Throughout the film it is ambiguous who is fully human and who is a cyborg Kusanagi is a full-cyborg, with only a human brain remaining. The film posits a 2029 where ‘full body cyberization’ is possible, the human brain encased in a shell that can then be inserted into a cyborg body. I’m sure that Ghost in the Shell (along with the videogame Deus Ex, from 2000) is responsible for my fascination with cyberpunk, artificial intelligence, and prosthetics. Though visually striking, it might be easy to dismiss as filler, yet the sequence is richly animated it’s no placeholder to bulk out the run time with cheap, still scenery. The level of grime and piles of trash are straight out of William Gibson’s earlier work or Philip K. Long, lingering shots of the buildings, the ferries, the waterways, the neon and the decay. In particular, the sequence set to Kenji Kawai’s “Ghost City” is one of my enduring images of the film, a kind of interlude or intermission between the two halves of the story. Huge swathes of the film are devoted to long, slow takes on the scenery, wherever it is. The puppet stands in front of dozens of rusty Chinese-language signs Apparently, Hong Kong was indeed used as a visual guide, but the intent is for the actual location to remain undefined. I’d always assumed the film is set in a deliberately ambiguous Chinese port the closing shot looking down from Batou’s safe house in the mountains overlooking the vast city calls Hong Kong to mind.
Ghost in the shell 1995 english dub series#
It’s worth mentioning that I still haven’t read the original manga, which may or may not shed light on this unhelpfully, Stand Alone Complex, the anime series also adapted from the same source, is explicitly set in Japan. Every sign is in hanzi, without a scrap of hiragana or katakana that might suggest a Japanese setting. Despite the abundance of Japanese characters – Kusanagi, Ishikawa, Aramaki, et al – it clearly takes place in a Chinese-language location. I say “the territory in which the film is set” very carefully, as I’ve never been sure where exactly Ghost in the Shell takes place. Watching it again, I was struck by how in my memory I had entirely glossed over some of the details, like the preponderance of basset hounds or the subplot with Mares a foreign military colonel apparently defecting or escaping into the territory in which the film is set, who is accused or suspected of being the Puppet Master. Visually and narratively, it’s overstuffed with ideas and suggestions and implications.
Ghost in the Shell is such an incredibly dense film. The following review contains minor spoilers about the identity and goals of the film’s antagonist I recently had the opportunity to see it in a cinema for the first time, which presents a perfect moment to discuss the film here. Since then I’ve revisited it several times, with the original Japanese audio, both before and after I learned to speak the language. I first saw Ghost in the Shell (1995) in the late ‘90s, on a probably-rented VHS, with the American dub (which, to my recollection, actually held up as one of the better dubs I’ve heard, though I haven’t tested that in years).
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