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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