Cyberpunk is the science-fiction mode of high technology and low life: advanced networks, cybernetics, and megacorporations set against street-level survival. In anime it became one of the medium's signature exports, defined by a handful of landmark films and series.
Japanese cyberpunk developed its own flavour alongside the Western literary movement. Where much Western cyberpunk is cool and noir, the anime tradition runs hotter: bodies rebuilt by machinery, cities grown like organisms, and technology that mutates its users. Akira in 1988 and Ghost in the Shell in 1995 carried that vision worldwide and permanently shaped what the word cyberpunk looks like on screen.
The genre's recurring questions are about the boundary of the person. If memory can be copied, a body replaced part by part, and a mind networked, what remains that is still the self? Cyberpunk works stage those questions as police procedurals, war stories, and street dramas rather than essays, which is why the genre's philosophy survives inside its action.
In demographic terms cyberpunk anime is usually aimed at adults, and its shelf position varies: a cyberpunk film, series, or manga is classified by its magazine or slot, with cyberpunk describing the mode. The label answers what a work is like, not who it is for. The label itself was coined in American science fiction in the 1980s, and Japanese creators absorbed it almost immediately, returning it to the world with a visual identity of their own making.
In use"A networked detective with a fully prosthetic body, hunting a hacker through a rain-lit megacity, is anime cyberpunk."