A review of episodes 3 & 4 of Ghost in the Shell: Arise
I was six when the Ghost in the Shell manga was first released, twelve when the Mamoru Oshii movie was originally released and fifteen when I saw it on Manga Entertainment’s first VHS release of it. Since then there has been second Oshii movie which, like its manga sequel by Masamune Shirow, many people would rather forget happened, and the almost universally well regarded Stand Alone Complex TV series, all fifty two episodes, two compilation movies and an original TV movie of it. That’s an awful lot of history for a franchise and is something that the last two releases of the latest entry, Arise, seem all too aware of.
Ghost Tears and Ghost Stands Alone, despite being initially released in theatres, are episodes rather than movies. At only fifty minutes each they have neither the time nor the isolation that movies do, and one would argue, that Ghost in the Shell as a concept needs. I said before that the first two entries, Ghost Pain and Ghost Whispers, held onto the ideas that run across the franchise:
“The layering of bureaucracy and machinations of governments and individuals in a world that is highly networked and ruthlessly mechanised, and ultimately facing new and increasing challenges because of it.”
That’s an awful lot to cram into only fifty minutes, and it has required some sacrifices that not everyone has taken to kindly.
Already no stranger to delving into the future, anime this season sees Production I.G. produce two forward looking series with Psycho-Pass, a mid-future cyber-noir and Robotics;Notes, a close-future hyper-commercialised world of robot fetishism. A1-Pictures meanwhile adapts the far future Shinsekai Yori (From the New World) novel into a series, followed by newcomer studio 8bit adding a TV series to Busou Shinki's already voluminous roster of media and merchandise. Finally there is the alternate history and fantasy-leaning K from GoHands, best known for their recently completed movie trilogy Mardock Scramble. All of them take a stab at a high-concept future but if the first three episodes are anything to go by, some are more successful than the others.
glassy-eyed pixies don absurd (yet still revealing) armour to knock seven shades of tar out of one another
Psycho-Pass for instance takes the dystopian world of Philip K. Dick's Minority Report - where law enforcement is no longer a reactive element of government - while mixing in some of Brave New World's deliberations on a ruthlessly enforced gilded cage. It tackles the same ethical briar patch as Minority Report:whether it is just to pre-emptively arrest, or in this series' parlance "rehabilitate", someone based upon the prediction of a third party, in this case the omnipresent Sybil System. Human judgement is taken out of the equation with even the gloriously titled "Dominator" guns unable to fire without the system's say so.
Back before I can coherently remember I watched a lot of the anime that made it on to British television. The mid nineties was before DVDs were widely available and the internet was squeezed through telephone lines. I was clueless but took what I could get which at the time was Manga Entertainment's (UK) catalogue of the time. Beyond the obvious Akira and Ghost in the Shell, this consisted mostly of late eighties and early nineties OVAs. Still aeons away from mainstream television, analogue satellite was the only way to watch them. The Sci-Fi channel was just starting out so it was late night on Bravo the majority of these were shown, and it was blind luck if I managed to know they were on prior to airing.
Genocyber was not the first one I saw and certainly not the most memorable, but individual scenes stuck in my head, mostly thanks to my then very squeamish nature. In the interests of exploring both my and anime's past, I decided to rewatch a lot of the shows which, subconsciously at least, formed the foundations for my current viewing preferences.
