Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #3: Ghost in the Shell (1995).

Mamoru Oshii's 1995 film of Masamune Shirow's seminal manga (Japanese comic) Ghost in the Shell is everything both science fiction and anime should be: fast, thought-provoking, violent, resonant and brilliantly designed. That said it's certainly not for everybody (anime itself being an acquired taste after all), but even if you're a casual anime fan, you can't go past this one.

It's set in 2029 Tokyo and follows Major Motoko Kusanagi and her colleagues in Section 9's Internal Bureau of Investigations, an elite police task force. After they learn of several cases of identity theft and mind manipulations, with suspicious similarities, they discover the culprit to be a computer virus capable of infiltrating human hosts, known only as the Puppet Master. They then meet a rather naïve delivery driver who thinks he is married with a young daughter, only for the IBI to show him how that was all an illusion the Puppet Master had created for him. The race is now on to capture and contain the omnipresent entity.

If any of that sounds reminiscent of The Matrix, that's because Ghost in the Shell was the Wachowskis' main influence for The Matrix. They even showed it to their producer Joel Silver and said (direct quote), "We wanna do that for real." But even after that classic and its own slew of imitators, Ghost in the Shell still stands on its own as an elaborate and flawlessly plotted sci-fi action ride.

Mamoru Oshii directs the whole piece with such clarity and attention to thematic and visual detail it is just striking, and Kazunori Ito's screenplay and the vocal performances all flesh the story's themes of globalisation and human-technological relations out with no shred of pretension or preachiness. And Kusanagi herself is a most fascinating protagonist: an android, she is assertive but sympathetic and confident in battle, though she doesn't always get away unscathed.

But what always amazes me most about Ghost in the Shell is how specific and detailed its visual design. Oshii and his team have realised this future Tokyo right down to every nook and cranny: the construction lines on the buildings, the sky and street lights, the pollution and rubbish, even assorted brand names and logos on signs et cetera (which naturally also count somewhat as intertextual references). It makes the whole atmosphere feel convincingly inhabited and used, and Kenji Kawai's score, an intoxicating hybrid of traditional Japanese music and electronica, increases this substantially.






 

Ghost in the Shell's two sequels are for me unfocused and inconsistently paced (and the upcoming live-action - and whitewashed - Hollywood remake has me rather torn), but they still couldn't take any of the shine off the original. One filmmaker called it "The first truly adult animation film to reach a level of literary and visual excellence."

His name? James Cameron.