Shirow vs Oshii

John Ohno
John Ohno
Nov 7 · 2 min read

Masamune Shirow is the Larry Cohen to Mamoru Oshii’s Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick might be more technically proficient but if I want to put on a movie after a long day, I will reach for the problematic, complicated, bizarre, and consistently inconsistent Cohen.

Oshii seems to create by elaborating from a core thematic idea, which produces a consistent & coherent result (and therefore, a result that can be boiled back down to its core idea). In other words, something that only has rewatch value on aesthetic grounds.

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John Ohno

Written by

John Ohno

Resident hypertext crank. Author of Big and Small Computing: Trajectories for the Future of Software. http://www.lord-enki.net

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