A.I. "Ghost in the Shell"
Friday, April 24, 2015 at 10:00PM Artificial Intelligence Week, our way of saying "hey, Ex-Machina and soon Age of Ultron are in theaters so it's trending, sort of" continues with Tim Brayton on an anime classic...
If we're going to talk about artificial intelligence in animation - sci-fi in animation generally, to be honest - we can't help but eventually find our way to the wonderful world of anime. Something about the combination of Japan's willingness to see animation as a medium for all kinds of storytelling, not just kiddie flicks, along with Japan's longstanding obsession with high-tech toys, makes Japanese animation a miraculous breeding ground for complex, philosophically overheated stories of life in the future and the impact of technology on humanity.
And possibly no movie in all of anime is so eager to explore the weirdest, thorniest issues of human vs. robot life, of consciousness vs. the electronic simulation of consciousness, and of self-determined identity as it is constrained by or transcends the body, as director Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell...
Even the English title (which is not the same as the Japanese original) underlines exactly that idea: that the self-awareness can appear where it's neither expected nor wanted.
The film, adapted by Kazunori Ito from the manga by Masamune Shirow, depicts a future where most of humanity has taken to using cybernetic bodies, with all the possibilities for swapping and discarding identities that implies. Naturally enough, its plot concerns a hacker's attempt to exploit this brave new world by taking control of individuals, blanking out their identities and removing their free will, and for this reason is called the Puppet Master. Attempting to hunt him down, we find our hero, cybernetic cop Motoko Kusanagi, who is one of the most fascinating psychological characters in the history of movie robots. Through her, the film explores not just the attempt to retain identity in the absence of a physically contiguous body, but also gender in a post-gender environment: Kusanagi's artificial body combines exaggerated feminine curves with a pointedly neutered body
Years before gender identity became a hot topic in pop culture, Kusanagi was already a more sophisticated vessel for conversations about the difference between psychological and physical realities than anything we've had since then, a sterling example of what science fiction does best: using imagined technology to examine present realities from striking new angles. The interesting thing about the film's depiction of consciousness residing in artificial bodies has nothing to do with advanced technology, and everything to do with how humans live in the world, right now.
For all that Ghost in the Shell is a great film mostly on the back of its remarkable protagonist, though, it's a pretty great work all around, telling a twisty (honestly, at times, almost too twisty) mystery story in a beautifully developed world, brought to life using what was some of the most advanced animation technology that had been employed in Japan up to that point. It was at the time a groundbreaking marriage of traditional cel animation and CGI, using tools that turned out be technological dead-ends, but still turned out absolutely splendid results here. For a film about the unsteady marriage of the past in the form good old-fashioned human consciousness with cutting-edge new scientific advances, mixing classic animation style with what would prove to be the new wave of the future simply makes good sense.
Besides, it makes for one of the most visually striking animated films of the 1990s. The film's sleek, vividly synthetic vision of the future was a direct, acknowledged influence on The Matrix, and in bits and pieces its one-of-a-kind look has seeped into science fiction and anime of every stripe. Virtually none of it has matched the original's depth of thought, nor the unstated but clear ways that all the details of its world fit together - we'll see if the upcoming live-action remake, presently set to star Scarlett Johansson, manages to match its source, though I am not an optimist on that front. That's the thing about truly great sci-fi: it's the most obvious thing in the world to see what makes it brilliant, and almost impossible to copy it without hollowing it out. And this is, in all ways, the genre at its most ambitious and best.
Previously on A.I. Week
Metropolis, WALL•E, Robot & Frank, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Reader Comments (7)
I've been vacillating on whether to watch Ghost in the Shell for years, but you've convinced me. Definitely going to hunt down a copy next week. Great write up!
I'm embarrassed to admit that I have never seen this, it really sounds intriguing.
I don't want to overstate the degree to which it's ABOUT body identity - at heart, it's a futuristic cop thriller. But the details fleshing out the world and the characters are absolutely terrific and give it a lot of thematic depth that lingers more than the noirish storyline.
At any rate I think it's a tremendously smart and satisfying gateway drug to "adult" anime. Much more so than Akira, by a pretty huge margin.
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Ghost in the Shell is a masterpiece. Period.
It is about an A.I. known as "The Puppetmaster" that desires to be human. Yes, that's hardly new, but still complex. I mean that never gets old and I've hardly seen a movie in where female nudity is used in quite an unsexual way.
Armitage III might be not that complex like GITS, but it has an interesting question. It's about "murder" on female androids on the Mars, wher later comes oiut they were typs of androids/robots called "Thirds" that can get.... pregnant.
I'm always touched when in a fight the main character Armitage screams: "If Humans don't WANT us, why did they BUILD us?!"
Just make sure never to see the absolutely dreadful Ghost in the Shell 2.0 re-release, which "remastered" all of the film's cel animation in truly hideous full CGI rendering.
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence - the film's actual sequel - is worth a look-in though. I think it's actually more ambitious in its tackling of philosophical ideas and in its marriage of 2D animation and CGI, although it is also a good deal less sucessful. Definitely the kind of flawed film well worth grappling with though.
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