Cultural context

Anime and manga

Comic books and animated films have generally been considered entertainment for children in the English-speaking world. In Japan, these media cater to a wide range of tastes and markets – lowbrow and highbrow, seekers of sensation and knowledge, children and adults, boys and girls, students and workers, housewives and office-workers. They are very popular with the public and the most profitable sections of the publishing and movie industries. Popular comic-strip books (known as manga) are turned into animated films (abbreviated in Japanese from animation to anime), which in turn produce a market for re-issues of and sequels to the original manga series. Ghost in the Shell, the 1995 animated film, was based on a 1989 manga, with the same title, created by the artist Masamune Shiro. Shiro’s earlier manga stories had featured wars between criminals and law enforcers, androids seeking the secret of their birth, and cyborgs running away from oppressive and corrupt corporations. His artful drawings combine organic forms with high-tech and mechanical (known in Japan as mecha) motifs.  

Director, Mamoru Oshii

In the early 1980s, Oshii directed episodes of a long-running comedy anime television series, about the mayhem unleashed by a devilish alien woman who attaches herself to a nerdy adolescent boy, and a movie spin-off from the series, called Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer. Prior to Ghost in the Shell, he also directed two sci-fi animated films, Patlabor (1989) and Patlabor 2 (1993), which were also spin-offs from a television series. The latter films were both set in Tokyo, in the near future, where giant robots run amok among the skyscrapers and the decaying remnants of old downtown Tokyo, formerly full of canals and small wooden houses. 

Hollywood influences

Oshii has acknowledged this film’s debt to Blade Runner, in its dark vision of a decaying metropolis. Like the American film, Ghost poses questions about what it means to be human in an increasingly technological world. Both films feature a physical hunt and a spiritual quest, on the part of their heroes. But, unlike the replicants of Blade Runner, Kusanagi is not interested in her origins or parents, nor in the prolonging of her bodily life; she is concerned with her spiritual identity, and wants to escape the physical – to achieve bodiless immortality.

Ghosts and bodily transformations

In Japanese folklore, literature and drama, ghosts of the dead assume human form to exact revenge, plague their former tormentors or seek satisfaction for frustrated desires. They are unquiet troubled spirits. In this film, the “ghost” seems to refer to the spirit or soul of a human being, encased in a bodily shell. The cyborg heroine has a beautiful and powerful body but broods about her “ghost”. Buddhism stresses the brevity of the physical life of individuals but the possibility of transcending individual existence through merging with the cosmos and reincarnation. Despite the Christian references, to Corinthians 1, Chapter 13, verses 11-12, quoted in the film, Kusanagi’s desire for bodiless union with a greater entity and her reincarnation in the body of a young girl draw on indigenous Buddhist beliefs. 

Historical context

International circulation of anime

By the mid 1990s, anime enjoyed enormous popularity among teenagers and cult movie fans in the United States, Australia, Europe, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. It was by far the biggest source of income from exports for Japanese film and video. The most popular genres with audiences abroad were  sci-fi thrillers for young adults (in full-length movie form) and fantasies for children (in half-hour television episodes). The sci-fi thriller Akira (Otomo, 1987) was a huge hit abroad, on screen and video.

Internationalisation of Japanese culture

Most anime are set in Japan but quite a number have foreign settings. Exotic European landscapes and castles have been popular settings for fairy-tale romances and adventure fantasies. The metropolis of this film is not Tokyo (as it was in Akira) but  Hong Kong; the issues raised are not specific to Japan, but global issues; the words hacked into the heroine’s mind by the Puppet Master are verses from the Christian bible, not Japanese  texts. The heroine has blue eyes and some of the other characters are blond-haired – not Japanese characteristics. One could argue that the producers of anime were deliberately catering to the Western market by extending their frames of reference beyond Japan; but one can equally argue that Japanese culture itself had become quite international by the 1990s. Through travel, the media and education, Japanese people had by then absorbed a great deal of European and American culture, thereby also employing Christian symbols and classical Greek myths. 

The Internet

The wide dissemination of computer technology and the World Wide Web during the 1990s provoked high hopes for a better world as well as a critical backlash. The critics bemoaned the loss of traditional face-to-face contact and communication between people; the fans looked forward to unlimited access to information and the forging of connections between people that transcended the barriers of gender, race and nationality and dispensed with traditional hierarchies of power. Ghost in the Shell was produced in this climate and seems to find the possibilities of the Net an exciting prospect.

Post-human existence

Experiments with artificial intelligence (AI – machines, computers) and artifical life (AL – robots, cyborgs, clones) have been the subject of science fiction (in literature and film) throughout the 20^th century. But by the end of the century, they were actually being produced – or on the verge of production. This development provoked much debate about the meaning of human life, about the ethics and politics of copying and cloning and hacking, about the relationship between intelligence and the  body, the natural and the artificial. These vital topical issues are all aired in this film.    

Socio-political context

End of boom

In 1989, the Japanese economy finally faced a major recession and market collapse after a long post-war boom. The international success of Japanese industry (especially in the   production and export of motor cars, cameras, television sets and video recorders) had not only increased national wealth and the standard of living; it had made the Japanese rather smug and self-satisfied. The recession was a humbling experience, producing a bout of national self-criticism, and a gloomier mood of pessimism. This film reflects the more thoughtful, bluer mood of the 90s, displaying dissatisfaction with high-rise urban development, the sinister intrigues and dubious policies of government agencies and the management of new technologies.

The role of women

When anime was first distributed abroad, it provoked criticism from feminists on the grounds that it used women’s bodies to excite the violent sexual fantasies of men. In fact, this was a response to a small sample of anime – a few violent action movies not representative of the industry as a whole. Now that a wider selection has become available, it has become apparent that many anime feature active and admirable young heroines – as do popular children’s television series like Sailor Moon as well as family movies like the ecological fairytale fantasies of Hayao Miyazaki (e.g. Nausicaa in the Valley of the Winds). It is also true that feminist ideas achieved wider currency in Japan at the end of the century. The heroine of this film is unusual in being a fully adult woman, not a young girl on the brink of maturity.

Crossing boundaries

The enormous social changes all over the world during the past few decades have led to a breakdown in traditional categories of race, gender and nationality. As a result of the large-scale migrations of oppressed and disadvantaged peoples from their countries of birth to countries of higher living standards, more freedom and economic opportunities, our cities have become multi-cultural and multi-racial. In addition, feminism, gay power and black power have questioned traditional definitions of race and gender because they were associated with discriminatory practices. We can see the heroine of this film as someone who transgresses traditional boundaries and eludes conventional definitions. She is a beautiful woman with the body of a model but the strength of a superman. She has a Japanese name but doesn’t look Japanese. She is a cyborg but has human feelings. She is produced by computer technology and wired up to a computer terminal and yet she is at home in water and loves swimming.

Terrorism

In recent times, the media have highlighted incidents of terrorism. In some cases, planes have been hijacked and the passengers murdered by political dissidents; in other cases, politicians or prominent businessmen have been kidnapped and murdered for revenge or reward. On the eve of the defeat, the Japanese airforce trained young suicide bombers (kamikaze fliers) to destroy American ships; recently, Palestinian nationalists and anti-American Arabs have also adopted suicide bombing as a technique to destroy and intimidate their foes (along with innocent passengers and bystanders).  Computer hackers are also called terrorists, when they hack into secret files of government defence departments, banks, and large corporations. They are performing an illegal operation, and challenging the power of mighty institutions, but they are not murdering people, as suicide bombers and hijackers are. The Puppet Master was originally a bug designed by the security forces for surveillance of their enemies but he turned against his masters and went freelance. The film suggests that the Net should be open and free, that attempts to control and curtail its uses can only be counterproductive and are certainly antidemocratic.   

Geographic context

Hong Kong setting

The film is set in Hong Kong which, like Tokyo, is a large modern metropolis full of skyscrapers, and situated by the sea.  As with Tokyo, parts of the city are built on land reclaimed from the sea, and there are fears that the city is sinking. The network of river canals that used to run through Tokyo (and still run through Venice and Amsterdam) is no longer visible. In Hong Kong, as in Tokyo, one can glimpse remnants of the old city   (little wooden buildings, street stalls, hustings) between the high-rise office and apartment buildings. The image of Hong Kong (and, by extension, every modern metropolis) that is projected by this film is of a precarious and presumptuous place.

Water imagery

The film is full of water imagery. The credit sequence, which is accompanied by scenes of the creation and “birth” of the cyborg heroine, shows her metallic body emerging majestically out of water. One is reminded that a natural human baby floats in the amniotic fluid of its mother’s womb before it emerges into the world. She is later shown brooding, like Narcissus, by the sea before diving into it. Freud and others have associated the sea with maternal femininity and with longings (the “oceanic” feeling). Kusanagi not only displays fondness for the sea; she is clearly associated with it. But the water lends itself to literal as well as symbolic and psychoanalytic interpretations for in some scenes the city is shown to be sinking under water – reclaimed by the sea. It is literally sinking, as are Venice and Tokyo, according to reports. 

Tech Noir

Films like Blade Runner belong to a category that has been named “tech noir”. They are high-tech versions of film noir – a type of film that was made in Hollywood in the 1940s and 50s, and enjoyed a cult revival later in the century. Film noir features a brooding male protagonist, often telling his story retrospectively in voice-over, a setting of dark wet city streets, shadowy and shady interiors, and a corrupt world of crime and intrigue, where it is difficult to know what is going on. Ghost in the Shell has a brooding protagonist and dark wet streets; the heroine also operates in a shady world of crime and intrigue, where appearances are deceptive. Unlike the original films noir, the film is not made in black and white, but it is suffused by the colour blue, and moody music, which give it a blue moodiness, not unlike the dark and brooding mood of the films noir.

International reception

This film was even more successful abroad than it was in Japan. When released on video in the US, it was a top seller. It was also very popular in Hong Kong and Australia. It has remained a favourite with Western anime fans, because of its combination of technically sophisticated (and very beautiful) computer animation with philosophically sophisticated subject matter.