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.

