Ghost In The Shell. Shirow Masamune. Dark Horse Manga (2004)

A great collection of stories revolving around an anti-terrorist public security team in a future Japan where the boundaries between human and machine are becoming blurred due to advances in prosthetics. Public Security Section 9 is lead by Major Motoko Kusanagi who has a fully artificial body, her spine and brain are the only biological elements, the rest of the team are more or less equipped with mechanical upgrades. They operate in an information drenched society where a cyberbrain in required to provide access to the net and allow normal functioning. This naturally gives new opportunities to criminals an terrorists to infiltrate individuals and attack the "Ghost in the Shell", the human personality of the individual. The stories are nicely varied, they mix up the political landscape of the future state of Japan with straightforward criminal activities. The final episodes raise interesting questions about what would happen if a machine intelligence became self aware.
This is a really dense comic, the art is crowed with detail and the stories are packed with ideas and explanations as well. Shirow Masamue manages to use this density to enhance the momentum of the stories, to place his cast in a credible context and to bring them to vivid and sharply defined life. The art is wonderfully easy to read and skillfully uses changing styles to move the mood of the story. Major Motoko is a great character, vibrantly human in her artificial body.
Ghost in the Shell is smart, funny and thoughtful science fiction, in a word, brilliant.

Appleseed. Geneon Entertainment (2004) DVD

This is a very engaging and enjoyable animated science fiction film. Deunan Kane is kidnapped from a battlefield and taken to the city of Olympus where she finds out that the war had already ended and that her missing lover Briareos is now a full cyborg. Olympus is the last human city and is populated by humans and biological robots called Bioroids who provide the administration for the city. The city is ruled by a computer called Gia and a council of human Elders, Olympus is intended to be a Utopia. There is trouble in Olympus, a group of humans wish to remove the Bioroids and Deunan finds that she is central to the struggle and the survival of Olympus. The reveals are nicely done, the action is staged with great flair and ambition and there is a genuinely interesting idea at the heart of the film.

The CG animation is excellent, it uses motion capture to build upon which creates a very natural sense of movement and interaction among the cast. The backgrounds are breathtaking in their scope and detail. The guns and the armoured suits the cast use are lovingly rendered, they are a major part of the cast in themselves. The story does not get lost in the detail, the interactions and machinations of the cast are the drivers in the film, the cast get to express themselves as much in action as in speech and the mix is nicely judged.

This is a very ambitious film that very self consciously uses technology to talk about technology and how humans interact with it. Smart, inventive and highly entertaining, a winner.

Ghost in the Shell. Manga Entertainment Ltd. DVD (1995)

A classic, beautiful animation, strong ideas, moody effective soundtrack all combine to create a stunning science fiction masterwork. Based on the extraordinary book by Masamune Shirow it clearly stands on its own. In the near future cyborg bodies will be more common, expensive and requiring regular maintenance, still they will be in reasonably common use. The most common use is to have implants that allow you to directly connect to a network and communicate directly with another person, right up to completely cybernetic bodies housing a human brain. Major Motoko Kusanagi works for Section 9, an anti-terrorist government agency. Since she is introduced in a scene in which she assassinates a foreign diplomat , anti-terrorist may be taken as having a flexible definition. The Major and the rest of her team become involved in a plot by a super hacker, The Puppetmaster, which steadily unravels to being both considerably more and much less than expected. The film traces how something extraordinary can have very squalid roots. This nice mix of bureaucratic infighting and philosophical investigation is what gives the film its spine. It never looses sight of being a exciting thriller either with superbly staged and paced action sequences that still dazzle with their complex artistry.

Science fiction can frequently age very badly as the assumed future is left in the dust by the current present, Ghost in the Shell sidesteps this by taking a very radical approach to the future and more importantly having a strong central core to it. The art and craft of the animation has not aged either, the detail lavished on the cityscape's is still a joy to behold, the technology is wonderfully integrated into the story, it is very much the human concerns that are to the forefront and they are always relevant and up to date. This film continues to set a standard for ambitious, stylish animated science fiction that later films are judged by.