Koukaku Kidoutai (Ghost in the Shell)

In the year 2029, Niihama City has become a technologically advanced metropolis. Due to great improvements in cybernetics, its citizens are able to replace their limbs with robotic parts. The world is now more interconnected than ever before, and the city's Public Security Section 9 is responsible for combating corruption, terrorism, and other dangerous threats following this shift toward globalization.

The strong-willed Major Motoko Kusanagi of Section 9 spearheads a case involving a mysterious hacker known only as the "Puppet Master," who leaves a trail of victims stripped of their memories. Like many in this futuristic world, the Puppet Master's body is almost entirely robotic, giving them incredible power.

As Motoko and her subordinates follow the enigmatic criminal's trail, other parties—including Section 6—start to get involved, forcing her to confront the extremely complicated nature of the case. Pondering about various philosophical questions, such as her own life's meaning, Motoko soon realizes that the one who will provide these answers is none other than the Puppet Master themself.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Background

Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell was the first film to adapt Masamune Shirow's manga of the same name. It heavily condenses the original storyline, reducing the original material's comic relief and sexual content in favor of a more serious tone and changing the setting from Japan to a city modelled after Hong Kong. The artwork within the animated film was produced using an innovative mix of cel animation and digital effects.

Ghost in the Shell is one of the world's most famous Japanese animated films, being the first to reach #1 on Billboard magazine's video best-seller list, and also served as a major inspiration for the Wachowskis in their creation of the Matrix movies. A special edition titled Ghost in the Shell: 2.0 was released in 2008, which features scenes reanimated with additional CGI to match the style of the 2004's sequel, Ghost in the Shell: Innocence.

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Adaptation:	Koukaku Kidoutai: The Ghost in the Shell
Alternative setting:	Koukaku Kidoutai: Stand Alone Complex, Koukaku Kidoutai: Shin Movie, Koukaku Kidoutai: SAC_2045
Sequel:	Innocence
Alternative version:	Koukaku Kidoutai 2.0

Genda, Tesshou
Japanese

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Staff

Ishikawa, Mitsuhisa

Producer

Watanabe, Shigeru

Producer

Oshii, Mamoru

Director, Storyboard

Wakabayashi, Kazuhiro

Sound Director

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Opening Theme

"Making of a Cyborg" Kenji Kawai

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Ending Theme

Reincarnation by Kenji Kawai

Reviews

Apr 3, 2024

a_last_flower

Recommended

It's recommended to those who love psychological, cyberpunk

Story Development ☆☆
1. The screenplay was not original.
2. The urge to quit was not there in fact, the atmosphere created makes you want to get to the end of the film.
3. A few questions after the end of the film.
4. The story tries to appear complicated by asking questions about life such as: "Who can call themselves a human being?" but it fails in my opinion.
5. NO memorable quotes.
6. Action anime but action I saw little of it. The fight at the end is poorly realized, short-lived, and done in the American style: the shots don't catch you, ...

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Feb 22, 2024

khattikeri

Mixed Feelings

Ghost in the Shell is visually and aurally stunning. Its animation is smooth, its music is gorgeous, its art holds up to the test of time, and its futuristic setting is captivating. However, watching it for the first time in 2024 clearly left me with different thoughts than someone who might've seen it for the first time at its release nearly thirty years ago.

That is to say, this movie failed to have any actual substance in its characters or plot. It is purely a vehicle for existential philosophy. Which is painfully ironic considering it's literally a movie called "ghost in the shell".

Of course ... it can be fun to contemplate the integration of rapidly developing technology with the human condition and what it literally means to be human. It is not fun to be beaten over the head with it in blunt monologues from one person to another, especially when you have no reason to care about the people spouting it.

I honestly can't even remember most of the characters. Nearly everyone is either a mook or a stoically badass cop with bare minimum details to differentiate them. The only memorable people to me were Batou, who has an actual subtle character arc, and the garbage man from the first third of the movie, whose mini-arc left me with the strongest impression in spite of him being largely irrelevant. The antagonist, Puppet Master, and the protagonist Motoko Kusanagi, are both underdeveloped to the point that I didn't care for just about anything they did. I didn't root for either of them. I didn't learn anything about them. They aren't fully, biologically human, which may have been the point. But they're still characters in a story, and the audience still needs SOMETHING to derive anything from what they're watching these people say and do.

The main plot is meant to be a conspiracy drama, but its pacing is fairly atrocious. It speeds up and slows down worse than a teenager struggling to work out their first car's accelerator. Longwinded existential rambling devolves into quick-paced action scenes which are then followed by minutes-long city montages overlaid with traditional Japanese music. Rinse and repeat. And even if you CAN follow the plot, there's little reason to care about what has happened by the time the credits roll, because none of the characters are explored in depth or made memorable whatsoever.

I understand why this movie was so influential, and I appreciate it for its role in anime and sci-fi history. It does look and sound great! But it utterly fails to tell a story or create interesting characters, which... is literally what a movie is supposed to do. My barely-positive impression of Ghost in the Shell is largely because of its legacy rather than its actual contents, and for that I really can't rate it higher than a 6/10.

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Aug 26, 2023

honzoslav

Not Recommended

Funny

Well-written

In the year 1920, a Czech writer named Karel Čapek released a sci-fi play called R.U.R. (short for "Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti"). As you can tell from the title, this play introduced the world to the word robot. The play is about a robot uprising causing the extinction of the human race. The last act of the play tries to answer a simple question. Can a machine become human? The play was met with negative reception from critics, although that probably had more to do with the author's political leanings than the work itself. Either way, the play turned out to be a massive hit and ... its influence can be seen in sci-fi media to this day. Sci-fi as a whole has obviously changed over the years, yet to this day many authors try to tackle the same question Čapek did more then a hundered years ago. Ghost in the shell is one of these stories.

With so many different books, plays, films, series, songs and video games insisting on exploring the exact same question, it must be a real head scratcher, right? Well no, not really. As you might have noticed by looking at my profile picture, I am a Christian. This is important, since from the Christian perspective, the obvious answer is "NO, it doesn't have a soul". You don't even have to be a Christian to arrive at the same conclusion. As long as your belief system includes some sort of spiritual element that makes us who we are, you are golden. You might counter this by saying that I didn't really answer the question, I just used my religious beliefs to dodge it. Alright, you might have a point there. So, for the sake of argument, let's assume that no such thing as a "soul" exists. The answer is once again obvious. NO, a machine by definition cannot be human. But since, as we already established, there is nothing special about us humans, the question becomes completely meaningless. A much better one to ask would be "Can a machine become conscious?". The answer to this depends on the setting, but it usually becomes blatantly obvious after the first five minutes. The robots in this story are either conscious or they are so good at faking it that they are completely indistinguishable from conscious beings. And at that point they would just be conscious *insert that Kaiki quote from Nisemonogatari*. Well, there you go, mystery solved.

Now, contrary to what some of you might think, the purpose of my last paragraph wasn't to dunk on everyone with my huge fucking brain. In fact, most of the things I wrote didn't come from me and have been floating around for some time now. I wrote the whole thing to explain in detail that the story has absolutely nothing deep or philosophical about it. What it has is an illusion of depth that can be very easily dispelled just by thinking about it for a few minutes. But because online discourse, by its very nature, will always be dominated by midwits, most of the reviews on this site praise Ghots in the shell for exactly these qualities. What is even more frustrating than that is the fact that the movie manages to stumble upon an idea that would have made for a much better story. Early on, we find out that one of the minor villains had his memories changed. Now that's an interesting direction to take the story. This might be just me, but I am a sucker for stories that fuck with the characters memories. It introduces so much suspense, mystery and even some actually hard questions to tackle. Well, if you are looking for a story like that, I would highly recommend you watch Memento or read "There is no antimemetics division" because those stories actually do something with it. Here it gets immediately dropped. I honestly dont get it. Why would you introduce something this important and then never use it for anything? This is basic writing advice. The gun always has to go off, otherwise it shouldn't even be included in the story.

And last but not least, we have the presentation. The presentation is the only reason I gave this movie a positive score. Sure, it has aged a bit and I have seen better looking shows over the years, but it still delivers when it needs to. Sadly, unlike Akira, Ghost in the shell cannot get by on animation alone and, as I already explained, the story is a meandering journey to answer a question you already know the answers to that came nearly a century too late to be innovative. What we are left with is a bloated mess with no meaning or message. If there is one thing I took away from watching this movie, it is that so called classics only rarely live up to their name. A lesson which I have already been taught too many times to count.

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