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movie review - Ghost in the Shell

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

A manga brought to film, this one is amazingly well animated, though the story is strange. It's brooding. It's very Japanese, and it's perched with a just-so tone like most of it's genre. But it's different in that it's about an reanimated cop who is put in a new synthetic body and there is a fair bit of reorientation and reintegration involved. This involves the female cyborg lead finding an identity in a government bureau with, for a manga, suitably shadowy agenda and scope.

I really liked the central character, or rather how that character is realized (there's little actual characterization). I liked the supporting characters. And I liked how the setting shows a certain trajectory - the world is a bit of a mess but it isn't a broken dystopia, and it's not purely an exploitative nightmare. They walk a fine line here where technology plays a central role and our view of the culture is shaped by the telling of the story (as it should be). And that technology it is very imaginative - as far from where we are today as we are from the 19th Century, with concomitant changes in culture.

Strongly recommended.