Ghost in the Shell

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Ghost in the Shell
Promotional film poster
Directed by	Mamoru Oshii
Produced by	Yoshimasa Mizuo Ken Matsumoto Ken Iyadomi Mitsuhisa Ishikawa
Written by	Kazunori Itō
Starring	Atsuko Tanaka Akio Ōtsuka Iemasa Kayumi
Music by	Kenji Kawai
Cinematography	Hisao Shirai
Editing by	Shūichi Kakesu Shigeyuki Yamamori
Distributed by	Shochiku (Japan) Manga Entertainment (North America, Australia and UK)
Release date(s)	November 18, 1995 December 8, 1995 March 29, 1996
Running time	80 minutes
Country	Japan
Language	Japanese
Budget	US$ 10 million
Followed by	Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

Ghost in the Shell (GHOST IN THE SHELL／攻殻機動隊, Gōsuto In Za Sheru/Kōkaku Kidōtai^?, lit. Ghost in the Shell/Mobile Armoured Riot Police) is a 1995 anime film directed by Mamoru Oshii; an adaptation of the manga Ghost in the Shell by Masamune Shirow, produced by Production I.G, and written by Kazunori Itō. A sequel, Innocence, was released in 2004.

Plot

The movie begins with Major Motoko Kusanagi spying on a meeting taking place in New Port City. The meeting is interrupted by a Section 6 enforcement team, at which point Motoko kills a foreign diplomat in the meeting who is attempting to transport an important programmer out of the country.

In the next scene, Section 9 chief Daisuke Aramaki is introduced conversing with an official about programmers who are attempting to gain political asylum. The story then moves into the main plotline when Aramaki describes one of the minister's interpreters having had her brain hacked into by the mysterious "Puppet Master".

The hacker turns out to be a garbageman who is going through a divorce and attempts to ghost-hack his wife using a program provided to him by an individual who met him in a bar. Batou and Ishikawa arrive at the latest access terminal moments after the hacking attempt from it ends, failing to catch any suspect but also realizing that the locations from which the hack is performed correlate to the garbage truck route. When the garbageman finds out that the police are looking for him, he attempts to warn the person who provided him with the ghosthacking software. Batou and Kusanagi catch up to the man, who attempts to flee using therm-optic camouflage. Eventually, the fugitive is incapacitated by Kusanagi.

It turns out that the man is not the actual Puppet Master but only a ghosthacked "puppet" of the criminal. The garbageman whom he aided in ghosthacking has also been ghosthacked - in reality he did not have a wife or daughter, and all memories of them he possesses are false.

One night, a female cybernetic body is suddenly assembled at Megatech without approval, and the cyborg escapes into the city where it is run over. Section 9 gets the body to try and determine why it was built. Batou relates a strange fact: the body has not even one brain cell as it is completely robotic, yet there are indications that there is a ghost within it. Kusanagi expresses a wish to 'dive in' to the body and contact the ghost.

As they are talking to the body, Togusa realizes that someone with therm-optic camouflage entered the building along with the officials. He alerts Kusanagi, and they realise that Section 6 is up to something. The persons who entered with therm-optic camouflage assault the lab and snatch the ruined cyborg containing the Puppet Master. As they escape in their getaway car, Togusa shoots a tracking device from his revolver into its licence plate. Batou begins to follow them by car while Kusanagi follows by helicopter.

Ishikawa speaks with Aramaki after investigating further into Project 2501 - it turns out that the project was initiated before the Puppet Master showed up, even though it was claimed by some officials that the project was created in order to capture the Puppet Master. He hints that the Puppet Master was a tool of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to do its dirty work. The escape of the Puppet Master would be a threat to Section 6 and the ministry would risk having secrets leaked out to the public.

Soon, the getaway car carrying the Puppet Master meets up with another and they split off in different directions. Batou follows the original car and Kusanagi chooses to follow the second one. With the help of a road block and additional police, Batou stops the car and discovers it is a decoy. He then rushes to support Kusanagi.

Kusanagi follows the car to an abandoned building. There, she runs into a spider tank guarding the Puppet Master. With her assault rifle useless, she spends most of the fight running. When the tank runs out of ammo, she tries to break its hatch open. However, she is unsuccessful and severely damages her cyborg body. The tank attempts to deliver the coup de grâce, but Batou shows up in the nick of time with heavy weaponry and puts the tank out of commission.

It turns out that the Puppet Master's body has survived the firefight, and Kusanagi decides to "dive in" and contact its ghost immediately, as she believes that Aramaki would just use it as a bargaining chip. As they connect, the Puppet Master and Kusanagi's ghosts contact each other and the Puppet Master introduces himself once again. It confirms that it is Project 2501, a Section 6 project that has hacked ghosts to serve various interests.

During its time collecting data and installing programs into various ghosts, it had become self-aware. It tells them that it had been looking for Kusanagi for a long time, knowing of her through the many networks that it had hacked into. It is a sentient being because it can recognize its own existence but lacks two experiences that are granted to all living organisms: reproduction and death. As a solution the Puppet Master finally expresses its wish to merge its ghost with Kusanagi's in order to give birth to a new single entity. Batou attempts to disconnect the dive, but The Puppet Master has also hacked him and prevents the disconnection.

Meanwhile, helicopters from Section 6 approach the abandoned building with orders to destroy the Puppet Master and Kusanagi to cover up the project. Batou sees red dots on both bodies, but the snipers are unable to shoot because their targeting systems have also been hacked by the Puppet Master.

Kusanagi and the Puppet Master continue to talk about the merge, with Kusanagi expressing concern over the fact that both of them will change and no longer retain their current identities. She wants a guarantee that she will retain her identity, but the Puppet Master argues that there is no reason to keep with it, because her desire to stay unchanging within a dynamic environment is ultimately what limits her. Kusanagi finally agrees to merge, and the Puppet Master releases Batou and the snipers' targeting systems from its control. The snipers fire and the Puppet Master's braincase is destroyed, but Batou manages to shield Kusanagi's with his arm. Their primary objective eliminated and Section 9 support on its way, Section 6 beats a hasty retreat.

Kusanagi wakes at Batou's safehouse - in a child-sized cyborg body. Batou enters and informs her of what transpired since her original body was destroyed (approximately twenty hours earlier): the Foreign Minister resigned as a result of the conspiracy, and Nakamura (Section 6 leader) is being questioned. Batou put her mind into a new child-sized body as it was the best he could get on short notice on the black market. Motoko decides to leave, and reveals that she is no longer Kusanagi nor is she the Puppet Master, but rather some combination of the two. The film concludes with the new Motoko/2501 entity gazing at the city and musing on what it should do next — "The net is vast and infinite."

Adaptation

The film adaptation presents the story's themes in a more serious, atmospheric and slow-paced manner than the manga. In addition, in order to condense the manga into 82 minutes of screen time, the movie excludes the subplots in order to focus exclusively on the "Puppet Master" plot.

Unlike the manga and the TV series, the producers have stated that the movie is set in Hong Kong, in the making-of Ghost in the Shell featurette. The writing depicted on the scenery is Chinese Hànzì characters, which are also used in written Japanese (kanji), but omits hiragana and katakana which are both exclusively used in written Japanese.

Reception

The examples and perspective in this article deal primarily with the United States and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article or discuss the issue on the talk page.

The movie was applauded as one of the first anime films to seamlessly blend computer and cell animation (after Macross Plus Movie Edition). It was one of the first anime features to cross over to non-anime fans in North America.

Soundtrack

Ghost in the Shell: Original Soundtrack
Soundtrack by Kenji Kawai
Released	1995
Genre	Film score
Length	45:25
Producer	Kenji Kawai

Track listing

1. "M01 Chant I - Making of Cyborg" – 4:31
2. "M02 Ghosthack" – 5:16
3. "EXM Puppetmaster" – 4:23
4. "M04 Virtual Crime" – 2:44
5. "M05 Chant II - Ghost City" – 3:37
6. "M06 Access" – 3:18
7. "M07 Nightstalker" – 1:47
8. "M08 Floating Museum" – 5:07
9. "M09 Ghostdive" – 5:55
10. "M10 Chant III - Reincarnation" – 5:47
11. "See You Everyday" (Bonus track) – 3:26

"See You Everyday" is different from the rest of the soundtrack, being a pop song sung in Cantonese by Fang Ka Wing. It can be faintly heard playing in the marketplace scene, when Batou is hunting the ghost-hacked puppet.

Choral song

According to the soundtrack's liner notes, the haunting choral song that plays throughout the film is a wedding song, sung to get rid of all evil influences that are about to follow. The lyrics of the song itself seems to reflect the union between Kusanagi and Project 2501 which takes place towards the end of the movie. Kenji Kawai originally wanted to use Bulgarian folk singers, but was unable to find any, so he relied on the Japanese folk song choir he used earlier in the Ranma 1/2 anime. The song uses an ancient form of the Japanese language mixed with Bulgarian harmony and traditional Japanese notes.

Academic influence

Ghost in the Shell was analyzed together with William Gibson's book Neuromancer in chapter 4 "Orienting the Future" of Wendy Hui Kyong Chun's book "Control and Freedom - Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics" (2006, The MIT Press). She looks at the aspect of high-tech Orientalism put forth in both works.

Ghost in the Shell 2.0

Not to be confused with Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

Ghost in the Shell 2.0
Release date(s)	July 12, 2008
Running time	85 minutes
Country	Japan

Ghost in the Shell 2.0 (GHOST IN THE SHELL／攻殻機動隊 2.0, Gōsuto In Za Sheru/Kōkaku Kidōtai 2.0^?) is a reproduced version of its original 1995 counterpart. It was produced in celebration for the release of The Sky Crawlers in 2008.^[1][2] For the films Version 2.0 release, all the original animations were re-produced with latest digital film and animation technologies, such as 3D-CGI. The original soundtrack was also re-organized and re-recorded.

Japanese music composer Kenji Kawai, who orchestrated the score for the original 1995 production, remixed the Version 2.0 soundtrack in 6.1 Channel Surround. Academy Award Winner Randy Thom of Skywalker Sound reprised his role as Sound Designer, after previously working on Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, and whose credits also include work on Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.^[1]

To complement the new soundtrack, Japanese voice dialogue was also re-recorded, with some variation from the original script to make use of more recent colloquial phrases in modern speech. Notably, the original male voice actor for the character of the "Puppet Master," Iemasa Kayumi, has been replaced by the female voice actor Yoshiko Sakakibara (Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence 's Harraway, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 's Prime Minister Yoko Kayabuki).^[1]

The North American release for the film is scheduled to be distributed by Warner Bros. Home Entertainment on the DVD and Blu-ray format. The Special Edition release is scheduled to include the original 1995 release alongside the Version 2.0 on a Double Layer Blu-ray, and complimented with the inclusion of a soundtrack CD and booklet with commentary detailing the Version 2.0 production.

Trivia

Lists of miscellaneous information should be avoided. Please relocate any relevant information into appropriate sections or articles. (December 2008)

• The Puppet Master quotes two consecutive Bible verses: Firstly 1 Corinthians 13:12 from the King James Version, "For now we see through a glass, darkly" and at the end of the film a paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 13:11 "When I was a child, my speech, feelings, and thinking were all those of a child. Now that I am a man I have no more use for childish ways."

• The brand of beer Batou drinks is a real beer brand called San Miguel Beer which is the dominant beer in the Philippines and popular in Hong Kong. Noteworthy is the anime's detailed and accurate recreation of the San Miguel beer can, including its gold label and corporate seal.

• The tank in the abandoned building also destroys a picture of Ernst Haeckel's pedigree of man, however with various fish species as ancestors of "hominis".

• On official subtitles, Kusanagi refers to her handgun as a "Zastaber". The gun is similar to a real model, a CZ 100, made by Česká zbrojovka of the Czech Republic. The arms manufacturer Crvena Zastava also exists, however, but is a Serbian firm and does not make that model of gun. Her rifle is also supposedly a Zastava product, the CZN-M22 (Crvena Zastava/Nosle model 22), although it is not a real model. Togusa's revolver is called a "Matever" instead of "Mateba". That gun is fictional, but Mateba makes similar automatic revolvers. (It is a common convention in anime to slightly alter brand names of real-life products or company, either as a form of parody, or in order to avoid costly licensing.)

• A cult classic outside the country, the ticket sales of the movie weren't as great domestically. Hence the sequel to the movie lost the title "Ghost in the Shell 2" and the secondary title became the primary title "Innocence."

• The original comic did not specify the location of the city, but rumor is rampant that it is set in Kobe, where Shirow Masamune (the creator of the manga) lives. In the movie, the city was created to be complete mixture of Asian culture, Chinese being the primary one. To go with the art, the music created for the movie used whole assortment of Southeastern Asia origins, and even play methods were often ad-libbed to create mixed ethnicity (although, Mr. Kawai admits it also partly had to do with the fact that he had no idea how to play some of them).

• In ordinary anime, characters would at least blink to create the feeling of "being animated," but in this movie, Motoko's eyes intentionally stayed unblinking many times. Director Mamoru Oshii's intention was to portray her as a "doll."

• After he struggled to convey the mood that the characters are supposed to emanate for English version dub, Mr.Oshii's thought was to thank the Japanese cast for making his job a whole lot easier. It took two days to record the Japanese dub, whereas the English version took three weeks to get right ("they can speak the line, but they couldn't emote"). In the pamphlet for Innocence, he actually pokes fun at a certain internationally recognized anime director by saying "Unlike some directors, I do give due credit to voice actors".

• In Manga Entertainment's domesticated releases, the closing title song is "One Minute Warning" by Passengers, which is a U2 and Brian Eno collaboration. In the original Japanese version of the film, the song Reincarnation III by Kenji Kawai is used, which can be found on the original soundtrack CD.

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ghost in the Shell

• Official Site At Manga.com
• Production I.G English website
• Ghost in the Shell at the Internet Movie Database
• Ghost in the Shell 2.0 at the Internet Movie Database
• Ghost in the Shell at Allmovie
• Ghost in the Shell (anime) at Anime News Network's Encyclopedia
• Ghost in the Shell at the Japanese Movie Database

Soundtrack

• Ghost in the Shell at MusicBrainz
• Ghost in the Shell at MusicBrainz