And is because is so obvious how Motoko sways her hips more than a Victoria's Secret model in a fashion show or how Togusa looked like a walking cardboard box you can not miss this every time they are on screen and don't even make me start with that pink haired aberration taken straight out of the hand of the newest KyoAni's intern and her overly exaggerated cutesy gestures.
I'm not one who criticizes just because the animation, but this cheap crap (yes that is how it looks, cheap!) while not bad for your average kids anime, is really not good enough to even attempt on getting close to the previous SAC or old GitS movies. Sadly for this one, the previous works simply had set the bar too high. Again, CG are not a determining factor for me, after all I enjoyed Ajin even when it looked cheap as hell, I liked Appleseed even when cell shaded was a new thing and I still believe that Spirits Within was a technological feat in the industry even when it was made two fkn decades ago! So why couldn't they make something visually more akin to Spirits Within while using this watered down plot they used for 2045? Beats me, it could have been an easy 8.2 even among the hardest audience and it could have been CG still.
As usual there is no problem with the voice cast (JP), they were spot on; in the 12 episodes I've watched I just noticed of two times where the dialog sounded weird, one from Motoko and one from chief Aramaki but hey, anyone can err a line among hundreds. On the other hand, opening and background music were subpar at best, they do not fit the CG aesthetics, story mood or the wannabe pseudo-sociopolitical plot. Do you remember how the music gave you this foreshadowing goosebumps when an action scene was about to start in Stand Alone Complex? Well, you can be forgetting about them because that won't happen this time, even when action scenes is one of the few things they did well in 2045.
What baffles me the most is not that it came out like this even when Aramaki and Sola Digital Arts had plenty experience, no, of them alone when not expecting it, it would have not surprised me, the weird thing is that it came out like this even when working hand in hand with Production I.G. and Kamiyama. One could make a mistake and you would think, well surely the other one will notice and vice-versa, but nope that didn't happen and here we are.
About the story, this is a watered down GitS. Not much else I can say, they try to sound profound and deep when only mentioning stuff by name, the rest is action scenes and petty dialog, no internal monologue, not character development, no intriguing mysteries to solve. Take this agent Smith as an example, he could have been an interesting plot device but ended up being ridiculed and discarded in the same forced way it was introduced.
Overall 5 out of 10 points, while you can eat popcorn while watching this, there are many parts where the dull story will make you yawn (mostly at the start), it gets better towards chapter 9 or 10 when Smith becomes irrelevant but nothing outstanding. You totally can skip this show if you are a GitS fan, an anime connoisseur or a sci-fi fan, you can probably enjoy this release if you like Marvel movies tho.
