Ani-May: Ghost in the Shell (Dir Mamoru Oshii, 1h 22m, 1995)

There are few mediums I love more than animation, and fewer still I love like its Japanese incarnation, anime, from its poetic visual tone poem profundity in films like the war movie/New-wave style Skycrawlers and the unforgettable childhood-in-war film Grave of the Fireflies, to its most artistic, or most ridiculous, or simply its best, in films like End of Evangelion, a nigh-experimental finale to the infamous Neon Genesis Evangelion, the work of Studio Ghibli, and visual treats like Redline, a near decade long hand-drawn passion project, and the still-seminal Akira. Hell, I do not one but two regular-ish podcasts on the medium's highs and lows. I love anime, in all its myriad explorations of what hand-drawn, cel, and increasingly computer animation can do.

I have a confession to make, though. You'll recall, way back in the summer of 2017, I reviewed the hopelessly average western adaption of Ghost in the Shell, in which Scarlett Johansson, as she is oft to do, played another of her white saviour among Asian masses roles, only heightened by the film otherwise keeping her Japanese roots intact, name et al. I still don't recommend it, even from an admittedly impressive aesthetic point of view, nor for the sterling supporting cast, including the one and only Beat Takeshi. And my confession is this. I have never seen Ghost in the Shell. To be frank, anyone with even a vague knowledge of the outline of the plot of Ghost in the Shell could tell you that the American version was going to be derivative, whitewashed trash on arrival, but it's an oversight that's smarted ever since, and one I made sure to go into subsequent anime adaptions (the excellent Alita: Battle Angel) better equipped.

So here we are, kicking off the obviously-named Ani-May with perhaps the most important single film the medium would produce, at least until 2001's Spirited Away utterly cemented the arrival of anime as a true rival to Disney, Dreamworks and the like. Loosely adapting Masamune Shirow's manga of the same name, though sloughing off some of the more adolescent concepts of the original three volume series in service to its profound tech-heavy exploration of humanity against the backdrop of a world made ever more complex by technology and corruption, its mucky fingerprints are everywhere.

Indeed, its ghost hides in plain site, not only through its many spin-offs, including the seminal Stand Alone Complex, perhaps the closest anime has ever come to a philosophically-driven work, but through the then nascent cyberpunk genre, including The Matrix trilogy, the divisive Cyberpunk 2077 (and its tabletop origin), and too many books, games, and films to count, from tabletop games to series like Altered Carbon and Westworld, to music to fashion. It towers above modern science-fiction, in the same way that Alien, Solaris, Blade Runner and its ilk tower, a ghostly shade cast across the medium in spectacular fashion.

Set in 2029, and following Mokoto Kusanagi, an android member of the Japanese Public Security Section 9, one part detective, one part assault team, Ghost in the Shell covers a remarkable amount of ground in just 82 minutes, as Section 9 hunt down the mysterious hacker, the Puppet Master, from philosophical debates about whether its augmented protagonists are still human, whilst exploring human identity and post-human evolution, to government corruption and the end of borders in a digital era, to astonishing visual imagery and otherworldly score, not to mention bruising, beautifully animated fights that still stand up over a quarter of a century after its release.

Mokoto is our in to this universe-we first see her atop a building as the crosschatter of military communications and her own thoughts mix-the sound mixing on GitS is still a remarkable part of this film, adding to its authenticity, and its sparing use of score throughout only adds to this. The scene around her unfurls slowly, as she disrobes and leaps off a building, to cloak herself in just one of the many high-tech items the film has to offer. It's an image the film returns to several times, not least on the more popular Western poster for the film, where the title hovers awkwardly at censor-bar level, but one that its now iconic status has done nothing to dilute. In short, it's a masterful shorthand for both her femininity and her otherness, for her vulnerability and her power-the finale, in which she takes on a tank barehanded, echoes this perfectly, even as she tears herself limb from limb to defeat it.

Here, we cut back to the meeting she is about to interrupt-Oshii, like fellow animator-turned-live-action director, Hideaki Anno, builds tension perfectly-the diplomat at the centre of the sequence is attempting to assist a programmer in defecting to an unnamed country, and we see the police force gather outside, only for this gun battle between the diplomat and the security forces cut short by Mokoto, who shoots him dead in bloody fashion, and drifts out of site, cloaking again in what, without a question, is the film's most famous shot. That this is just one of the many sequences that the 2017 live action version creats nigh-verbatim is not just a testament to how slavish the remake truly was, but how well, how perfectly paced an introduction to this world, this opening seven minutes truly is, not just in terms of introducing Major Kusanagi, but in introducing this complex world of cyber/human relations to its audience.

Intercut with a chatter of type-writer and code that forms the titles-a moment that the Wachowski sisters would lift wholesale for The Matrix, four years later-there it is. Making of Cyborg is not just an astonishing scene technically, matching hand-drawn animation with then nascent computer graphics (and, strangely, further updated for the curiously inessential 2008 Ghost in the Shell 2.0), nor just stunning for what it does in terms of the matching of Japanese folk vocals and Bulgarian melody to create the utterly unique score that accompanies this scene, but the literal birth of our heroine, a moment that feels at once sacred and utterly personal, and disturbingly post-human and impersonal. Whilst Stand Alone Complex explores these themes to the point it resembles a philosophy textbook, much of GitS does this through imagery, minimal dialogue, and its masterfully taut pace.

From here, Makoto (Atsuko Tanaka/Mimi Woods), together with the rest of Section 9, including Batou (Akio Otsuka/Richard Epcar) begin to follow up on the appearance of the mysterious Puppet Master, beginning with the hacking of the Foreign Minister's interpreter, leading to a chase in which the perpetrator changes several times, from hapless garbage man to gun-wielding thug, leading to a spectacularly taut set of sequences from slowly growing detective work to following the unaware perpetrators, to a car-chase and gunfight, to another chase on foot through a market, only to find, once Makoto defeats and captures him, that the thug is merely being controlled by the still-elusive Puppet Master.

That this flows perfectly, that this build and payoff and build and payoff set of sequences work is not just due to the pacing and the naturalistic flow and build of setpiece, but down to the stunning animation, both in terms of the characters themselves, given a suitable weight and heft, but from its backgrounds, with Hong Kong of the 1990s tight, claustrophobic streets and rubbish-strewn alleys and dried up riverbeds, as planes course overhead, barely clearing the blocks below. It is scenery that lends itself perfectly to the sequence, to the tautness, to this five-minutes-into-the-future sense of the future, and as it ends, so the film turns inward, into a more cerebral, less action-centric piece of cinema, as the conspiracy begins to grow.

Following a prolonged sequence that drifts through the downtown of the city, as "Creation of Cyborg" echoes in the background, and sees Oshii at his most abstract, a cinematic animated tonepoem before the film dives into its more intellectual half, we are introduced to the Puppet Master, a disembodied-voiced, oddly Christ-like figure with long blonde hair despite their female body, who is promptly run down and brought into the headquarters of Section 9, only to be stolen from under their nose after begging for asylum in Japan. It is this, following another gruelling action sequence in which Mokoto struggles against the sudden appearance of a tank to defeat it, that brings them and Mokoto together, into a surreal melding of souls, and a stunningly post-modern ending to the film, mirroring its opening.

Ghost in the Shell is many things; a post-human masterpiece, a stunning exploration of what it means to be human, a film that still feels like an astonishingly cutting edge piece of cinema. Mokoto is one of animated cinema, let alone anime's greatest character, a cold stoic who eventually becomes far more than the mere government agent she began as, her exploration, her attempts to discover who she is driving the final third of the film, to a point where she becomes something more than human, more than android, a next step, as Bowman becomes in the equally influential 2001: A Space Odyssey, in our existence. GitS still feels, in an age where we live in internet-interlaced world, where bio-augmentation is now fast approaching and where AI and cybernetics drive us forward, hugely relevant, a humanist parable about the very nature of being human because-or in spite-of the technology we embed ourselves in, mentally and physically.

Here's the thing though. Ghost in the Shell never made budget, its profit only coming when co-producers Manga Entertainment, a company now synonymous with the early era of anime, released it onto VHS in early 1996, where, together with Akira and the now-largely forgotten ultra-violent also-ran, Ninja Scroll (dir. Yoshiaki Kawajiri, 1993, released on VHS 1995), it proceeded to introduce a generation, in the UK and beyond, to anime as a medium. Without it, The Matrix, not to mention a hundred other copies of that formula, do not exist, without it, anime's eruption into the western market with Pokémon, Naruto, and a hundred other series is either delayed until Hayao Miyazaki pushes it over the top and into respectability, or it remains a niche curio.

But twenty-six years on, it towers above much of the rest of the medium-so much near-future cyberpunk sci-fi is beholden to it, and its heroine, or to its message, and no slavish remake, no cultural osmosis, no overwrought if technically superb companion series can dilute it. No film, save perhaps the return of that great catylist of cyberpunk in the first place, in the form of Blade Runner 2049, which still cannot help but homage and tip its hat to Oshii's masterpiece in its city scenes, comes close. Like few films in anime, its ghost, its spirit, its masterful mix of animation, music, and tautly written philosopher-actioneer endures, and it is everywhere, in anime and beyond.

Rating: Must See: Personal Recommendation

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