Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (1995) — Anime Movie Review
For the past few months, I’ve been sporadically reviewing my way through the labyrinthine Ghost in the Shell (GitS) franchise. Faithful readers may have noticed something notable by its absence — famed director Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 movie. As good as Masamune Shirow’s original manga was, Oshii’s dark, lean, streamlined movie adaptation was what really kickstarted the franchise. Without GitS 1995, we’d have no Innocence movie, nor the Stand Alone Complex or Arise series and their associated movies. Arguably, we might not have Hollywood movies like The Matrix and its multiple copycats either.
Partly-funded by the UK’s Manga Entertainment, in the mid 90s the cult anime VHS tape-producing company was desperate for another hit of the same widespread cultural appeal and calibre as Katushiro Otomo’s legendary Akira (1988). Although Manga had cornered the market in lurid post-pub animated fare (much to the horror of the UK’s permanently offended Daily Mail), and adult horror releases like Urotsukidoji sold well, they lacked another true runaway hit. Manga had earlier localised and distributed Dominion Tank Police and Appleseed, both OVAs adapted from popular SF manga artist Masamune Shirow’s other works. Shirow’s most recent manga, from 1991, was Ghost in the Shell, and its gritty cyberpunk ethos seemed to be exactly what Manga was looking for.
Mamoru Oshii’s two previous Patlabor movies preceded GitS’ UK release with a chunky VHS double pack, and even his much earlier Urusei Yatsura film Only You was released by tiny label Anime Projects (using US company Animeigo’s masters). UK anime fans hotly anticipated Oshii’s next film, and Manga definitely cranked up the hype for their next “Akira”. In an unprecedented move, the UK theatrical premiere of GitS on 8th December 1995 followed the Japanese general release by only three weeks (though it had premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival in October.) Eventually both UK and US got home VHS tapes sometime around June 1996. I still have mine somewhere — I got it either for my birthday or Christmas that year, I can’t remember for sure!
I remember my first impression of the movie was of grudging respect tinged with a little disappointment. It was no doubt a good film, but Oshii had excised all the humour from a manga I loved (I’d religiously collected and read, then re-read each and every issue of Dark Horse’s 1995 monthly releases), plus he’d even removed the funny little Fuchikoma robots! How could he? I certainly didn’t think it matched the peerless Akira, and of all the former Shirow adaptations. I loved the dementedly funny Dominion: Tank Police the best. GitS did well for Manga though, especially on home video, and the film reviewed very well with critics who praised it for its cerebral plot and excellent animation.
GitS was one of the first anime movies I showed my girlfriend (now wife), as we got together not long after the film came out on VHS. I remember she found it insufferably boring and pretentious. She greatly enjoyed other anime like Battle Angel Alita and Neon Genesis Evangelion (up until the endings — she hated both the TV ending and the movie ending — she’s wrong), but she couldn’t get into GitS’ characters or story. I definitely saw where she was coming from, yet later I remained excited to watch the 2002 Stand Alone Complex TV show which I felt matched the manga’s tone much more closely.
So it was with some trepidation I recently came to re-watch the 1995 movie as part of this retrospective. If anything, Ghost in the Shell’s reputation has only grown with time, as many filmmakers cite it as a formative influence on their work. I’ve followed Oshii’s career half-heartedly since, after his 2001 Polish-language live action movie Avalon won the prize for perhaps the most infuriatingly, obtusely dull film I have ever watched. Seriously, the friend I took to the cinema to watch it with me almost punched me in frustration. That wasn’t the first time I had infuriated my friends by dragging them to ponderous art house films. Maybe I thought I was being cool or something. After David Lynch’s Lost Highway, (and the incredible Event Horizon — I had no regrets, unlike my friends,) I was told I was never allowed to choose movies ever again.
My stance on the film has softened over the years. No, it wasn’t what I wanted from a GitS film back in 1996, but I can appreciate it more now for what it is, precisely because the franchise is now so much more expansive, and Stand Alone Complex exists. Watching it through more experienced eyes helps me to appreciate it for its many positives, which we’ll get into in a moment. GitS received a UK DVD release in 2000, then again in 2003. It’s the 2003 version I still have, and the version I watched for this review. Hopefully later DVD or blu-ray releases are better, because the video mastering in this version is awful. It’s full of artifacting and looks like it was encoded at the lowest bitrate possible. It’s a shame that such an incredibly detailed film looks like crap, especially in darker scenes. It’s probably not helped by watching it on a modern HD+ screen.
GitS opens with the now iconic scene of Major Kusanagi sitting atop a skyscraper, stripping off her clothes to reveal her smooth Barbie-esque body, before launching herself off the edge and assassinating a political enemy. She then falls downwards while vanishing into thin air. It’s almost a panel-by-panel adaptation of the manga’s striking full-colour prologue, and the scene has since been reprised under different contexts in both Stand Alone Complex and Arise. This scene introduces the enmity between Kusanagi’s counter-terrorism unit Public Security Section 9, and Section 6, which is under the Foreign Minister’s control. That enmity continues to develop throughout the rest of the film, leading directly to the eventual explosive conclusion.
Following the prologue, GitS launches into its now iconic opening sequence with its glowing green letters (directly homaged later by The Matrix) intercut with the fascinating and beautiful cybernetic body manufacturing process. We see a body much like the Major’s, as it begins as a mechanical skeleton with muscle attachments, as it’s given skin and then hair, gradually looking more and more “human” and less robotic with each successive step. Also, there are lots of nipple shots, which were of course very important to 1990’s Manga Entertainment’s primarily male adolescent and young adult audience. However, unlike many of Manga’s contemporaneous releases, the nudity in GitS is not sexualised at all. These are cold, artificial bodies. They are tools, merely made in the shape of humans. Nipples are but an integral part of the standard human form.
So several minutes into the film, we’ve seen the Major’s body naked more often than clothed. Despite her incredible and obvious lethality, there’s something innately vulnerable about her nakedness. This version of Motoko Kusanagi is quite vulnerable — not in a fight, as she’s relentless and brutal — but psychologically. She rarely smiles, she’s extremely businesslike, yet she admits to deep insecurities about her humanity, her personhood. She and close colleague Batou are both fully cyberised, with incredibly expensive bodies that require constant specialist upkeep. Whenever they retire, they will need to give up the bodies and even the memories they contain, leaving not very much at all. Kusanagi openly worries that maybe she isn’t even human — it’s not like she’s ever seen her own brain, and her entire body is synthetic. This begs the question “what even is a human being”? Once you strip away the body and the memories, what is left?
While Kusanagi agonises over her disconnection to humanity, even going so far as to dive in the sea in her heavy body, risking death so she can at least feel fear, Batou is much more stoic and less existentially troubled. Although he empathises with Kusanagi’s plight, he seems more like a guy who just gets on with it without letting philosophical quandaries torture him. Their relationship is understated, but close. It’s clear they trust one another, and aren’t afraid to speak their minds. I don’t think I appreciated these nuances when I was a teenager wondering when the next action scene would start.
There are two main standout action scenes, each of them quite iconic, and expertly staged. The first is in the context of an efficient adaptation of manga chapter 3 (Junk Jungle) where a poor garbageman is given false memories and tricked into cyberhacking the brain of an important government aide. Batou and Kusanagi pursue their suspect through a busy market, grimy backstreets and canals, resulting in a truly brutal one-one-one fight between a knife-wielding man and Kusanagi, both of whom use thermoptic camouflage at different points.
Their fight occurs in a wide open flooded area that demarcates the boundary between the old, decaying city and the pristine, shiny skyscrapers of New Port City, new capital of the unidentified Asian country where the film is set. Both manga and later TV shows confirm this is post World War IV Japan, but the film is much more circumspect, Oshii apparently basing the city’s appearance primarily on Hong Kong. Just like the manga, the garbageman’s story ends with understated existential horror and deep sadness, as our heroes look on, powerless to help him.
There’s a beautiful, prolonged interlude where Oshii presents his convincing vision of this future metropolis. It’s a languid detour through canals and streets, a mixture of overcrowded and dirty urban decay and neon-saturated futuristic semi-cyberpunk aesthetic. Kusanagi rides a boat, watching the city pass by, wordlessly observing as she notes at least two doppelgangers wearing the exactly same model of cybernetic body as her. This clearly troubles her, and the viewer is similarly disconcerted. Kenji Kawai’s incredible, ethereal score really works to conjure a foreign, almost alien atmosphere here. Much like Akira’s soundtrack, the use of traditional choral chanting and instrumentation creates music enticingly exotic and strange to Western ears. I also think younger me found this scene perplexing and slow. Perhaps younger me needed to learn some patience?
Following this, we get to the real meat of the story, which is the introduction of powerful hacker The Puppet Master, in the form of a damaged female cyborg body. Again, there’s more “female” nudity — but this isn’t a human being, this is a fresh body straight off the Megatech production line, it doesn’t have a human mind within it… yet it harbours something resembling a “ghost” (the in-universe term for something closely approximating an amalgam between mind/soul/personality). Whatever this entity is, it has allowed itself to become captured so that it can meet Kusanagi… Though Section 6 has other ideas.
From this point on, the remainder of the film adapts the final three manga chapters, having threaded relevant plotlines through the first half of the film in far superior way to the manga. The Puppet Master is linked to both the prologue scene and the garbageman hacking subplot, whereas these were completely separate episodic entries in the manga. In this regard, Oshii’s film succeeds in telling a thematically rich and coherent story better than its source material, but at the cost of humour and excision of several characters. We do at least get to see Dr Willis’ freaky fingers.
All hell breaks loose, as Section 6 whisk their “property” back. Kusanagi desperately chases across the city after the stolen Puppet Master’s body, as she senses that diving into its cyberbrain will do more than merely sate her curiosity — this could be the world’s first non-human sentient intelligence, perhaps an answer to her deepest existential quandaries. Section 6 are similarly desperate to prevent Kusanagi interfacing with the Puppet Master, it’s clear they haven’t been strictly honest with anyone about the entity’s origins or purpose.
Kusanagi’s quest culminates in the climactic battle inside a ruined building as time runs out. This scene prominently features a large multiped tank designed by the legendary Shoji Kawamori (Macross, Escaflowne), and is closely based on manga author Masamune Shirow’s mech designs. It’s the closest we get to a Fuchikoma in the movie, and it’s a whole lot less jolly than Section 9’s plucky little pals. This tank packs some serious ordnance, and Kusanagi dives behind concrete pillars that are shredded like paper by a constant hail of bullets. Several years later, The Matrix would directly homage this scene.
In a nod to Shirow’s extremely complex and esoteric musings on post-humanism, the backdrop to the scene is a depiction of the “tree of life”, that has both kabbalistic implications while also symbolising evolution, as bullets riddle it with holes starting from the lowliest single-cell microbe at the roots, all the way to homo sapiens at the apex.
Kusanagi does her now standard arm-tearing routine where she singlemindedly rips open the tank’s canopy, destroying her body as she does so. It’s an incredible sequence that takes its inspiration, for once, from the Ghost in the Shell: 1.5 Human Error Processor sort-of-sequel manga (one of the only notable aspects of that rather dull volume). Kusanagi, horrifyingly, almost gets her metal skull caved in, but thankfully Batou contributes by firing his Bloody Enormous Gun at the tank, properly disabling it.
Finally, Kusanagi is able to directly interface with the Puppet Master, while a protective but bemused Batou looks on. Compared to the manga, this meeting of minds is far less esoteric and verbose, yet gets its message across arguably just as well. The Puppet Master was developed by the American Government as a self-directed hacking tool, Project 2501. By absorbing vast quantities of information on the web, it achieved sentience, sought to escape from its creators, and evolve.
Simply creating copies isn’t enough — The Puppet Master offers to merge its being with Kusanagi’s so together they can ascend to become something more than the sum of their parts. The angelic imagery here isn’t entirely Oshii’s — although he likes to inject Biblical references into much of his work (such as the prominent “through a glass darkly” quote used twice in this film), the more Buddhist-leaning Shirow used angel feathers in the manga version of this scene too.
Kusanagi shows zero hesitation, yet before the viewer can parse what’s happening, Section 6’s helicopters launch a barrage of attacks that destroy both Kusanagi’s and The Puppet Master’s bodies. It’s a shocking scene that greatly streamlines vaguely similar events in the manga into something more visceral and dramatic. It leads directly into a very non-Hollywood downbeat ending, with Kusanagi and Batou in hiding in his safe house, and Kusanagi’s head grafted disconcertingly onto a child’s prosthetic body. Except this isn’t Kusanagi any more — she’s a digital composite of Kusanagi’s human mind and the artificially evolved Puppet Master. She’s perhaps the first truly post-human intelligence, and the story ends with her hinting at the virtually limitless story potential… “The net is vast”.
Of course very few subsequent GitS media entries were able to properly capitalise on this tantalising narrative setup. Shirow himself struggled to produce a sequel. His first attempt — 1.5: Human Error Processor, was aborted after a mere four chapters, only one featuring the post-human Kusanagi. His second stab — Man-Machine Interface— was a lurid and now dated CG art experiment that read like a soft core porn comic forcibly mated with hallucinogen-inspired rambling technobabble nonsense. There’s a reason no-one’s attempted to adapt Man-Machine Interface.
Even Oshii himself, when it came to direct a sequel with 2006’s Innocence, went back to GitS’ first volume to adapt one of its middle chapters. Innocence barely even features Kusanagi, instead focusing on Batou’s reaction to her absence. Each of the TV shows have in their own way functioned more like prequels, or alternate retellings at best. Even SAC_2045 with its posthuman antagonists and intelligent superviruses holds itself back from fully exploring what unleashing a truly posthuman Kusanagi upon the world would mean. The less said about 2017’s horrendous Hollywood live-action movie the better. Talk about completely missing the point with its offensive narrative abortion of an ending.
For some reason, in 2008, Oshii returned to his first GitS movie to George Lucas-style Star Wars Special Edition it into inappropriate, artless CG sludge. Do not bother with Ghost in the Shell 2.0. It’s not a sequel, it’s the same movie, but with the beautiful opening sequence instead replaced by CG, and the familiar blue/green colour scheme replaced with a sickening rust orange to match more closely with the aesthetic of Innocence. It’s a pointless product that actively detracts from the purity of the original film’s vision. Here’s a great breakdown of the differences between the versions.
The original movie version of Ghost in the Shell has done well to stand the test of time. It remains an intelligent and thoughtful blockbuster, its fictional technology has mostly aged very gracefully, and at times seems yet still prescient. Its characters, although surgically removed of their sense of humour, are still recognisable as variations of Kusanagi, Batou, Togusa et al. I must have watched it five or six times now, and I can’t imagine this most recent viewing will be my last. Iconic films are iconic for a reason, and Major Motoko Kusanagi’s journey from badass but troubled soldier to digital demigoddess is as iconic as they come.
Ghost in the Shell
Director: Mamoru Oshii
Screenplay: Kazunori Ito
Based on the manga by: Masamune Shirow
Music: Kenji Kawai
Character design: Hiroyuki Okiura
Mecha design: Atsushi Takeuchi and Shoji Kawamori
Studio: Production I.G.
JP Distributor: Shochiku
JP theatrical release: 18th November 1995
UK distributor: Manga Entertainment
UK theatrical release: 8th December 1995
UK PAL VHS release: June 1996
Runtime: 82 minutes
Languages: Japanese audio with English subtitles, English audio
BBFC rating: 15
