Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence Ani-Manga Box Set Review
The idea of using photographs to produce comics has been around for a long time, across many cultures, appearing to originate in 1940s Italy. They spread to Latin America in the 1960s, establishing the “Photonovella” genre. In 1970s UK, comics as diverse as male-targeted sci-fi anthology 2000AD and female-targeted Photo Love experimented with the art form. 1970s US publishers adapted prominent movies and TV shows using stills to construct comics, most notably with Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and Alien, among many others. As a form of mainstream comics, it seems to have mostly fallen out of favour since the 1980s, with little of note released in the past few decades.
Unsurprisingly, the Japanese comics industry also adapted the use of movie stills to produce full-color manga, though instead of live action, they used anime. In general, manga is primarily produced in black-and-white, as the pressures of weekly/fortnightly/monthly serialisation dictates fast turnaround of new chapters. While 20-page monthly American comics are often produced by a small army of contributors — writer/penciller/inker/colorist/letterer/etc etc, manga is more often than not produced by a single writer/artist, who may or may not employ assistants to help with backgrounds or other supportive work. Japan produces so much anime that its striking and colourful images have the potential to be transformed into myriad beautiful, full-colour comics without the excess time required to paint every manga panel from scratch.
From what I understand, Japanese “Film Comics” (or “anime comics”) first entered production in either the late 1970s, or 1980s. Early examples include the TV version of Captain Harlock, and OVA The Humanoid. Most famously in the West, many Studio Ghibli movies have been adapted in this way, and released in English by Viz Comics, who also published many volumes of the Inu-Yasha “ani-manga”. For a while, Tokyopop released many titles (not necessarily of Japanese origin) in their “cine-manga” range, such as Akira, Avatar The Last Airbender, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and such Disney properties as Meet the Robinsons, Ratatouille and Lilo & Stitch.
This ani-manga version of Mamoru Oshii’s 2004 movie Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is the first time I’ve ever read anything like this, and I was somewhat sceptical as to its value. It comes as a four-volume box set that cost more than I’d like to admit to paying when I found it somewhere online. This thing is difficult to find, and there’s a dearth of information about it anywhere on the internet. The box itself is lovely, and each individual volume is a pocket-sized paperback with a slipcover, a little smaller than your average manga volume, and comprises around 150 pages each.
Across the total six hundred pages, there are around two thousand stills from Innocence used to recount its story. Japanese onomatopoeic sound effects are added, along with a few motion lines, where appropriate. At the back of each volume is a lengthy and unwieldy glossary of English-translated sound effects. There are so many of them that it’s unrealistically laborious to go back and check every single instance of a sound. I wish in this case they’d just replaced the sound effects directly with translations. It’s not as if there was a concern about manga art needing to be retouched. The Japanese sound effects are stamped over the movie images and look no less out of place than English words would.
None of these four volumes were released separately, the books exist only as part of the set, which is just as well. Due to the sheer number of stills used, each scene takes many pages to progress — probably a lot slower-paced than if this had been a more traditional manga adaptation. By the time the first volume ends, just prior to Batou and Togusa’s visit to the local Yakuza, very little has actually happened. It’s perhaps best not to look at these volumes from a narrative perspective — they are pretty much just a collection of movie photos with the script jammed (sometimes awkwardly) into speech bubbles. This box set’s main value is in the images, and they are gorgeous.
Say what you like about Innocence, it’s impossible to argue that it’s a bad-looking movie. Even considering the advances in CG rendering in the last 20 years, the festival scene in Etorofu remains astonishing for its details and vibrant use of colour. It’s reproduced here in a multi-page spread, along with the Japanese lyrics for composer Kenji Kawai’s accompanying piece Ballade of the Puppets. The detailed translations at the back of the second volume demonstrate how thematically fitting those lyrics are.
Innocence is well-renowned for its overuse of literary quotes that comprise its improbably philosophical conversations between its central cast members. What remains difficult to parse when watching becomes somewhat more manageable on the printed page, as the fidelity of the written dialogue to the original script allows the reader to slow down and digest what the characters are actually saying to one another, rather than letting the highfalutin gibberish wash over one’s head. Now I’m not saying this makes Oshii’s dense dialogue make a whole lot more sense, but the opportunity to at least google some of the references helps a lot with general comprehension. It’s difficult to do that when watching a film.
The Innocence Ani-Manga’s glossy paper quality is excellent, and allows the colour reproduction to absolutely shine. Despite its small size, details in the stills really pop, with every two-page-spread a work of art. I don’t know who got the job of capturing stills, arranging them, and shaping them as panels, because they’re not credited. Whoever they are, they did a very good job. There are multiple images from every scene here, nothing is missed at all. It’s an almost obsessively detailed work that realistically doesn’t need six hundred full pages, but as an indulgent piece of art, I think it’s forgiveable.
Although Innocence is by no means my favourite Ghost in the Shell animated incarnation, I can’t deny that this paper edition is thoroughly beautiful. It’s a shame it’s so hard to find now, because I recommend this to anyone who’s a fan of Oshii’s films. It almost tempts me to go seek out a showing of the newly 4K-restored Innocence, currently showing in movie theatres for its 20th annniversary…
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence Ani-Manga
Based on: the Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence movie written and directed by Mamoru Oshii
Original work: Ghost in the Shell manga by Masamune Shirow
Dialogue Translation: based on English subtitles by Linda Hoaglund and Judith Alley
Miscellanous translation: Yuji Oniki
US publisher: Viz Media LLC
US publication: 2nd March 2005
Language: English
Pages: 600
ISBN 13: 978–1591168294
