How Mamoru Oshii ruined the Ghost in the Shell franchise

How Mamoru Oshii ruined the Ghost in the Shell franchise

Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 film Ghost in the Shell is excellent, technically groundbreaking, and hugely culturally important. However, as an adaptation of Masamune Shirow’s manga of the same name, it is an abysmal failure, and one that has negatively impacted all other elements of the franchise. Because of the upcoming american live-action film, I’d like to revisit the problems with the 1995 adaptation, if only because it seems like the 2017 film does to the 1995 film what the 1995 film did to its original source material — with major implications for future franchise entries if it becomes successful.

It’s important to give some background on Shirow, in order to understand why the manga is how it is and what differentiates it from his other work. Shirow (real name Masanori Ota) is known for works that combine heavily sexual content with detailed descriptions of machinery; his work ranges from pornography to hard SF. While earlier works like Tank Police, Orion and Appleseed contained a mix of science fiction and political ideas, Ghost in the Shell is notable in its first volume for its more grounded near-future setting and for much greater technical detail. Ghost in the Shell incorporates elements of previous works — like Tank Police and Appleseed, it’s about a government-sanctioned para-military anti-terrorism task force who have been super-empowered by the use of military hardware.

Where Ghost in the Shell differs from these other works (and nearly everything else in the genre) is the attention to detail baked into the manga: my copy of the first volume (the Dark Horse release) has 81 authors notes in a 10-page section in the back, as well as substantial use of inline footnotes: the first color spread contains four separate inline footnotes, and while the frequency of footnotes is reduced for the following three chapters, chapters four and five are primarily dedicated to world-building, and chapter five contains four substantial footnotes, four explanatory diagrams describing the science behind cyborg manufacture and design processes, and a textbook recommendation — all over a total of six pages. In chapter nine, twelve pages are dedicated to Motoko’s dive into a Puppeteer victim —initially focusing on the mechanics of diving, but eventually going into detail about brain structures & the use of electron spin in storage. From early on, Ghost in the Shell is a manga about ideas that doesn’t shy away from technical details.

Ghost in the Shell also doesn’t shy away from taking a close look at politics and economics. There are two major plots in the first volume; one is the Puppeteer plot, and the other revolves around economic incentives leading to orphans and refugees being brainwashed, cyborgized, and sold as counterfeit robots — in other words, industrially-mediated slave labor supported by government corruption stemming from the price difference between top of the line hardware and the bodies of the poor. Corruption is a focus: every antagonist is shown to have government ties, and while Section Nine is on the side of the angels mostly because of Aramaki & Kusanagi having abnormal moral integrity, its existence is grey-legal and owes itself to the same back-door politicing as 2501 does.

Oshii’s film adapts material from only four chapters of the 11-chapter manga: chapters 1, 3, 9, and 11 (i.e., the Puppeteer story), and only in a severely truncated way. Project 2501’s monologue during the dive in chapter 9 is dropped entirely (including the explanation that 2501 was a high speed insider-trading system), and of his nine page monologue in chapter 11, only elements from six pages are included — of 48 panels, Oshii’s film only adapts material from 13, producing an overly simplified explanation of 2501’s philosophy. There are ten diagrams in this chapter, of which only one is every visually referenced in the film.

A particularly interesting omission is the systematic scrubbing of references to all forms of eastern mysticism from the film: in the manga, 2501’s reasoning leans heavily on ideas about karmic connections, but these elements have been removed entirely. This is strange, since Oshii inserts his own religious references of various types (including bible quotes). One way to look at it is that Oshii’s philosophy (and the ideas he is fixated with) differ significantly from Shirow’s. The Ghost in the Shell manga is not largely concerned with identity: only seven of the 48 panels in 2501’s chapter-11 monologue touch on identity at all, and of them only one acknowledges it as meaningful — of the remaining six, two are related to the idea of karmic connection in terms of our false models of others’ personalities, and four are related to the idea that sexual reproduction produces more robust offspring than cloning. On the other hand, 2501’s monologue at the end of Oshii’s film is mostly concerned with the idea that Kusanagi fears changes to her identity, and most of the scenes Oshii added focus on the idea that Kusanagi considers her body alien to her (including being unembarassed by nudity & having a fixation on its mass-produced nature). These attributes Oshii gave to Kusanagi in the film are not at all in line with her character in the manga, of course: Kusanagi breaks Bateau’s eyes in retaliation for his intrusion into her VR beach party — i.e., for seeing her in a revealing bathing suit unexpectedly — and 2501 notes that, by being unconcerned with the preservation of her own identity, Kusanagi violated his prediction — agreeing to his suggestion that they fuse in one twenty-fifth the time he expected.

When Oshii made these changes to Kusanagi’s character, he influenced later parts of the franchise. With the release of the film, the manga and non-manga portions of the franchise begin to fundamentally diverge. Even as Stand Alone Complex reintroduced the Fuchikoma (as Tachikoma) and brought in members of Section 9 not featured in the film, it kept much closer to the film’s characterization of Kusanagi as business-like and humorless rather than the mischevious troublemaker from the manga, and also kept her portrayal as sexless (in direct contradiction with the manga, which gave her a boyfriend for several chapters and also had her participating in casual group sex with two female friends). While SAC brought in a handful of elements of stories from the first volume of the manga (including ideas about wealth inequality in the GitS universe), no other part of the franchise ever really adapted any story from anywhere in the entire manga continuity outside of the Puppetmaster story (and never substantially differently from Oshii’s version), and every iteration has trouble portraying Section 9 as being in a moral grey area the way the manga was able to do quite casually. While it’s not technically correct to say that Oshii’s film was “the original”, in a sense it’s more accurate: the manga was first, but Oshii’s film has a pretty tenuous connection to its source material and all later elements of the franchise draw more from it than from Shirow’s work.

Trailers for the new american film look like they have lifted imagery directly from Oshii’s series (both Ghost in the Shell 1995 and Innocence) and from the first episode of SAC. However, the voice-over in the trailer implies that the plot has taken another step in the direction of cliche: where Oshii took a character who was comfortable in her own bio-type sensory-film skin and turned her into a human thrust into an alien mechanical body and trying desperately to maintain her sense of self in the face of a mass-produced mechanized society, this film adds yet another tired idea — that she hates being a cyborg and wants to take revenge on the people who saved her life. In other words, plot-wise, this film appears to have more to do with 009 than Ghost in the Shell.

While the 1995 film dumbed down the manga’s ideas and replaced a large portion of them with cliche, current Ghost in the Shell fandom was introduced to the franchise by this film and largely prefers it. A much larger market will be introduced to the franchise by the 2017 film, and by the same logic, will prefer the even dumber version — potentially leading to lots of tie-in media that tries not to stray far from the gutted premise. (Imagine an american live action GitS TV show in the vein of current Marvel and DC shows.)

Meanwhile, the manga continues in the rich, weird direction its always had. Volume 2 was followed by volume 1.5. Volume 2 focuses on a psychic investigator hired by Section 9 who crosses paths with Kusanagi, who while following the trail of a hallucinated racoon-dog is hacked by a south american communist guerilla group and then discovers clones of her original body on a space station. The art’s better and it has even more footnotes than the original. Kusanagi determines whether or not she’s in a simulation by convincing herself that her leg is a perfect cylinder and then checking it in a mirror; a secret government agency prevents earthquakes with feng shuei; Kusanagi has a big cyborg body guard whose chest can hold her normal cyborg body, who she rides in like a mech and at one point hides a diplomat inside. It’s exactly the kind of high-information-density fun that GitS always promised.