My Adventure with:
Ghost in the Shell
So I got sent to ISS, which if you little kiddies or oldies out there don't know that is in school suspension. Why was I sent there you ask? well I will tell you my fine chap. I was perusing the interwebs as I often do and found a funny picture which I decided to show my hardcore otaku friend. He promptly chuckled and went to work searching for something to gross me out. What was this you ask? Well that was tons of cartoon network character hentai which got me flagged. Side note I am a denizen of the internet and wasn't grossed out in the slightest, the things I have seen would make a Vietnam vet want back on the battlefield so they can run into some chemical orange and maybe blind themselves. I digress though, the point is this caused my school laptop to be flagged and then the attendance/diciplinary officer called me down and confiscated it so he could search it. Hope he enjoys 100gb of anime. Now the only thing I had on there that I was iffy on was the Ghost in the Shell movie, so I decided to watch it while in ISS to pass the time.
In ISS you are essentially in a permit test cubby where you can't see except if you turn around, so i thought it was perfect for watching considering the privacy. I begin watching and the titillage begins, I kid though the movie was very serious and touched down on many philosophical topics. There just happened to be a lot of tit scenes tossed in there, with the majors thermoptic camo only working when naked save for a belt. The technology is another thing worth mentioning, it is so diverse and you are told nothing except that people have different augmentations that help them with every day life.
This movie had something that I don't see in many shows today, subtlety the show knows how to toss all these scenes and dialog at you that don't make sense to you at the time but are known by the characters. The dialog seems natural and not forced in any way, you don't have long exposition dumps as many modern anime do. For instance an anime which I have been watching is Black Bullet, the show is good, with great action scenes and dialog from the villian but the rest of the characters have seemingly forced dialog, many shows have this issue especially when first explaining something. Some it is justified like in the case of Death Note where Light knows nothing about the shinigami powers and how the notebook works, so it is logical for things to have to be explained. In many shows they state things which should already be known by the characters and it feels unnatural. Ghost in the Shell has many things that it states but doesn't explain, they mention ghosts a lot and you come to realize throughout the film that a ghost is the augmented brain, later you they talk about a shell but you aren't sure what they mean for a while until you figure out that it is the body. The dialog is different from normal speech to us but is normal to them so they don't have to explain it, you just realize it through repition similar to learning a language by exposure.
The movie has multiple scenes which go on between others that further elude to what will happen next, the show seems to have mastered the environment and that is by far the best part of the movie. The cyberpunk dystopian future where everyone is augmented but it leads to further complications. It brings up many points like what makes a human special, what if a soul is a simple algorithm, things like that. Things which a cyborg would go through, especially when confronted by a construct that was artificially created but as sentient as a human. These partial machines feel more human than almost anything I have seen from animation and I loved it. I sat through the whole movie in awe of the cinematography and had to remind myself that this movie came out in 1995 because it looked better than most shows that I have watched.
The soundtrack was something that had no real outstanding tracks but as a whole it immersed you into the universe that was being illustrated, I felt enthralled by the bewitching soundtrack that conveyed a sense of lapsing reality in some scenes but could switch to a fast paced scene as well without feeling jarring. The whole soundtrack flowed well with the movie and helped to cement it into my mind as something to think about.
Something I catch myself thinking about are all the media which seem to have taken inspiration from this movie, from the style, to the setting, to the philosophy of indisinguishable man and machine. This is a topic which has been addressed over and over again from characters that are partially machine fighting with the urge to go full machine and sacrifice their humanity (alla teen titans), to AI wanting humanity (alla a metric shit ton of space movies, with an honorable mention going to AI rampancy in the Halo universe), to just the struggle of man and machine (terminator). It is something that seems to have predicted the future as people become more and more engrained with technology, before we know it we will begin augmenting ourselves more than we already do and you will start seeing cyborgs in every day life. Though this is only speculation as we could just go the Star Trek route but then you have the Borg. More man and machine conflict.
Overall Ghost in the Shell was a highly enjoyable experience, it can't even be described as a movie, but an experience. One has to watch it for themselves because it is filled to the brim with amazing animation and subtle hints at how the universe actually functions. So I sugjest that you go watch this masterpiece of a movie.
Animation: 10 (still holds up amazingly today)
Characters: 8 (the focus was more on the environment than any individual character)
Sound: 10 (had me entranced the whole way through
Enjoyment: 10 (I loved every minute of this movie, I went into this expecting the matrix due to the matrix being heavily influenced by this movie but got something so much better)
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Overall: 9.5
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