Overview:
A movie recapping the first season of the series
Our Take:
Ghost in the Shell is one of those series that has almost a cult following. The movie from 1995 is one of the most well-known anime films out there. I recently rewatched it and believe me it still holds up and is amazingly animated. Definitely, a fine example of the medium and I understand the hype behind the series.
What I was unaware of was how much to the series there actually was. I thought the movie was it but there is so much more. I was turned away at first because a lot of the newer stuff was CGI and I am not a huge fan of that type of animation. But recently I had some of my biases changed by watching some great CGI anime.
Unfortunately, this is not one of those. This movie falls into the pitfall that a lot of cyberpunk-themed things so often do. It thinks if it throws out enough fancy and complicated sounding jargon that it will make it feel sophisticated or philosophical. What it does instead is leaves the viewer confused and uninterested. I wanted to like this one and was excited to give it a chance but there just wasn’t much fun to be had.
The animation was also some of the worst CGI I have seen in a long time. I was watching this movie with some friends and even they commented that it wasn’t very good. So, I imagine if an untrained eye can spot the errors then that makes it an even bigger problem. The biggest issue I found was the lip flaps. There were so many times that the words were way off from the mouths moving. With anime and dubs in particular I give a bit of pass to some of that but with this, it was just way too distracting to let it slide. This was disappointing because there were a lot of really good VA’s in this one and even some great performances didn’t help.
It wasn’t all bad though. The world is still an interesting one, and even though this particular story was hard to follow I still like what Ghost in the Shell is doing. At the very least it convinced me to watch some of the other anime in this series. It wasn’t the most enjoyable experience but it had some merits. It is a decent enough recap before the second season drops soon which is what the point was I imagine. I wasn’t a fan of this and it being a recap didn’t do it any favors because you all know how I feel about recaps.