In a scene early in Ghost In The Shell, Kusanagi goes diving, then rises to the surface, approaching her own reflection in a shot that calls back to the opening credits’ images of her body being manufactured, while also wordlessly questioning whether she’s really unique. Kusanagi herself is a remarkable piece of visual design: curvy above the waist, devoid of sexual characteristics below, and either willowy or musclebound, depending on the situation.
(The dialogue plays better in the original Japanese with subtitles than it does in the English dub, where the chatter seems incessant.) But all the tech-speak and philosophizing is matched with pictures that carry Ghost In The Shell out of the realm of ideas. Oshii and screenwriter Kazunori Itô tell this story with enough wonky explanations to fill half a dozen Christopher Nolan films. As Kusanagi gets closer to the truth, she seems to confirm a lot of her worst fears about the inevitable outcome of all this technological advancement: that a new consciousness could spawn from the ocean of data on the web, not unlike how primordial beings crawled out of the sea.
#GHOST IN THE SHELL 1995 ENGLISH CAST MOVIE#
The plot of Ghost In The Shell-taken in part from Masamune Shirow’s manga series-concerns a malevolent force known as Puppet Master, who has been “ghost-hacking,” implanting false memories and personalities into cybernetic “shells.” Much of the movie has to do with uncovering Puppet Master’s location and motives, which isn’t easy, since it doesn’t seem to have any preferred physical form. Is it her experiences? The way other people treat her? And what does any of that mean if someone is capable of tampering with her consciousness? Throughout the film, Kusanagi wonders what individuates her. In the future-world where the film takes place, some people modify their bodies with electronics, and others-like Kusanagi-have their consciousnesses, or “ghosts,” projected into fully cybernetic bodies. For a movie that’s so photo-realistic in its backgrounds and detailed in its character design, Ghost In The Shell is just as effective when it goes minimal, suggesting presence through absence.īut as the title implies, Ghost In The Shell is preoccupied throughout with matters of “presence” and “absence.” One of the big reasons Ghost In The Shell became the most popular anime feature internationally since Akira (the film that first introduced many audiences to mature Japanese animation) is that it gets into its viewers’ heads, by musing out loud about what defines a living entity. And then just before the story properly begins, director Mamoru Oshii holds on a shot of the city, seen through a window, surrounded in the frame by total blackness aside from two strips of white-one representing Kusanagi’s bed, and the other the light from an adjoining room. In the background, Kenji Kawai’s score combines arrhythmic percussion and a vocal chorus, recalling something ancient, not futuristic. After an opening sequence in which half-naked cyborg cop Major Motoko Kusanagi splits a criminal’s head and torso wide open with a super-powerful gun, the movie’s opening credits begin, interspersed with images of the heroine dreaming of her own body’s creation.
The 1995 anime science-fiction classic Ghost In The Shell is an ultra-violent, rocket-paced film-over and out in just over 80 minutes-but it’s a poetic one, too.
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