of all time, Eureka Seven, memorable for its depiction of a future Earth infected by a sentient space flora called scub coral, as well as its unexpected incorporation of surf/skate subculture staples. Eureka Seven’s mechs surf through the sky on transparent air particles in the altered atmosphere. 

Life on Mars

In Martian Time-Slip, Dick imagined that colonizers would suffer severe psychological damage and a profound sense of alienation after abandoning Earth. In general, PKD’s depictions of Mars are of humanity in isolation, and what becomes of society in a hostile environment that allows for altered states. In The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, colonists become addicted to drugs that wreak havoc to their perception of reality. 

Anime in general has been at least as fascinated with using Mars as a mirror as PKD was. In Gen Urobuchi’s underrated mecha series Aldnoah.Zero, humans who colonize Mars turn on their home planet, no longer seeing Earthlings as equals. I have written about Aria the Animation, which reimagines Mars as an ocean planet after terraforming. One of the strongest Gundam entries of the 2010s, Iron-Blooded Orphans, features a band of child soldiers rebelling on Mars. 

It is hard not to draw parallels to the bleak depiction of the red planet in Time-Slip, and that divergence from the norm is partly what dismantles the formation of a successful Martian society. When interviewed by The Science Fiction Review in 1976, PKD was asked what impact discovering life on Mars would have on humanity. Dick responded, “I don’t really think that to find life on Mars is going to affect people…think people would have been pleased if there was life on Mars, but I think they would have soon wearied of the novelty of it, and said, ‘But what is there on Jupiter? What can the life do?’ And, ‘My pet dog can do the same thing.’” 

More often than not, the most successful Martian stories use Mars as a distorted reflection of Earth’s own struggles with issues such as colonialism, government oversight, the neglect of mental healthcare, and nihilism. Mars does not fix anything. But it does offer a setting in which a smaller sampling of humanity can be thoroughly examined. 

Lucy in SPAAAACE with Diamonds…

While the more widely known Philip K. Dick adaptations are more digestible science fiction stories, Dick wrote plenty of abstract, fantastical stories, too, especially during the LSD-infused ’60s. While reportedly little of his work was written while he himself was on acid—PKD admitted to being terrified by psychedelics during the most prolific arcs of his career—many of his peers were caught in the throes, and altered states inspired much of his work. A Scanner Darkly is the most prominent of his works to address the threat drug use poses to health and identity, and has often been described as the most autobiographical of his books. While it is still a science fiction novel, Scanner keeps one foot firmly grounded in a mostly-familiar vision of Orange County. When Bob Arctor, an undercover cop, befriends the drug-addled housemates he is investigating and becomes addicted to drugs himself, he loses sight not only of the job at hand, but reality in general. 

An unexpected addendum to A Scanner Darkly is the unsettling 2013 anime adaptation of the horror manga Flowers of Evil. A creepy, paranoid story about the fallout of a high school boy who stole a classmate’s gym clothes for perverse reasons, Flowers explores the taboo nature of eroticism, going far beyond Baudelaire references. In a nod to Richard Linklater, who used his rotoscoping to adapt A Scanner Darkly into a feature film in 2006, Flowers of Evil was the first anime to utilize rotoscoping as its primary mode of animation. While this decision was divisive for manga fans who adored the original artwork and did not care for the “ugly” look of the anime, Flowers of Evil is memorable, disconcerting, and unique. Bold, meticulous direction by Hiroshi Nagahama, best known for helming Mushishi, makes Flowers of Evil a worthwhile watch. It might be argued that rotoscoping worked for A Scanner Darkly and Flowers of Evil because it creates a deliberate uncanny valley that parallels the themes of both works: the world is almost familiar, but it’s also completely alien, and that tension makes us uncomfortable.

While drug use is largely condemned in Japan and remains extremely illegal, mind-altering substances often appear in anime. Unfinished and perhaps unsung, the manga and subsequent anime Gangsta is set in a grimy, crime-riddled city that houses the superhuman descendants of soldiers who took an enhancement drug called Cerebret. Just as the children of meth-addicted mothers are born experiencing withdrawal, so are the Cerebret babies reliant on daily doses of Cerebret to prevent violent symptoms that activate their superhuman abilities. Of course, the drug also shortens their lifespans and leaves many of them disabled. While the show does not quite live up to its potential, the premise and setting, as well as the lead characters, are really compelling. 

And we can’t ignore Banana Fish here. While much of the fantastic landmark ’80s BL action series takes place in a familiar setting—1980s New York City—the title is drawn from a drug that does not exist in our reality. Ash Lynx survives sex trafficking before finding some degree of footing as a young adult. He is determined to uncover the cause of his older brother’s irreparable brain damage. His brother, Griffin, uttered the words “banana fish” and then slaughtered his own squadron before going catatonic. “Banana Fish” is revealed to be a reference to a brainwashing drug given to soldiers in Vietnam. The 2018 anime adaptation by MAPPA is fantastic, if inevitably upsetting.

The Kids Are (Not) Alright

And after thinking of Ash Lynx and the horrors he experienced, again I come back to children. PKD was not ignorant of the control adults have over children and, subsequently, humanity’s future. Sometimes this manifested in questionable work like “ThePre-Persons,” a ham-fisted anti-choice short story that suggested children under the age of 12 could still be aborted. It’s clear that PKD tended to regard children with something like reverence. Famously, Dick became obsessed with a vision he had shortly after the birth of his son. A pink, sentient light convinced him that his son had an unseen hernia, and so he took him to the doctor and received confirmation that this was true. Thereafter, PKD spent years writing a journal, the Exegesis, exploring the spiritual and psychic connections between human beings and the universe. His final books, the incomplete VALIS trilogy, are a continuation of those ideas.

In terms of work along similar thematic lines, the first anime I’d recommend is From the New World, an anime adapted from a novel by horror author Yusuke Kishi. It chronicles the seemingly peaceful lives of psychic children in the far-flung post-apocalyptic future. Without spoiling too much—it really is a trip, this anime, and I recommend it—the world as they see it is the result of a lot of psychic manipulation, and it harbors a lot of dark secrets.

And once again I’ll bring up Gen Urobuchi, who is a fan favorite not because he is especially original, but because he has a real knack for grabbing hold of a genre and twisting it backwards to redefine it. In Urobuchi’s hands, the magical girls of Puella Magi Madoka Magica are cursed child-soldiers being manipulated by a sinister alien disguised as an adorable mascot character. A similar idea is featured in the PKD short story The Little Movement, in which aliens disguised as toys attempt a takeover of Earth by appealing to children. 

Other solid anime fitting this uneasy niche include the very beautiful but very often off-putting fantasy horror series Made in Abyss, the early aughts sci-fi anime Noein, and Yoshitoshi Abe’s Haibane Renmei.

Animism and Animation

In Dick’s Ubik, a man named Joe Chip learns that an over-the-counter aerosol can negate the effects of a plague of deterioration impacting people, technology, and reality itself. While it is impossible to really summarize any one of PKD’s batshit plotlines in the confines of a single essay, it’s safe to say this brand of surreal science fiction has a lot in common with the works of Satoshi Kon (Paprika) and Masaaki Yuasa (Kaiba). 

Animism is an undeniable aspect of the PKD canon. In a speech in 1972, Dick argued that the more technology advances, the more likely we are to attribute humanity to it: “Information has become alive, with a collective mind of its own independent of our brains.” Man, has he ever been right about that, if the sinister interactions many people are already having with AI chatbots is any measure. If you’re looking for anime that explore this concept, I recommend, yet again, the works of Chiaki J. Konaka, director of Serial ExperimentsLain, which I wrote about recently. Konaka has explicitly stated his appreciation for PKD, saying, “He is one of my favorite writers.” Lain explores the thin barrier between reality and fabricated realities. It questions whether humanity is confined to a body and whether a thing need be humanoid to be human. The will of a program might become a person, given the means.

The core concept in Chainsaw Man is that human-made objects—weapons especially—become devils. The essence of an object is distilled down not to its parts, but its intentions, creating a most twisted tulpa—the more feared an object is, the more powerful its devil avatar. As in Ubik, reality is altered by a person’s interpretation of it, and if that interpretation can change, so might reality.

In an interview with Erik Davis, PKD addressed the growing paranoia that technology was beginning to seem “alive” almost 50 years ago, in the early ’80s:

“Within the past decade, our environment — and I mean our man-made world of machines — is beginning to possess what the primitive sees in his environment: animation. In a very real sense our environment is becoming alive, or at least quasi-alive, and in ways specifically and fundamentally analogous to ourselves…today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. We are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.”

This reminds me strongly of another underrated anime gem, Kyousougiga, or Capital Craze. In this anime it is not a corporation or government that creates a new universe, but a single person. A priest named Myoe learns he has a dangerous ability; anything he draws becomes real. He creates an alternative version of Kyoto to escape into and draws a guardian god for his city, a rabbit named Koto. Myoe and the goddess build a family in their pocket dimension, but only one of their children is a “real” person. When an interloper, a precocious child from the other reality disturbs the balance of Mirror Kyoto, the entire multiverse is threatened. Kyousougiga deserves a lot more attention than it gets, and I highly recommend it to anyone reading this column.

The Present As It Might Have Been

During the start of his writing career, PKD was rarely taken seriously by so-called “literary” critics, who held a collective bias against works of science fiction and fantasy and dismissed pulp novels as trash for children. But The Man in the High Castle broke that barrier down when it imagined how the world would have changed had the Axis Powers won WWII. Even PKD saw High Castle as an anomaly, and he did far more research than was usually required for his books while writing it, during a time when he had decided to quit writing altogether and was just “pretending” that he was working on a novel.

Anime have tackled the novel’s same fundamental premise, as jarring that might be given that Japan was one of the Axis powers. In Mamoru Oshii’s 1999 feature film Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, Japan has struggled to separate itself from German influence and occupation in the decades following a Nazi victory in the war. Terrorists resisting the government are on the rise, and the film’s choice of protagonist is an officer fighting to maintain the status quo. It’s a confusing mix of perspectives all around, but the sort of thought experiment that Dickheads (imagine my delight at learning that some of the fandom referred to themselves as Dickheads!) might appreciate.

A gentler take on this concept features in Makoto Shinkai’s film The Place Promised in Our Early Days. In this alternate history, the Axis powers did not win, but after the war Japan was divided and occupied by Russia and the United States. The subsequent Cold War leaves Hokkaido and Honshu divided much as West and East Germany were before the fall of the Berlin Wall, with children in Aomori determined to travel to Hokkaido despite the ongoing conflict. They can see the shore and a mysterious, reality-altering tower being built across the channel, and begin constructing a plane in the hopes of flying to it. Interdimensional communication is a common theme in many of Shinkai’s movies, and while some of his storylines are too romantic for my tastes, his ambition and the fantastic animation that defines his best work makes up for that.

Final Thoughts

There is no version of this essay I might have written that could ever be complete, concise, or measure up to the monumental legacy of Philip K. Dick. It has been many years since I read most of his work, but in that time I have often been reminded how singular a mind Dick had. For all his flaws, his ideas were so ambitious and prescient that few authors today come close to achieving the same impact. Philip K. Dick wrote worlds more complex than many of us can imagine, and he did it again and again, and with little enough recognition during his lifetime. If even someone like me—for whom his books were more my dad’s thing, always at a bit of a remove—struggles to envision how different science fiction would be today without him, what might others think? I can appreciate that a legacy is more than the sum of its parts.

With that in mind, please tell me your thoughts on PKD and the works he left behind, and offer any recommendations and opinions and assessments of your own that you’d like to share.

Honestly, this essay could probably do with a cheap Hollywood sequel—let me know if there are other books, stories, or themes in Dick’s body of work that might pair particularly well with anime.

Leah Thomas

Leah Thomas is the author of several YA novels, including the Morris Award finalist Because You’ll Never Meet Me and the Edgar Award finalist Wild and Crooked . She currently lives and works in Tottori, Japan, surrounded by cats, students, and youkai.
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