Oshii ditched the wisecracks and technical esoterica for a lyrical, atmospheric film set in what looks like Hong Kong, its rainy, neon-lit streets teeming with humans and robots and combinations thereof. “There were some terms I spent hours trying to pin down, only to find that he’d made them up.”
“A lot of the science was way over my head,” he said. Schodt, the author of the pioneering 1983 book “Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics,” translated the “Ghost” series for English-speaking readers. Without giving too much away, Kusanagi finds her inner self by embracing her wonderfully synthetic side.įrederik L. Nor does the film share the fears of a wired world found in other sci-fi movies. But unlike others of her ilk, the protagonist of “Ghost in the Shell,” Major Motoko Kusanagi, doesn’t want to be human or even pass for one. More to the point: Can an artificial human even have one? The question has fascinated science-fiction writers for decades, inspiring characters from the automatons of Isaac Asimov’s “ I, Robot,” from 1950, to the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” android Data and the “Blade Runner” replicants. It’s her soul, however, that’s at the heart of this beloved anime classic. You see her synthetic bones, skin, sinew, breasts - everything but the creature’s soul, the so-called ghost in the cyborg’s high-tech shell. Her body rises out of a pool of milky goo. The petals of her segmented skull wrap around her brain, like a flower closing at dusk. Between shots of green digits floating in black space - a vision of computer code lovingly repurposed four years later in “ The Matrix” - a cyborg with female features wakes. The title sequence of the 1995 film “Ghost in the Shell” contains one of anime’s most visually arresting birth scenes.
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