Why, you ask? Let’s look at GITS’s iconic history to understand this wariness better, shall we?
Now, over 20 years after the original movie released and nearly three decades after the manga was first serialised, Ghost in the Shell will hit movie theaters in a whitewashed live-action movie starring Scarlett Johansson as Motoko Kusanagi - the aforementioned cyborg, dealing with crime, criminals, and the realisation that her life (if you can call it that) was stolen when she was “saved” and made into a cyber-enhanced crime-fighting machine! As a fan of the original manga and the anime, I’m excited but wary about this modern retelling. The movie’s lasting influence is evident - from the Wachowskis’ use of the green computer code screen a few years later for The Matrix to Westworld’s making of the hosts (someone even used the GITS theme for the Westworld host-making sequence, and it’s magic!).
WATCH: Female passenger found with 22 snakes and a chameleon at Chennai airport Japan PM Kishida to visit South Korea amid tension with North Korea, China An entire generation of anime lovers was waking up to something spectacular, and to the gradual realisation that anime (technically, a cartoon) wasn’t just cute and cuddly anymore, that it wasn’t just meant for kids anymore. It confirmed what Japanese fans of manga and anime knew all along - that Japanese manga was internationally bankable and that the Japanese animation industry had developed into something technically far advanced than anything else the entertainment world had seen. Japanese animation had become popular across the world since the 1960s when Akira hit American screens in the late ’80s, it was an eye-opener to Western audiences, but Ghost in the Shell (GITS) was the true game changer. That moment and the eventual release of the movie to worldwide audiences in 1996 ( Ghost in the Shell was director Mamoru Oshii’s take on Masamune Shirow’s manga of the same name) was a defining moment for animated cinema.
There are very few movie opening scenes more visceral than the opening title sequence of the 1995 animated movie Ghost in the Shell. Kenji Kawai’s brilliantly haunting music comprised a mix of Bulgarian harmony and traditional Japanese notes set against a backdrop of green digits that look like computer code floating in space, as a (female?) cyborg awakens.
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