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Who was the wise man who originated the notion that technology, if sufficiently advanced, would be indistinguishable from magic? Arthur C. Clarke, perhaps? In any case, the master Japanese manga creator Shirow Masamune shares this view: "Science, the new black magic," declares a character in Shirow's early cyberpunk graphic novel Appleseed. In Ghost in the Shell, the animated film version of a later Shirow work, a gifted director, Oshii Mamoru, works hard to invest the futurism with a quality of the uncanny, as if our awe before technological advancement has gone full circle and become indistinguishable from superstition.
Ghost in the Shell (Koka.ku Kidotai, '95), which has been playing around the country and will be out on Manga Entertainment home video this summer, is a breakthrough work-an anime spine-chiller more fully alive than most live-action movies. It should be required viewing for critics who fear that snowballing new film technologies will inexorably make movies even more mechanical and soulless than they are already-as if mechanical thinking, especially about plot and character, hasn't been the real hazard all along.
Even more dramatically than such heartfelt techno-romps as Babe and Toy Story, Ghost in the Shell is an artfully fabricated mechanism with discernible life signs, a factory product with a human soul. Its traditional cel-animation techniques are augmented with swatches of glittery computer graphics, but what matters most is that its complicated story and sophisticated themes are consistently interesting. In this the picture resembles its central character, a cyborg cop of the near future with a crucial kernel of actual brain tissue in her metal cranium.
On a purely technical level, GitS is dazzling. Only die-hard Western Animation chauvinists, clutching their stop watches and fixating upon the number of frames-per-second that flicker by (which is a function of money, anyway, rather than technique)-only these perceptually impaired souls could fault the movie's craftsmanship. Director Oshii is a master of mobile spatial effects. His blasted cityscapes feel three-dimensional because he moves through them without inhibition, gazing at them from every possible angle. (Supposedly, in his off hours he prowls Tokyo with a videocamera collecting novel vantage points.)
The characters, too, wear their fabricated status lightly. Some of the most impressive "effects" in the movie are closely observed incidental glimpses...