Columnist Andrew Osmond discusses Science Saru’s eagerly awaited new vision of Masamune Shirow’s science-fiction manga and weighs it against the iconic film by Mamoru Oshii.
This week, I’m writing about Ghost in the Shell. It’s the brand-new, “you can start here,” Science Saru anime that just debuted in Japan on Prime Video, though this version’s gained a definite article – it’s The Ghost in the Shell now. I’ll also write about the 30-year-old Ghost in the Shell film from 1995, made by Production I.G and directed by Mamoru Oshii.
Going from the old Ghost to the new is like going from Fantasia to Bob Clampett’s spoof A Corny Concerto. But I’ll start with the Concerto.
In with the new
Anime exhibition in British cinemas is at a level I couldn’t have dreamed a decade ago. In recent days, I’ve been able to see both the old and new Ghosts in London. The new Saru Ghost isn’t a movie; it’s a series, but the first two episodes were previewed in a cinema package along with a “making-of” documentary. Thankfully the making-of doc was at the end, as it should have been; I’ve complained about the alternative approach.
Whereas nearly all such previews are shown in Japanese with subtitles, the Saru Ghost previews were English-dubbed only. Decades ago, a dubbed anime would have been seen as more marketable. After all, the marketers would say, what kind of freak wants to see subbed animation? When I first saw the 1995 Ghost movie in a London cinema, it was with the American dub. That was a large part of why I hated it back then; the dub voices were so flat and listless.
Today, I suspect the new Ghost might be dubbed for a different reason; so that many of the fans will watch it in the cinema for the visuals and then rewatch the episodes on Prime to hear the Japanese. There’s a particular curiosity factor, though it’s a somber one. What will Motoko Kusanagi, heroine of the franchise, sound like in Japanese now? Atsuko Tanaka, who voiced Kusasnagi through most Ghost anime over three decades, died in 2024, aged just 61.
[Update – We now know Maaya Sakamoto is voicing Kusanagi in Japanese. She's a veteran; one of her first roles as a teenager was near the end of the 1995 Ghost in the Shell film, when Kusanagi finds herself in a “child” body and says a a few lines in a young voice. Sakamoto also voiced Kusanagi in a version of the franchise called Ghost in the Shell: Arise, an emotionally brittle take on the character. Judging from the new version, Sakamoto's playing a whole new Kusanagi now, with the assurance of maturity.]
Saru’s Ghost was shown across the main British cinema chains; I saw it at an Odeon near Piccadilly. It’s impressive – lively, colorful, irreverent and funny, with triumphal funky music. For some viewers, the downside may be how the dialogue is saturated with background detail about the show’s world and technology. But you can cruise over that and still get the gist. Ghost in the Shell isn’t just sci-fi, after all. Under the synthetic skin and future tech, it’s an old-school cop show.
The main characters belong to what’s effectively a benign secret police force. They’re led by the cockily confident Motoko Kusanagi, a woman in a cyber-body who can shoot someone in the head through a high-rise window, then leap away into invisibility. If you think you remember that bit from the old Ghost film too, you’re right. Actually, the first two episodes often overlap with the earlier film, especially the second episode where Section 9, as Kusanagi’s unit is called, comes up against a hacker sending brain-twisting malware via payphones. Yes, payphones – the setting is 2029, but a 2029 envisaged in the 1980s, before public Wi-Fi or Skynet-grade smartphones.
Indeed, that’s one of the new Ghost’s selling points. From the first trailers, it’s presented itself as a return to the original “Ghost” – not the cinema film, but the comic it came from. The show’s first image, a close-up of a neurochip, may look strange to Ghost newbies, but it’s really advertising for the fans, replicating one of the strip’s opening frames. Much of the script is transcribed from the manga verbatim, at least in the first two episodes.
Created by Masamune Shirow (real name Masanori Ota), the strip was serialized from 1989 in Young Magazine. Despite its name, Young skewed older than the top-selling Shonen Jump. “Ghost” shared pages with Katsuhiro Otomo’s “Akira,” which ran on in strip form after the anime film blew Neo-Tokyo away.
Ghost in the Shell has had many screen adaptations since 1989, but they were rarely faithful. That had less to do with story details, and far more with Ghost’s tone. It’s like the James Bond films, in reverse. Ian Fleming’s “Bond” books were straight hardboiled thrillers, which the films treated as absurd self-parodies (with moments of hardboiled drama), till the advent of Daniel Craig. Conversely, Mamoru Oshii’s film of Ghost played the story straight and the later anime followed suit, till now.
Shirow’s strip was larky to the point of ridiculousness, and that’s what Saru’s anime brings back. The first part deals with child slavery, but visualized in cartoon terms, as a nineteenth-century children’s workhouse with waifs from “Oliver Twist.” Episode 2 is straighter, but it can’t resist an “accidental pervert” scene straight from the strip. Kusanagi’s loyal cop underling Batou (sometimes written Bateau) accidentally sees his boss off-duty, enjoying a lesbian threesome in cyberspace. I confess I was waiting to see if the anime would go there, and I approved the compromise. The anime’s scene is sexily sultry, but it’s sensibly toned down from the manga, where it was explicit enough to be cut in some editions.
In another scene, Batou sets a bomb in a car… only it’s played like he’s a naughty boy with a firecracker. The payoff’s so silly even Roger Moore wouldn’t have touched it.
The anime’s characters are drawings, with lively untidy shadings and livelier expressions, crooked or bugged-out. Once again that’s true to Shirow’s drawings but alien to earlier Ghost anime. Even the earlier Ghost TV shows aspired to the neon-lit live-action cinema of Michael Mann. The palette of Saru’s series is far brasher, and yet again that’s true to the strip. While Shirow’s manga was mostly monochrome, its color pages serve as the new show’s template.
In short; Saru’s version looks great so far. Its director is a first-timer who goes by Mokochan, real name Toma Kimura. He’s had staff credits on several earlier Science Saru titles, including directing and storyboarding Episode 4 of Dan Da Dan. That had a giant crab, a livid palette, and a chase frenzied even for anime, excerpted below. It’s a good episode in a good show, but no mold-breaker like Episode 7 (the mother-child story). Like the new Ghost, Mokochan’s Dan Da Dan episode upheld a collective style. With Ghost, Shirow already established much of the style 37 years ago.
Oshii’s Ghost
That brings me to the “old” Ghost anime, the 1995 film by Mamoru Oshii, which I rewatched in London a day after Saru’s version. As I mentioned above, I hated the film when I first saw it, dubbed in London in 1996. Digging out an old copy of the print magazine Animato!, one of the first places that published my rambles, I see I wrote that the film was “inscrutable… Characters delivering dollops of undigested of undigested information which link to other speeches but never to the actual narrative… If you can stay awake while the heroine explains the differences between humans, cyborgs and virtual whatsits that may or may not exist, you’re a better man than I.”
Well, I was young and dumb, and it was my first exposure to an Oshii film. I’ve seen Ghost many times since in the proper Japanese and now respect it greatly, though it’s not my favorite Oshii – that’s the hilarious Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer. I’d write a little book on Ghost; by that time, I was such an Oshii convert that I went out of my way to defend his far more philosophically indulgent sequel, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, released in 2004 (trailer). After all, many critics dissed Innocence in very similar ways to how I’d insulted the first film.
Back to the first Ghost. This time round, I saw it at my favorite indie cinema, London’s Prince Charles, which regularly plays anime such as Perfect Blue, Akira and Ghibli’s oeuvre.
As mentioned above, the film’s story often overlaps with Saru’s version, sometimes covering exactly the same moments. The characters are easily recognizable, even if Oshii depicts them far less cartoonily. I suggested above that the difference was like Disney versus Bob Clampett, though you might also see Oshii as the Zack Snyder to Saru’s Adam West.
One specific difference is that Oshii’s film omits the insectile robots that the characters use in most other Ghosts, including Saru’s. Oshii himself said the mecha-bugs “would become cute and we felt that would be damaging to the film.” As anyone who’s seen the other Ghosts knows – especially the Stand-Alone Complex series by Kenji Kamiyama – they leaned into that cuteness all the way.
Oshii’s version is icy, Kubrickian. One of the film’s last scenes, where we’re drawn “into” a mirror where a character is reflected, seems to homage a moment in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where we’re similarly pulled “into” an alien obelisk at the end of a deathbed. Oshii’s Ghost is a serious film, whose characters soliloquize before slow-changing backdrops. Kusanagi calmly contemplates her cyborg existence on a boat at night. Elsewhere, a robot body with female breasts, a man’s voice, and no body beneath its torso delivers ontological challenges to a black-suited interrogator resembling Agent Smith from The Matrix. “Life is like a nodal point born in an overwhelming sea of information… A memory cannot be defined, but it defines mankind.”
Yet Oshii’s film also has traces of warmth and humanity. There’s Kusanagi’s intense curiosity, all those moments when she just pauses and looks, trying to penetrate the veil, the “glass darkly” of Saint Paul’s Corinthians which supplies the film’s Bible quotes. (Those quotes are an Oshii thing; there’s nothing like that in Shirow’s strip.) There’s also a clear unrequited love story between Batou and Kusanagi, though perhaps it’s just from Batou’s side. Oshii has no farcical scene of Batou seeing his commander’s private pleasure in cyberspace. Instead, the director shows a gentlemanly Batou covering Kusanagi’s “nakedness” after combat, though even Batou can’t resist looking too long when she blithely strips on the boat – and remember, he knows her body is artificial.
True, Oshii’s film is oblique. Back in the day, I couldn’t understand how its first act tied into the rest of the story – the stuff about an exiled Colonel, and the ambiguity about who was setting up who, and how. I only understood it when I read Shirow’s manga, which explains the things Oshii left you to work out yourself. It’s likely that the same explanations will be made in the Saru series, probably in Episode 3, as the series was midway through that plotline when the cinema preview ended.
Oshii’s film is far less true to the manga than the Saru series. But you can argue it’s less a Ghost in the Shell film than it is a film by its director, Oshii, an auteur anime as Saru’s series is not.
“Auteur” is a label that’s provoked arguments for decades. It’s the notion that some directors put an authorial stamp on their films, often through recurring themes, imagery and sensibilities. Think Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Nolan, Tarantino. A few readers may think it’s pretentious to apply that idea to anime, but if so, they don’t know anime. I wrote a column last year on how many anime directors are steamroller brands in Japan precisely because of their themes, imagery and sensibilities. I need only mention Miyazaki, Shinkai, Kon, Yamada… and Oshii.
The funny thing is that viewers in both Britain and America have been able to see exactly what Oshii brought to Ghost as an auteur. That’s because it was encapsulated beautifully in his earlier film Angel’s Egg. First released in Japan in 1985, a decade before Ghost, Angel’s Egg opened in American cinemas last November and in British cinemas in recent weeks. London’s Prince Charles cinema will screen it through July.
Angel’s Egg is a Rorschach blot of a film that can invite diametrically different readings from the viewer. But it also represents everything that Saru’s new Ghost subtracts from Oshii’s film – or seen another way, as everything that Oshii added to Shirow’s strip.
Both Angel’s Egg and Oshii’s Ghost are quests for the spiritual. Oshii read the Bible since his student days, not as a believer but “for ideology and literary inspiration.” Both his films are journeys through landscapes of water and fossils, undertaken by a curious female – the girl in Angel’s Egg is an unkempt Alice in Wonderland – and an otherworldly male. I’d go further and say the girl and man in Angel’s Egg’s are prototypes of two of Ghost’s protagonists, Kusanagi and the Puppetmaster, at least as Oshii would envisage them a decade later. Or they’re premonitory dreams. Do cyborgs dream of angel’s eggs?
Oshii both wrote and directed Angel’s Egg. Notably the film didn’t involve the writer Kazunori Ito, who’d script several of Oshii’s later anime, including Ghost. The “auteur director” theory is sometimes challenged by critics arguing a film’s author is its writer (I’ve highlighted anime writers myself in some earlier columns). But Angel’s Egg shows how much of Oshii’s ethos – and specifically that of his Ghost in the Shell – predates his writing partner. Oshii claimed he usually gave Ito “the basic storyline and structure already written down.”
Ito surely deserves much credit for what he brought to their collaborations. To take one example, though, I doubt Ito conceived the melancholically beautiful sequence shown below, at least by himself. The scene is from Oshii’s political thriller Patlabor 2 (1993), which Ito scripted. It depicts what is an effectively present-day Tokyo in crisis, the military on the streets. The music is by Kenji Kawai, who’d compose for Oshii’s Ghost a couple of years later.
A nearly wordless urban poem, the Patlabor 2 scene is a clear precursor to the famous “canal” scene at the midpoint of Oshii’s Ghost, which has no equivalent in Shirow’s manga. However, to me the canal scene also invokes the themes of Angel’s Egg. It may be another Rorschach blot, but I see the canal sequence as a spiritual journey in itself. It starts in depression and decay; then it quickens and livens midway through its course, as the city is transfigured by rain. Judge for yourself below.
A Cyborg Screening
I mentioned I rewatched Oshii’s Ghost at the Prince Charles cinema. As it turned out, the screening itself was a cyborg. The picture was impeccable and the soundtrack was in Japanese, but it was a dubtitled screening.
That is to say, the subtitles were based on the English dub of the anime, with glaring mismatches to the Japanese soundtrack. There was “ghost” dialogue, reflecting extra dub lines when no-one spoke in the original. At points, one character spoke on the soundtrack while we read another character’s line. I was okay as I knew the film, but it might have confused the hell out of newbies.
Even the screening’s end-music wasn’t the final romantic version of the Ghost theme by Kawai, undulating and soaring. Instead, we heard the techno-track, “One Minute Warning,” which was pasted into the dub by the film’s Western co-producer Manga Entertainment, because of the track’s big-name creators, Brian Eno and U2. I previously used to find the track dull and noodling, a philistine insult to the film. This time, I thought it fitted tolerably, though it’s still vastly inferior to Kawai’s music. (There’s an official copy of “One Minute Warning” here if you want to try it.)
The dubtitles were full of profanities. It might have been a subtle bid to match the mood of the Japanese script; no, just kidding. I’m not bilingual, but the film feels as formalized as a lecture, and the dub’s F-bombs were like a gatecrasher’s heckles. The swearing was surely to appeal to the dub’s perceived teen male audience, as was common practice for Western distributors in the ‘90s (see this interview).
The hilarious thing is that for all the swearing it adds, the dub cuts a much wittier quip in the original Japanese. It’s in the opening minutes while Kusanagi waits to execute her high-rise hit (also shown in Saru’s version, though the reason behind the hit is very different). Batou mentions there’s electric noise in her brain. Ghost’s heroine, who’s long discarded human biology except her brain, remarks it’s that time of the month. Was it considered too much for the sensibilities of teenage boys?
I won’t pretend the dubtitles didn’t annoy me. But I still enjoyed the film far more than when I first saw it in the 1990s and then went home to trash it in Animato! The dubtitles made me reflect on the history of Ghost’s release, both in dubbed and subbed form, and how my own feelings about it changed when I finally saw it in Japanese. I also thought about how differently anime is sold now. Back in the ‘90s, who could have imagined that two Ghost anime, made 30 years apart, would one day be playing in London cinemas?
Lastly, it made me think about authenticity. That’s an underlying question in Oshii’s film – in an artificial world, can you be authentically yourself? As of writing, Saru’s new Ghost is being praised enthusiastically for being true to Shirow’s source manga. But then Oshii’s Ghost was no less true to its director’s auteur vision and sensibility, established through years of works like Angel’s Egg and Patlabor 2.
But, I reminded myself ruefully, who am I to talk? I’m just a heretic, and not just because I was completely wrong about Oshii’s Ghost when I first saw it. As I confessed in this column only last March, I enjoyed the fakest Ghost of all – the Hollywood live-action film with Scarlett Johansson.
