I grew up watching anime in the early 90's. When I was young, it all seemed so cool to me. Often times I would go to a comic shop, and get denied the ability to buy The Invisibles or some other more mature themed comic, but for whatever reason I could rent anime at rental stores. Perhaps the people at the rental stores didn't know (or care) about the content in these cartoons. So when I looked at the cool covers, I imagined all the things I was missing from picking up Bloodshot, or Spawn, would be in there somewhere, but also animated. It was exciting and bad ass looking. Plus there were adaptations of Fatal Fury or Street Fighter to be seen. Sadly, my predictions were usually correct when it came the bad end of the spectrum. For every Ghost in the Shell there were like 50 M.D. Geist's, just like for every Invisibles, there were 50 Heroes Reborn's, but being filled with teenage lust and angst, this was just fine. I was willing to overlook the problems of these movies for the 5 minutes of awesome that was usually within.
You may have noticed that I mentioned the title I am about to review. Yes, Ghost in the Shell is one of those pretty good anime titles. Practically everyone who was into anime at the time had seen it, or owned it. This was the gold standard for anime at the time and for good reason.
This movie is about a cyborg woman named Motoko Kusanagi, who works for Public Security Section 9. This is of course a sort of government agency that employs a bunch of specialists to do insane things and protect the public from stuff like robots or whatever. Anyway, she is a Major of some kind and loves to hang out on top of buildings at night, mostly naked in order to use her super camo thing to become invisible-ish and shoot up bad guys. With her are other employees like Batou, and Togusa. Batou is a white haired dude with cyber eyes that do... something, and Togusa is a mostly human guy who is seemingly employed for that reason.
A large portion of this movie is people musing over what it means to be human, and if it's any different or more special than being an AI. There are a bunch of action scenes though and that it sweet. I like the themes explored in the movie, but honestly there isn't enough time to really go through it all.
So a Robo-Chick body escapes a facility and gets run over. Section 9 recovers it and discovers that it got up and left on it's own without any AI or Ghost inside. It turns out that... Something is inside. It awakens and goes on a bit of a rampage. What is this something? Well is it an AI, a soul? These are the questions that attempt to get answered along the way as Kusanagi gets naked and blows stuff up.
Though the movie is not too long, it leaves a lot of weird questions, and usually one wants more. I felt that way. The only real option for a while however was a not so well translated, blown up, and flipped comic version of the manga. This was pretty undesirable as it would cost way too much to really get much out of it. Luckily Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex would come out later, and this is where people really became obsessed with the franchise.
The movie was meant to be sort of "Stand Alone" in it's own right and has an ending of sorts. It can be viewed as a bit of an oddity of fandom and 90's nerd culture, but it is also a very good looking movie, and totally worth watching. I recommend it very much. It isn't all that fantastic in retrospect however. Most of it's special nature is based around the time it was released so i could see how people could just watch it and not care too much. It is a part of anime history, and is very important to America as a release that helped popularize anime as a media format to view though. For this reason, fans of the whole anime thing should just watch it anyway, but it's better than most of the others of it's era. Take that for what it's worth I guess.
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