Sporting an attention grabbing combo of beautiful animation, an original story and more breast-centered shots than a viewer can handle, Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell comes with a weighty reputation as one of the best anime features films ever made. The film lives up to its rep in some regards, especially in its slick, dense animation quality and influence on current science-fiction films (including The Matrix), however, it is held back by its soulless story, which never really makes any effort to warm the audience up to the main characters at all. Viewers may distantly observe of all the film’s events without a care about what actually happens.
In a future world full of technological advancements, robots and cybernetically enhanced humans, sits Section 9— a department of cyborgs, alerted to the recurrence of a famous hacker known only as the Puppetmaster. The self-doubting Major Kusanagi, a female cyborg cop and the best Section 9 has to offer, is assigned to this mess of political entanglements and techno-philosophy to put a stop to the Puppetmaster’s terrorism and learn something of her identity as well.
With an eighty-minute running time, Ghost still runs slower than some viewers will expect with all the Matrix connections tossed about. This is not a fast-paced action sci-fi thrill ride, but rather a William Gibson inspired cyberpunk mystery that cares a little more for creating intelligent technological, philosophical and existential dialogues than any sort of explosive fights—though the film does come with a decent share of action. But the film’s greatest asset is its animation quality, which remains remarkably fresh more than ten years after its release and counting. Production I.G uses both hand-drawn and computer rendered animation for an overwhelmingly detailed look into the future and the smallest, beautiful moments—one scene seamlessly integrates a character’s camouflage suit that renders them nearly invisible, save a slight blur.
Still, for the amounts of effort put into the meticulous animation, the story falls incredibly short, both in length and emotional connections. Plot turns often conveniently fall into place and the general flow of the film is stilted—it resembles the epic Akira, which was hardly able to adapt all the material from the manga into a single two-hour film. The plot moves along at an entertaining pace, but it lacks the heart and sympathetic characters. It detaches the viewer from the storyline and often fails at conjuring up the simplest of emotions. Ghost in the Shell is still an anime classic no doubt, but it sticks around for its technical and artistic achievements, more than any deeply memorable and satisfying story content.
Reviewed by Tarun
