Ghost in the Shell

Wonderfully executed anime classic.

It is a darker anime tale aimed towards a more mature audience. I enjoyed the amazing realism of this film. The attention to detail is definitely enjoyable to see.

The DVD has a rather enjoyable documentary on the making of the film. Any fan will enjoy the structure and content of the documentary. It is quite informative on the process of making the film.

Like most Anime, there is a lot of character development and dialogue mixed with stunning visuals.

I think the most captivating element that this film has to offer is its creative "cinematography" and attention to detail. There are numerous memorable shots in this film.

This is not an anime for everybody. Attention to story is critical and I am guilty of rewinding certain areas just to keep up with the story.

Thankfully this is not a mindless science-fiction/anime tale filled with crazy action sequences. The Ghost in the Shell proves to be quite philosophical in nature by questioning the meaning of life.

I would love to venture deeper into this story and its message but I think it is better for you interpret it on your own.

Remember to watch this movie with your heart, not with your mind. Reflect on it later. This is the best way to enjoy this type of film.

There are many many many MANY themes to take away from this cinematic experience, perhaps it is abit too heavy for its own good. The story includes a cyborg agent investigating "The Puppet Master" which is a virus capable of infiltrating human hosts. So already we are presented with questions such as: What is reality? Could everything be a simulation? Do memories define us or do we define memories? We have creationism, ideology, afterlife...this is not for your average moviegoer. In fact films like The Matrix took inspiration from this, bear in mind this wasn't entirely accessible to western audiences at the time of its release. It's very heavy going and the script doesn't help. It feels mechanical, which makes sense considering it's a techno thriller and that our protagonist is an emotionless cyborg, but it's so mechanical that it just doesn't flow.

The lead characters are memorable, from the no nonsense cyborg Major Motoko Kusanagi to her fellow agent Batou. I loved the fact that many of the humans have cybernetic enhancements and is something that could easily be real in many years to come. I adored the computer systems, it was very green and rather cyberpunk-ish...perfect for a film from 1995. The animation was fluid, although not Studio Ghibli, and still has aged well. There are some scenes with just background music and images of the cityscape, this really drives the technological style at its core. The English dub was good apart from Major's voice actress...didn't really work for me. This is a good hard sci-fi anime, although hard to follow it's themes and style pushes this above your average animation.

"Ghost in the Shell" is an intricate masterpiece of cyber-punk fiction and storytelling, successfully melding intriguing philosophical ideas with a coherent, well thought-out (albeit) confusing plot.

Even more, it's a nightmarish vision of a society that's dominated by cyberspace and looking back now, is eerily prescient of today's computerized times. Many of the characters in the film are enhanced, someway or another by machines, to help them get the advantage in a vastly changing society.

I'll avoid going real deep into the plot simply because there's a whole lot to grasp and even I got more than a little confused trying to follow it. The story is that a team of high-level government operatives are hot on the trail of a notorious computer hacker called the "Puppet Master," who is wanted for various crimes in cyberspace and has taken a particularly fond interest in the team's tough, female cyborg leader.

Not surprisingly, as with the stigmas surrounding Anime', "Ghost in the Shell" is not short of nudity and graphic violence. But it's far from being gratuitous, and does not slow down the movie at all.

"Ghost in the Shell" was one of the first Anime' films to skillfully blend traditional drawn animation with computerized imagery. This helps to give the film a surreal, yet beautiful look. And the dialogue helps sometimes too, with helping to sort out the confusing plot and many of its mythical ideas about personal identity and human evolution.

This film is also even more revered today, in 2004, since some of this film's core themes helped to develop the plot basis of the insanely popular "Matrix" films, and some scenes from "Ghost in the Shell" were even homaged to in the first "Matrix" movie. The Wachowski Brothers certainly do owe a lot to this movie for the success of their work in America.

I think that to understand "Ghost in the Shell," it would help to accept that Anime' is much more complex and daring than traditional American animation. Most Japanese animation films, like this one, "Akira," or Mayazaki's "Spirited Away," are on a level of sophistication that will never be matched in America.

It has been said that the majority of American audiences would be afraid of Anime' because of the many stereotypes surrounding it, but that's why it's boundless - it's been given free reign to use those stigmas to its advantage in developing truly remarkable pieces of art that have gone largely ignored here in the U.S. "Ghost in the Shell" could very well be a mere reflection or a parable of a doomed society that's probably already accepted its dark fate. Most American animation would never touch up on this sort of subject matter.

"Ghost in the Shell" is my #3 choice Anime' film (behind "Spirited Away" and "Akira") because it's so full of ideas and is masterful in telling a dark story about our times.

10/10

This is the most beautiful film i've ever seen.

There, i've said it. Watch it and be awed at how amazingly detailed and fluid the whole film is. Never does it falter in the art department. The colours are just right, the peoples movements are so real its scary, and sometimes the strong story of the film cant fit all this beauty in and so it releases it entirely in a magical scene in the middle of the film with no dialogue and no plot progression, just marvellous panoramic followed by marvellous panoramic shot. This is my favourite segment of the movie. It shows the nameless city in which the protagonists exist as a cluttered, enclosed, claustrophobic world, yet terrifyingly familiar. This film is full of such themes which subtly make their way into your mind and you dont even realise they're there until afterwards.

So lets talk about the story. Its an amazing monster of a tale, squeezing it all in barely in its short running time. It does sometimes feel a little rushed, a little convoluted so that it bears repeat viewings to get the whole thing, but it is still a strong story none the less. In fact it is a very mature story. The creators could have so easily gone the typical manga route and thrown in some invading demons or mega-destructive internet monsters. But no, the whole thing restrains intself to a realistic view of an extra-ordinary situation. it all feels like this is exactly how it would happen in real life, and that is what makes it so engaging, and so scary.

This film deserves to be seen, not just because the heavenly beauty warrants it, but because the deep issues it raises needs to be questioned. If you want to be entertained without thinking, watch Wicked City or the countless millions of other mediocre mangas out there. You want to be entertained and be made to think and question the film? See this.

You wont regret it.

Upon Ghost in the Shell's release in 1995, the Western world was still largely unfamiliar with manga, but had already had its head turned by Katsuhiro Ohtomo's Akira (1988). Blending philosophical musings with blistering action, Ghost in the Shell captured the imagination of it's new audience, helping kick-start the Japanophilia that runs so blatantly through most modern Western cartoons and lines the bookcases of many a teenager. While it certainly has its flaws, this was the first time that casual Western audiences who were new to manga had seen a cartoon be as meditative as is explosive. And for those that didn't catch it, no doubt they would have watched The Matrix (1999) four years later, a film that arguably 'borrows' a lot more from Ghost in the Shell that it lets on.

In the future, technology has become so far advanced that all aspects of life are interconnected through an electronic network. Major Motoko Kusanagi (Atsuko Tanaka), a soldier working for government agency Section 9, is a cyborg, and is able to access this network through plugs in the back of her head. She and her team are assigned to catch an elusive 'ghost-hacker' known as the Puppet Master (Iemasa Kayumi), an intelligent entity created by the government, who they lost control of when it became self-aware. When the Puppet Master surfaces in the mangled body of an artificial human shell, Kusanagi faces a crisis of identity.

Disappointingly, the film begins with gratuitous nudity, showing off the fine female form (with giant breasts, of course) of Major Kusanagi just before she takes a plunge off a building to nail some bad guys. Manga caters heavily for its audience, be it sexually-frustrated, highly- stressed businessmen or horny teenagers who have no doubt been bombarded with images of giggling, short-skirted school girls throughout their young life. Thankfully, these moments are brief, and prove to be not much more than a mild distraction from the stunning animation on show. Things are grim in the future, but they're certainly beautiful to look at.

The sexism aside, Kusanagi is an interesting character. When a man realises his wife and daughter are nothing more than an implanted memory, he fails to comprehend it. Kusanagi, with her mixture of organic and mechanical body parts and uploaded memories, struggled to define what it is to be human. Her hunt for the Puppet Master, who is seemingly a new kind of being, becomes a hunt for identity. Is it enough to be aware of what and who you are? The philosophy, although provocative, is heavy-handed. Conversations about humanity between Kusanagi and her second-in-command Bateau (Akio Otsuka) are delivered with a monotony worthy of a whiny emo teen, and I found the film's first half quite a head-scratcher. But things thankfully do become clearer, and the film is still, almost twenty years later, one of the best examples of the genre.

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