Reviews of The Ghost in the Shell (1989) and related work
- Adaptation: Ghost in the Shell (1995)
- Sequel: Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004)
- Adaptation: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2002)
- Bonus material: Tachikoma Specials (2002)
- Sequel: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd GIG (2004)
- Sequel: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex – Solid State Society (2006)
- Adaptation: Ghost in the Shell (2017)
The Ghost in the Shell (1989
)
Shirō Masamune (writer-artist).
I’ve read both a standard English translation and the 2002 Kodansha Bilingual edition.
From March 2029 to September 2030, a team of officers do the dirty work of stabilizing a future Japanese state precariously merged with its corporations. In April of ’29, they are reconstituted as a power-suited rapid-response squad (攻殻機動隊, kōkaku kidō-tai, the original title of the series) but are still within Section 9 of Public Security, descended from the real-world PSIA (公安調査庁, kōan chōsa-chō).
Supposedly, following the April reorg, Section 9 is an international rescue unit (国際救助隊, kokusai kyūjo-tai). However, it reports directly to the head of its domestic intelligence agency and to the prime minister, because it sometimes kills Japanese politicians and businessmen: Civilians corrupted in the fever heat of technological and economic development after another two world wars. The most advanced electronics are neural networks down to the hardware level, and as a result, anyone among the teeming postwar multitudes is a potential puppet, ready to be hacked.
An essential graphic novel in the cyberpunk genre. Shirō swerves gleefully, cramming his pages with visual detail and even rambling footnotes. The design aesthetic and the action scenes are lovely, the premises at once incoherent and profound. It’s soft science fiction where psychic powers definitely exist, but only in the deep background. The occasional spreads of pornography add to the impression of an organic mess, of Shirō’s overworked mind cracking under the pressure of the asset-price bubble.
As you would expect, the intertext is wide open. There are explicit references to the memes of The Selfish Gene (1976) as an SF commonplace, and to various pop-sci books of the 1980s. Armitage/Corto in Neuromancer (1984) is a puppet of sorts, which means that Shirō’s Puppeteer is like Neuromancer itself. Shirō’s grimy hypercapitalism is also Gibson’s, but with an optimistic undertone. Shirō is optimistic not only about the pace of research but about the international ethos of the 2020s. The author espouses an ideology surprisingly close to The Ego and Its Own (1844). There is a ridiculous parliamentary session in chapter 10 and not a lot of love for democracy or the rule of law. Instead, Shirō’s protagonist, working under the alias “Kusanagi Motoko”, punches her boss’s boss and urges both bums and downtrodden orphans—victims of white-hot capitalism—to use their brains, as if all thinking creatures possessed a bedrock Stirnerian equality regardless of Gibsonian socioeconomic inequality. It’s far from a utopia, but there is a comforting current of heroism, wishful thinking and fuzzy, superstitious humanism here that is absent in a lot of Western cyberpunk.
References here: “Silent Möbius” (1991), “New Dominion Tank Police” (1993), Altered Carbon (2018).
sequential art text Japanese production fiction cyberpunk
‣ Ghost in the Shell (1995
)
Oshii Mamoru (director).
A rapidly growing city on an artificial island in the area of Hong Kong, in 2029. Traditional society has begun to dissolve with the advent of ever more invasive electronic communications. A hacker brainwashes cyborgs through the net, masking out their true memories, making them act as pawns in intercorporate crimes. Section 9 of a fractionalized Public Peace Department is on this hacker’s trail.
The Section’s chief operative retains only one biological component and has begun to question the nature of her existence. Her traditional mental complexity qualifies her as the possessor of a “ghost”, a secular, operationalized term for what used to be called a soul, but what does that matter? When she discovers that the hacker she is chasing isn’t human, and that it seeks her, she risks everything to communicate.
Pure cyberpunk: Extrapolative near-future science fiction in the vein of William Gibson, without Shirō’s supernatural background premises, in an animated feature. It’s uncommonly international in character, with 50% of its budget coming from US company Manga Entertainment. Incidentally, this film, the FMV cuts from an 1997 PlayStation 1 game by Exact, and the Stand Alone Complex (2002) leg of the franchise were all produced by Production I.G. Only this film and its sequel were directed by Oshii Mamoru.
This film is prefigured by Blue Thunder (1983), Gall Force: Earth Chapter (1989), “Silent Möbius” (1991) and many others, but only vaguely. It’s a creative landmark, some of Oshii’s densest work at almost half the length of Mobile Police Patlabor: The Movie 2 (1993). Its setting, a version of Hong Kong, invokes Milton Friedman’s dream in Free to Choose (1980), Gibson’s future, and the reality of an overworked society where monopolies not only exist, but actually vote in elections. In this setting, the film marries the contemplative style and temps mort (Jp. ma) of L’Eclisse (1962) to a techno-thriller genuinely concerned with the future, and this is not easy. It’s possibly the greatest masterpiece of cyberpunk film in the world.
This adaptation is based on chapters 1, 3, 5 and 8–11 of the graphic novel, taking only the German “think tank” from chapter 8 and tapering off quickly toward the end. The tone is very different and incredibly good. The porn, the comedy, and the spider-like powered suits (Fuchikoma) of Section 9 are all gone, and they stay gone in Oshii’s sequel. Oshii keeps Shirō’s frivolous invisibility but drop his effective targeting of firearms. There is one scene where an older man splits his mechatronic fingers to use a computer keyboard, but that’s not quite as baroque as it seems. It’s taken from the graphic novel, where it is explained in a footnote as an affectation of the older generation, who are not willing or able to interface more directly with the computers of the future. On a script level the treatment of brain-computer interfaces is better than that of manufactured superhuman slaves in Blade Runner (1982), but not by much; it’s roughly on a level with Gibson’s quasi-visual cyberspace in Neuromancer (1984), another subject that Shirō questions, and excuses himself for, in his footnotes. The quotes from 1 Corinthians 13 add little, but the very brief pop-Christian metaphor of communion with cyberspace as angelic is consistent with both Shirō and Gibson, as well as with Oshii’s tone.
References here: En betraktelse av A Silent Voice, Gundress (1999), Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation (2001/2005), Cowboy Bebop: Knocking on Heaven’s Door (2001), Avalon (2001), Japanorama (2002), I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006), Pacific Rim (2013), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Violet Evergarden (2018), Upgrade (2018), Mars Express (2023).
moving picture adaptation Japanese production animation fiction cyberpunk
‣‣ Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004)
Suzuki Toshio (producer), Oshii Mamoru (writer-director).
Three years later. Bateau is despondent after the disappearance of Kusanagi. He cares for his dumpy old Basset Hound and toys with death in his combat-cyborg body. He and Togusa, who now has a cyberbrain implant, investigate a new line of androids who are going insane.
An animated feature. This one retains the thrilling action set pieces and philosophical depth of the 1995 film, but the visuals and the writing style are very different. Philosophy is now front and centre. The script is based mainly on chapter 6 (“Robot Rondo”) of the original comic, but overloaded with quotes from and allusions to famous thinkers, all the way from Psalms 139 to Saitō Ryokuu’s 19th-century aphorisms and Richard Dawkins’s Extended Phenotype (1982). A one-scene forensic technician named Haraway is based on Donna Haraway, whose Cyborg Manifesto (1985) echoes throughout. Here’s a passage from the real Haraway that may shine some light on the plot:
Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.
In his visual style, meanwhile, Oshii combines variably textured 3D CGI with 2D animation in a way that is often beautiful but rarely illusionistic. Outside the set pieces, there is little movement, but Oshii puts his thumb on this doll-like immobility to match the dialogue’s overt intertextuality. The style is a curious mix of the surreal with the “piss filter” of contemporary video-game shooters. For one fight sequence, Oshii includes a version of the manga’s Koil Krasnov from chapter 7, a character with one mechanical arm longer than the other, but Oshii exaggerates the asymmetry to the point where he contradict’s one of Shirō’s intelligent asides in chapter 5: An arm that much stronger than the body that carries it would rip itself off under Newtonian physics.
The film is challenging but successfully develops a couple of themes. The basic plot is driven by the theme of Haraway’s women exploited in transnational capitalism: The Locus Solus corporation selling sexbots programmed with AI trained on trafficked girls and manufactured literally off shore. These women, as cyborgs, are able to fight back through the means of their own exploitation, which are means of production. Similarly, the operatives of Section 9, who normally hack their opponents, are now hacked with false inputs, re-introducing the first film’s theme of phenomenology and integrating it with authenticity and pained ruminations on the human form.
Haraway’s “them” are marginalized women of colour in the USA. Both Oshii and Shirō include human women as victims with agency, but especially in Oshii’s case, they’re something more Buddhist and less political going on. The personhood of robots is a running theme of the original manga, and that personhood is not just a consequence of general intelligence. Human-like robots, represented in the 1995 film by the girls in Aramaki’s op centre, are discussed at length in this second film, but in a different way. Their intelligence is peripheral. In one panel of Shirō’s chapter 9, Bateau mentions that even celluloid dolls sometimes seem to him to have a soul, and Shirō clarifies in his longest footnote that Bateau is talking about a “low-level spiritual structure”, not a subjective impression. However, it is only Oshii’s version of Bateau who makes a point of speaking for non-human, non-sentient dolls as victims, whether they’re robots or not. If you were to apply this line of thinking to real life, it would be factually incorrect, but in the context of filmmaking, Bateau’s radical empathy makes this project even more bold.
References here: Ex Machina (2014), Westworld (2016), Ghost in the Shell (2017).
moving picture sequel Japanese production animation fiction cyberpunk
‣‣‣ “Towards A New Posthuman Ontology – The Anti-Anthropocentrism of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence” (2020
)
Yalun Li (writer).
Read in 2020.
A medium-heavy case of the hedging typical of contemporary film studies, aggravated by mistakes in copy-editing:
This dynamic system is generated by both the diverse array of subjects but also the tone of the relations. The subjects, animal (Batou’s basset hound), human (Togusa), offspring (Togusa’s daughter), cyborg (Batou and Kusanagi), gynoid, dolls generate a complicated web of relations of companionship, kinship, care, desire, lust, ambivalence, hate, fear, resistant, respect, hope, and love.
Presumably, “dolls” should be in the singular, “resistant” should be “resistance”, and the second sentence should have used some means of separation other than commas alone for its two lists. The academic style, assuming familiarity with the author’s various citations, needs special attention to clarity on this more basic level.
‣ Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2002)
Shirō Masamune (cooperation).
Near-future Japan, especially New Port City (Niihama-shi) near Nagasaki. Stand-alone chapters (often treating emerging social problems) are mixed with the coherent story of the Laughing Man, a young genius and cyberterrorist.
TV series. Modernized cyberpunk with a lot of criminal investigation. Closer to its comic basis than Oshii’s films, but set in another universe where Tachikoma replace the manga’s and PlayStation game’s Fuchikoma, and where the Puppet Master never meets Kusanagi. Naturally, a lot of other stuff is altered, and many storylines are original. There is no significant overlap with the films, and no Oshii involvement.
The show seems to try to emulate Oshii’s style of direction, but a pay-per-view TV budget means more static shots and less realistic designs, especially for poor Kusanagi who wears a swimsuit and has hideous hair. The CGI is often flawed, particularly the cars, and elements of the hastily finished opening from episode 3 onwards.
From the point of view of a literary cyberpunk fan, this is an odd beast, falling somewhere between a 1980s retrofuture and a more contemporary extrapolative effort. Of course it would be absurd to show increased overcrowding in the near future of Japan, barring disasters, but there are also no brooding cityscapes, no punk attitude, no great cultural or social change. As a serious modernization, it’s not very good: Where then are the depletion of aquifers, the energy crisis, the changes in diet, and so on? The Tachikoma are pathetically pitched for comedy, and the writing is often opaque. The very clear use of disconnected stand-alone stories and the final reset hurt believability. Add to this the choice of Kanno’s progressive pop-rock instead of something like Kawai’s transcendent soundtracks, and quite a lot of the series turns out only so-so.
References here: Ghost in the Shell (1995).
moving picture adaptation Japanese production animation fiction series cyberpunk
‣‣ Tachikoma Specials (2002)
The Tachikoma hang out in virtual space. Their activities are often tied to the corresponding SAC episode’s plot.
One small spoof per episode of the SAC series, distributed with the series on DVD. There is one moment of brilliance: The musical in episode 25.
moving picture bonus material Japanese production animation fiction cyberpunk
‣‣ Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd GIG (2004)
Section 9 is reconstituted two years after its nominal destruction, because of a new terrorist threat in connection with large numbers of refugees from World Wars 3 and 4.
TV series. GIG as in a musical “gig” or the gig economy.
This is slightly more classical cyberpunk, including both a peripheral apocalyptic event—old Tokyo under water with general upheaval—and political themes, probably in reaction to the murder and robbery of a Japanese family of four in Fukuoka perpetrated by Chinese students, as well as other real-world events which helped reignite a fear of foreigners around the time of the production.
The Tachikomas return, despite what happened to the last batch, and a relatively huge amount of background info on the Section’s members is provided, including scenes from the Major’s childhood and from one of the wars.
References here: Ghost in the Shell (2017).
moving picture sequel Japanese production animation fiction series cyberpunk
‣‣ Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex – Solid State Society (2006)
After another two years, Togusa is a senior member of the greatly expanded Section 9, now playing Kusanagi’s role after she went solo. Their paths converge in the investigation of a transcendent hacker who has something to do with a device providing automated medical care for the elderly in their homes. That device has the side effect of practically inducing a coma, but perhaps the mind is simply elsewhere?
Animated feature. SAC handles the shift in format remarkably well, but other than the appropriate adaptations (including more smooth vehicle animation) there is little difference, hence little commonality with Oshii. The hacker is called the Puppet Master, but the specific term is kugutsu mawashi as opposed to ningyoutsukai, which is what they call the Puppet Master in Oshii’s first film.
moving picture sequel Japanese production animation fiction cyberpunk
‣ Ghost in the Shell (2017)
Seen in 2025.
In this version, “Kusanagi Motoko” is not an alias, even though the family name “Kusanagi” refers to a legendary “Grass-Cutting Sword” found among the imperial regalia of Japan. Here, it is the real name of a runaway who is kidnapped and forced to undergo the first successful conversion to the form of a cyborg with a biological nervous system in an otherwise artificial body. In the 1989 original, the same type of cyborg is common, without the kidnapping. Despite having a natural brain, Kusanagi is also brainwashed to believe that she is “Mira Killian”, a refugee, but the same person also suffers from memory loss and is also known as “Major” in English, not as “the Major”, so she has three names.
Whereas Innocence is an example of auteur filmmaking, this is not. There is not a single moment in this film where I sensed the artistic intent of its three writers or of its director, Rupert Sanders. Instead, it was made for name recognition, on the hypothesis that a live-action remake of a well-known film, with well-known actors and visual callbacks to other people’s work, would sell.
The actors, including Juliette Binoche, Scarlett Johansson and Kitano Takeshi, do poorly. Clint Mansell, a competent composer when he’s working with Aronofsky, never elevates this film like Kawai elevated Oshii’s in 1995. The techno music at a club is especially generic. The film also looks generic. The CGI cityscapes are particularly dull: A third-generation copy of Blade Runner (1982) without the physicality or ingenuity. There is nothing left of Shirō’s organic Etorofu (Iturup), or Oshii’s Hong Kong. Kitano as Aramaki gets the cartoon haircut and more action sequences than he does even in the graphic novel, but it’s not funny. Years in development hell reduced this whole film to a trail of slime across the screen.
The script draws on both the 1995 film and Innocence’s androids with their opening heads, but it doesn’t stop there. Its villain-turned-antihero, Kuze, is an illustrative piece of intertext. The name is from 2nd GIG (2004), but the role is not. Like Oshii, this film’s writers chose to use one antagonist to bring together otherwise disconnected chapters of Shirō’s original story, but that only worked for Oshii with the Puppeteer because the Puppeteer’s powers are compatible with the original chapter 3, where a garbage man is ghost-hacked. In this film, Kuze has to have the Puppeteer’s powers to explain why he can do the same trick, but it doesn’t make sense that he would have those powers. I think the writers used Kuze here because he and Kusanagi once knew each other in 2nd GIG: A coincidence that allows for implausible personal drama. However, that doesn’t explain why this film also includes Oshii’s personal trademark, the Basset Hound. That’s only there to steal some glory.
References here: Altered Carbon (2018), Mars Express (2023).