Some of you might remember my concern back in June when I first reported on Production IG’s planned visual update to Oshii’s 1995 classic Ghost in the Shell. Well, the Blu-ray of GiTS 2.0 (not to be confused with GiTS 2: Innocence, which will also be referred to a lot in this piece) hit Japanese stores a few weeks ago, and via sources that I’m not at liberty to identify I have managed to get my hands on a preview copy – months before the (still yet to be confirmed) UK release. So it was that I found myself, on the first morning of 2009, sitting down to watch one of my favourite movies of all time again, but instead of being filled with the usual satisfying feeling of anticipation, I was gripped with something nearer to dread.

The ‘problem’ – if it is really one at all – is the issue of progress. In the nine years between GiTS and GiTS 2: Innocence technology changed. In this time the tech teams at Production IG focused on becoming the masters at seamlessly merging CGI imagery with conventional hand drawn animation, with GiTS 2 being heralded as the pinnacle of this across the industry. And with these new technological changes came aesthetic ones; Oshii switched palettes from green and blue tones to more deep, orange ones, and the computer interfaces and displays that are such an important part of the GiTS environment became more sophisticated and refined as the software used to create them got cheaper, quicker and maturer. And while these displays had been the only thing to be rendered by computer in the first movie, the sequel employed CGI in nearly every scene.

Suddenly, you could run the two movies and – arguably – something didn’t look quite right. At times they looked like different worlds. The computer displays in GiTS started to look outmoded by today’s standards, let alone compared to the future they were meant to predict. Some of the cityscapes looked uninspiring – perhaps – in comparison to the epic computer rendered vistas of GiTS 2. Production IG had hit the same problem Lucas had hit with the Star Wars prequels – when you’re making heavy SFX based science fiction, your work is always going to look dated. Luckily then, that you can now go back and change it…

Before we talk about this anymore, lets have a look at the evidence. By far the biggest section of the film to have been altered is the well known, and often mimicked, opening sequence, with Major Kusanagi leaping off a skyscraper to assassinate a foreign diplomat. I’ve grabbed some images from both versions of the film for comparison.

The first thing you notice is the palette switch, as well as how the old computer maps that open the film have been completely re-designed and rendered.

Then it hits you, every external shot in the sequence – including the Major herself – have been recreated in CGI.

And this is where I first started to have problems with GiTS 2.0. CGI Kusanagi doesn’t look quite right. Well, she looks fine on her own, but inter-cut with the other characters – who are still hand drawn from the orignial – she looks jarring. Almost, at times, like you’re watching two different films.

From here you’re into the ‘cyborg birth’ opening sequence, which has also been completely redone, with much more sophisticated CGI and the same green-to-orange palette change, the again bring it more into line with the companion sequence in GiTS 2.

Later on in the film there’s also some CGI rendered helicopters and vehicles, although luckily the climactic spider tank battle sequence has survived untouched. There’s also a few minor dialogue changes, as well as a female voice actor for the Puppet Master, which makes a bit more visual sense and the plot a little easier to follow. But otherwise the rest of the movie has remained largely untouched.

Sitting writing this after watching GiTS 2.0 for the first time only a few hours ago, I’m still a little undecided as to how I feel about it. One major issue i have is that I always loved the original’s aesthetic, far more than I did it’s sequel’s. The video game style graphics, the green-blue palette…the whole film captured the 80′s cyberpunk vibe of Shirow’s original manga (all be it with a far darker, more serious tone) as well as developing on the themes and aesthetics of works like Bladerunner and Neuromancer that came before it. Don’t get me wrong, I like GiTS 2: Innocence, and I found the new palette that Oshii had brought over from Avalon appealing, but it was a different film to the original, a different world. And I was happy with that – time had passed in the real world, and I was happy to just accept it had passed in the GiTS world too. Things change, especially technology. Characters had clearly aged, so why couldn’t everything else had moved on as well?

Also the beauty of the original film for me was that it didn’t actually rely too much on futuristic design and visual effects to create it’s haunting atmosphere. The best science fiction works because it manipulates the familiar and believable, and what truly makes GiTS a masterpiece is the noir atmosphere, Oshii’s pacing, his slow pans, and the beautifully drawn Tokyo Hong Kong street scenes.

In fact watching it after returning from Tokyo, it’s remarkable how un-futuristic the architecture is in GiTS, with the sequel’s towering CGI mega-scrapers and smoggy vistas starting to look a little Fifth Element in comparison. It’s these things that give the original it’s feeling of edgy, ‘just around the corner’ realism, and if it’s any consolation, all of that is still here in 2.0.

Personally there are still a lot of unanswered questions for me. Why was this made? Is it just another IG tech demo? How much as Oshii actually involved? Wasn’t he busy making Sky Crawlers at the time, and is this really just a marketing exercise for that movie – it having been shown at the same time at some Japanese theaters?

Not that there’s nothing at all to recommend this release. As previously mentioned, the beautiful pacing and gentle street scenes are all still intact, and this is the best they’ve ever been seen. It’s a great transfer, and has clearly been cleaned up in places in the process, and it’s the better for it. Kenji Kawai‘s legendary score has also been given an audibly noticeable remaster, and sounds stunning all over again. I was only given the main feature, but the Japanese collectors release featured not only some interesting looking extras but also a copy of the original – although it’s unsure whether that has been given the same gorgeous visual polish in the transition to Blu-ray. Only time will tell what is included on any western releases.

Only one thing is certain – if you’re a GiTS fan then you can’t kid yourself – you’re going to want to see this. Whether you end up loving it, hating it, or – like me – wondering whether it was really necessary is something still to be determined.

ありがとうございます to The Laughing Man for securing me this review copy. The net is vast and infinite…

Mandarake – a chain of otaku shops dotted around Tokyo and Japan – opened it’s Akihabara superstore earlier this year, and it’s clear why it’s become it’s flagship. Spanning eight levels, it’s the first place to go for any sci-fi, manga or anime fan needing a spot of retail therapy. We ploughed through six of the eight floors – sensibly skipping the shojo and hentai/doujinshi departments – and for most of the time it was just too much to take in, let alone process. I bought a couple of art books – Shirow’s Intron Depot (which I’m embarrassed to say i’d never got round to picking up before, but grabbed for a truly bargain price) and an unbelievable and unique Patlabor book which I can’t even start to describe to you right now. When I’m home and sane again I’ll post some pics and review it; believe me it’s worth the wait. Time permitting I’m going to head back there before I leave, but in the meantime here’s some photos. Apologies for the poor quality at times, this was a covert operation, for as the signs throughout the store tell you PHOTOGRAPHY IS NOT PERMITTED.

The last 9 months or so has been an exciting time for fans of Production IG and Masamune Shirow – previous collaborations between the anime powerhouse and the manga legend gave the world the unstoppable, stylish and cerebral Ghost in the Shell franchise, and last year they announced that the two giants would be joining forces for not one but two new TV series, Ghost Hound and Real Drive.

Ghost Hound, a dark, deep supernatural series about school children having out of body experiences, premiered in October 2007 in Japan. I watched the first five or so episodes as they were aired (and fansubbed courtesy of the ever awesome Ureshii), and really enjoyed them. It was mature for a show about teenagers, and had that down tempo kinda vibe that IG do so well. Then a minor disaster with my HTPC wiped a 500gb hard drive (yeah, don’t ask) and I lost all the episodes I’d grabbed to date. Instead of trying to catch up them again, I decided to to wait until the series ended and grab them all at once. Besides, I told myself, it was the futuristic, cyberpunk sounding Real Drive, that didn’t start until April 2008, that I was really looking forward to.

Set in 2061, the show focuses on the ‘Meta Real Network’, or ‘Metal’, a vast shared computer system used for communication, entertainment and storing the uploaded digital recordings of human personalities. More reminiscent of William Gibson’s original cyberspace concept than the Internet you’re plugged into right now, it’s often unclear (to me at least, so far) how much of the Metal is virtual, and how much is actually a physical network, formed by nanomachines that have reproduced throughout the Earth’s oceans. Our main hero-protagonist is 81 year old Masamichi Haru, who has only recently awakened into this new world after a diving accident involving an early version of the Metal technology left him in a coma for 50 years. Although his body is old and frail and he is confined to a wheelchair, he of course finds that he can dive again courtesy of the Metal, and begins a new career as a net-diver, investigating anomalies in this new realm, whilst always searching for the mysterious ‘answer in the sea’.

So far, so Shirow. It’s his typical near/post singularity stuff, familiar to anyone who’s watched or read GitS or Appleseed. Even if nothing groundbreaking, I thought, at least they’ll be some interesting ideas going on here, and it’ll be worth watching. But then something happened in the first episode, something truly awful and disturbing, that I nearly vowed to never watch another episode again.

That something was Minamo Aoi.

Aoi is a 15 year old Japanese schoolgirl, inexplicably employed to look after Haru whilst Holon, his android assistant, is undergoing maintenance. Only meant to be working for the diver on a temporary basis, she becomes a permanent member of his staff after he takes a similarly inexplicable shine to her. She’s a horribly stereotypical depiction of the Japanese schoolgirl archetype; clumsy, awkward, shrill, overly-kawaii and sickeningly positive when she’s not blubbing about some minor emotional upset. Yeah yeah, I get how she’s meant to be this narrative device for providing a more innocent perspective on events, and perhaps that would work – perhaps – if it wasn’t for her insanely short skirt flapping up whenever she moved, or the camera taking a little too long to pan across her exposed thighs when she’s talking, or that she didn’t blunder around like she’d been binge drinking rohypnol spiked alcopops all day. Or if she just kept her fucking mouth shut occasionally.

To be a little – and I mean a little – fairer, she does seem to calm down slightly as the episodes roll on (or perhaps I’m getting better at mentally blocking out the scenes shes in), but she does seem to be disturbingly central to most of the storylines so far. My initial knee-jerk reaction of hatred was partly down to the way she was introduced in episode 1; she literally bursts onto the screen, shrieking and smiling, her pudgy little thighs on display…it’s totally jarring with the ostensibly serious science fiction story that is meant to be being told here, and instantly rips the viewer out the quite complex technological world that is being outlined. Like I said, it nearly stopped me from watching anymore.

There are some of his fans, and I’d include myself amongst them, who have been concerned that Shirow has been losing his touch over the last few years. The last of the GitS comics certainly had a few too-many panty shots for a serious cyberpunk epic, and his recent pre-occupation with seemingly only drawing semi naked, near-hentai images of female warriors wrapped in tentacles while holding massive phallic swords/guns/sword-guns was starting to make it look like the once great sci-fi master was descending into being nothing more than a filthy old pervert. We were hoping that these two new projects with IG would prove us wrong, and that he still had some great concepts and storytelling left in him, but sadly Real Drive, and Aoi in particular, fails to set things straight. And perhaps even more tellingly Ghost Hound, which from what I saw looks far more interestingly, is apparently based on a story and designs he originally came up with back in 1987.

So what else is there to say? The animation is fine – as you’d expect from Production IG – and reminiscent in many ways of a cleaner, less grimy, more utopian version of GitS:SAC. The soundtrack is at times awful, over orchestrated, operatic anime nonsense, thankfully occasionally giving away to minimal breaks and pulsing electronica, which is much more suited to the setting, if a little obvious.

So…I’m not painting a great picture, am I? The weird thing is I’m still watching. Why? Well, partly out of fanboy loyalty, but mainly because plotwise I’m still not quite sure what is going on. Both the setting and technology hasn’t been fully explained yet, and I’m intrigued enough to sit it out. Shirow’s works have always been famed for not just being sometimes so complex on a conceptual level as to be almost inaccesable, but also for the effort he puts into thinking through his technological ideas. So far Real Drive shows much of the former and little of the latter, but I’m still holding out hope that this will emerge, and save not only the show but also the reputation of it’s creator for whom I’ve always had so much respect.

I’ll be back in a few episodes to let you know how I’m getting on. Hopefully it was just a rough take-off…

This one slipped past me apparently. Ether that or Production IG have been keeping it very, very tightly under wraps.

Either way, apparently July 12 will see a Japanese theatrical release of Ghost in the Shell 2.0; a new special edition of the 1995 classic featuring some re-done CGI visual effects and a whole new, remastered 6.1 soundtrack. Anime News Network has all the precise details, and the one thing that worried me most is in that list of names there is no mention of the film’s original director Mamoru Oshii. Presumably he’s been far too busy with Sky Crawlers – which this release seems to be aimed at promoting – to have got involved himself.

Looking at the comparison images, it looks like most of the visual work has been done to bring some of the original’s scenes more in line with the aesthetic of the 2004 sequel, Innocence. And so far it looks like it’s been done quite subtly and effectively- that’s if you don’t mind things being a bit darker and, erm, more orangey.

I can’t say it doesn’t worry me though. GiTS is a film very close to my heart, for many reasons. Plus, and this may just be particularly bad timing, but less than a week ago I was sitting with a very good friend of mine, watching an HD encode of Star Wars: A New Hope that I had, ahem, obtained. We were quite happily sat there ohhing and ahhing over how amazing it still looked after all these years, and how Lucas obviously once had an amazing eye for colour and lighting, when the first fully CGI’d newly shoehorned in scene jarred us out of our nostalgia. I swear, the second I saw that Jawa hanging off that rope from that lizard thing, a little part of me died.

And don’t even get me started on that Greedo bullshit.

According to Variety today, Steven Speilberg’s Dreamworks studio has acquired the rights to produce a live action version of Ghost in the Shell. It’s not clear at this point whether the plan is to make an adaptation of Oshii’s 1995 movie, or Shirow’s 1989 manga, and the cynical among us (i.e. me) might jump to the conclusion that this is just a bandwagon jump after the announcement of the Akira live action flick. But apparently Spielberg ‘loves’ the original, and believes it is a ‘genre that has arrived’. Erm, OK Stevie. What genre, exactly? Cyberpunk? If so, then ‘fraid you’re jackin’ in about 20 years too late, chombatta.

So I love GiTS…Speilberg loves GiTS…who else? Well, Britney Spears, of course. Or at least the director of her latest video does, which freaked me out whilst channel surfing last night. It’s a poorly animated, very low budget, blatant rip off homage to the original movie, with the crack-loving starlet taking the role of everybody’s favourite cybernetic anti-terrorism agent. Hmmm. Check out the video below, though it’s probably worth turning the sound down. Obviously.

Actually, what made me laugh while searching for that on YouTube was the number of fan made alternative videos that have been uploaded – made from edited together clips of her old promos – because apparently her ‘real’ fans hate the anime style one. Excellent.

It was with some slight trepidation that I sat down to watch Appleseed Ex Machina this weekend; the completely CGI anime is a sequel to the 2004 Appleseed, with both being based on Masamune Shirow‘s classic 1985 manga. Being a fan of the original printed version (and Shirow’s work in general), I found little in the first film beyond it’s impressive visuals to get me excited, sadly.

For those of you with no prior experience, the background to the Appleseed series is kind of interesting. Set some point in the 22nd century, after a non-nuclear war has destroyed 90% of world civilisation, it tells the story of the rise of Olympus, a high-tech floating city-state. Apparently utopian at first glance, the city is populated by a mixture of baseline humans, cyborgs and ‘bioroids’; genetically engineered humans designed with altered emotions to bring peace and stability to the city. For both the reader of the manga and the viewer of these two films, our point of view into this world is through the two main protagonists and lovers; female human Deunan Knute and the once human but now fully cyborg Briareos Hecatonchires. Both veterans of the war, they find themselves trying to adjust to life in Olympus, whilst also being recruited into ESWAT, a high-tech special weapons police unit detailed with keeping the peace in the so-called Utopian city. In the original Shirow uses this environment to explore the moral, political and social issues raised by this very artificial utopia, whilst also showcasing the beautifully visualised technology, gadgets, weapons and mecha that he is famed for. Unfortunately, while the movies deal with the latter in exhilarating style, it’s with the former thematic issues where they start to disappoint.

But let’s look at the positives first. Visually the film rarely fails to impress; the city of Olympus, its inhabitants and their technology and weapons are all rendered in a colourful, bold, energetic style. Of special note are the Landmate Mechas; the distinctive powered fighting suits that the ESWAT members ride into combat, which look like they’ve stepped off the page of the manga, matching Shirow’s designs perfectly and moving in subtly realistic ways. Gone is the slightly cell-shaded style of the first film, that aimed to make the characters look more hand drawn, in favour of a pure-CGI look, which while probably appeasing the many fans that disliked the look of the first film, I can’t help wondering if it doesn’t make the film seem slightly colder. Certainly the only place where the film failed visually for me at times was when depicting human characters, and especially their expressions…faces seemed too plastic, too clean and somewhat lifeless. While motion capture was clearly used for character movement, it looks very unlikely that it was for faces – probably due to budget and time constraints – and at times it’s clear much more attention has been lavished on the intricacies of the mecha and their weapons than on bestowing life into the protagonists. While a deeper, more challenging narrative would have used the emotionless plasticity of both the human and bioroid characters to subtly infer something about the true nature of Olympus, instead AsDE’s weak plot leaves it instead feeling like you’re watching yet another video game cut-scene.

Which is exactly where I started to have problems with the film. It borrows heavily, and faithfully, from computer game aesthetics – and there are a lot of times when this approach works perfectly. The action scenes are at times breathtaking, especially the aerial combat scenes between the Landmates, and are almost enough on their own to recommend the film. In fact, if like me, you are a mecha freak then the film is definitely worth seeing for these designs and action sequences. Similarly if, god forbid, you’re some sort of Michael Bay loving explosions freak, then you’ll have fun. But sadly the borrowing from video games doesn’t end there, and it feels like the producers take too many pointers from one area where games are famously weak: plot.

I mean there is some plot here, something painfully obvious about a new consumer technology (an actually quite cool looking, but never really explained in any detail, augmented reality cell phone type system) being used to control the actions of it’s users. And there’s even a sub-plot, with the introduction of a new character cloned from Briareos’ DNA, so that he looks exactly like the cyborg before he went full-op – which of course leads to weird if predictable emotional reactions from the two central characters – even hinting at a painful love triangle – but this never goes anywhere and is almost forgotten by the third act, despite being probably the script’s most potentially interesting angle. Instead the plot feels all too much like videogame padding between levels – sorry – action sequences, culminating in an impressive final battle that looks a little too much like an end of game boss encounter (and even worse, slightly like the fall of Zion in the third, terrible Matrix film). The problem was, despite how frenetic the action was at this point, with the plot failing to grip me I found myself wondering whether I really cared any more.

Which is, sadly, why I was ultimately disappointed with Appleseed Ex Machina. Coming from being a fan of the manga, it seemed an awful waste to, again, not try and tackle the subtle but important themes that Shirow pre-occupies himself with in the original. Especially when you contrast the dense, sometimes dizzying, philosophical and political plots Shirow’s most successful adaptations; Production IG’s and Mamoru Oshii‘s famous Ghost in the Shell movies and TV series. Disappointing, like I say, but still fun in places. If you’re into mecha, high-tech video-game violence or just uber-cool CGI in general, it’s still worth checking out. Just don’t expect to be intellectually challenged, or to be able to skip the more boring cut-scenes by hitting ‘A’ on your gamepad.