Results tagged “Mamoru Oshii”

My copy of Ghost in the Shell 2.0 on Blu-ray arrived today. I encourage everyone with an iota of respect for this film not to buy it.

There are two things wrong with GITS2.0. The first is the 2.0 "remix" of the film itself, which looks like two entirely different movies spliced together without regard for continuity of visual tone. The original idea didn't seem like a bad one: take the computer-generated effects that were in the original edition of the film and recreate them using 2009 technology.

Fine so far. Except that the newly-created footage and the original footage clash so badly in tone and look that they might as well have scrapped the entire original film and re-made it. The original movie's CGI wasn't great, but it was impressive for the period — and, as with any movie, it was a part of an accepted whole. Bringing it "up to date" only means now you have two badly contrasting aesthetics — one from "then", one from" now" — being forced to share the same film.

Here and there they've attempted to bridge the gap between the two versions by changing the color balance of the original footage to match the gold-tinged CGI of the new material, but it doesn't work. Worse, many perfectly good shots in the original that showed plenty of native craftsmanship — like the magnificent hand-painted panorama in the closing sequence — have been replaced with CGI that's as impersonal and soulless as a screensaver.

I am not, in principle, against the idea of using digital techniques to correct deficiencies present in a film. I didn't mind when George Lucas re-composited many of the old effects in Star Wars to look that much better. I did mind when Han no longer shot first. But the temptation to fix what wasn't ever really broken is strong, it seems.

Now, none of this would be quite so egregious if you could only opt for the original unmolested version of Shell and be done with it. You can't. At least, not in anything resembling a watchable version. The import version of the film sports the 1080p 1.0 and 2.0 editions on the same platter — but it's $80. The U.S. edition, for $15, has only a dreadful-looking upconverted 1080i version (for all I know, it could be 480i) of the 1.0 cut. It is one of the most contemptuous things I've ever seen done to a film.

I wouldn't have minded paying extra — $40, $50 even — for good editions of both films, even if they weren't on the same disc. This is the sort of tactic I would have expected from a major studio with no real empathy for its customers, not indies like Anchor Bay Entertainment and Manga.

In sum: Save your money. Get the import version, which is expensive but is Region A and sports English subs. And write both Manga and Anchor Bay nasty letters — and perhaps Kodansha / Bandai as well, since I can only assume they did this as a sneaky way to prevent parallel imports of the product back into Japan at cut-rate costs. (You can expect to see a good deal more of that sort of thing in the future, too.)

Thanks, guys. Thanks for nothing and then some.

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Dominion dates back from 1986, but I don’t mean “dates” in the sense that it’s “dated.” In fact, it’s probably one of the better things Masamune Shirow has done: it’s relatively easy to follow, funny, spirited, and doesn’t confuse story with mere ideas.

The problem I’ve long had with Shirow is that while he’s a fantastic visualizer and has thrown away more ideas than most people ever have, he’s been a pretty scattershot storyteller. Or, maybe better to say that over time he’s subordinated storytelling to simply throwing big uncooked lumps of ideas at the reader, and most of his best work is not really his but rather the work derived from his core concepts. Case in point: Ghost in the Shell. The original comic is actually only okay, and its follow-ups are virtually (pun intended) incoherent. It’s what other people have done with the idea that have really shone. Mamoru Oshii’s two films were dreamtime meditations on the ideas and characters brought up in the book, but it was Kenji Kamiyama’s TV series and subsequent movie that really kicked the whole thing up to the level where it deserved to be.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.

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The Red Spectacles is a little like what you might get if you took a screenplay for one of Jean-Pierre Melville’s movies (Le Samouraï) and gave it to F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu). That doesn’t mean it’s any good, though. Here, the director and screenwriter are Mamoru Oshii, he who gave us the digressions of the Ghost in the Shell films and the deeply underrated Avalon, so I expected at least something thoughtful. Red Spectacles is actually the first live-action movie after he’d already spent a great deal of time in anime (his dream-state production Angel’s Egg immediately predates this film), and it’s clear throughout this movie how he tries to apply an animation director’s sensibilities to what he’s doing. Unfortunately, he doesn’t produce a movie that’s worth watching, let alone one worth thinking deeply about, and in the end even the most hard-core movie buffs will be left scratching their heads.

The plot’s a reworking of a story that Oshii has revisited time and again throughout his career, where an elite metropolitan police force, the Kerberos, were established to combat growing levels of crime, insurgency and corruption. Then the Kerberos themselves succumb to the same vices that they’re allegedly combating, and are disbanded — except for a loyal few, who stick it out to the end after being outlawed. One of their number, Koichi, flees the city and returns several years later to pick up what he’s left behind, to reunite with his comrades and to strike a blow for justice, or something. (A much better version of the Kerberos saga was told in the animated film Jin-roh.)

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It’s common practice to use the term “thought-provoking” as praise for a movie, and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence has been designed from the inside out to provoke so much thought that said impulse threatens to override everything else except for its staggering images. It uses lush visuals and striking action sequences as a vehicle to deliver extended ruminations about memory, human nature, society, information theory, the mind vs. the body, and a good many other things that you would expect more to find in a college philosophy course than an animated science-fiction movie. That doesn’t make it bad, mind you, just a tough pill to swallow if you are not already primed for it.

GITS2 is an explicit sequel to the first Ghost in the Shell film (which I admired a great deal, and should also review when it’s reissued shortly). While it takes place in the same world and features many of the same characters, it’s not absolutely required that you see the first film to get through this one. It takes place some time in the future, when humans and machines have become heavily co-integrated; almost everyone in the film has electronically-modified eyesight, for instance, which allows them to receive metadata about everything they look at. Needless to say, digital terrorists and electronic crime run rampant, and you are about as likely to have your body hacked into as your PC or your bank account.

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Talking about a movie like Angel’s Egg is bound to be frustrating, because my first impulse is just to recommend it unhesitatingly to anyone with the slightest interest in animation as art. Like Koyaanisqatsi or 2001, it doesn’t lend itself to being described; it’s the sort of thing best seen first and then discussed. Unfortunately, most of the people reading this may never get to see it — at least not until someone licenses the film for an English-speaking audience — so I’m forced to improvise through words and stills.

Angel’s Egg is a collaboration between director Mamoru Oshii and visual designer Yoshitaka Amano. Oshii is best-known for directing Ghost in the Shell, Avalon, and many other films — live-action and animated — all of which deal in some way with memory and the meaning of being human. His movies aren’t for everyone, but contain many rewards for the patient and openminded. Amano has provided design work for many anime and manga (Five Star Stories) and video games (Final Fantasy); his art style is beautiful and unmistakable. He provided the character and set designs for Egg, while Oshii wrote the story and framed the action. The result is a successful hybrid of two very dynamic talents.

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The most popular video game for the PC right now is a game called The Sims, where people get to play people doing ordinary things in ordinary settings — instead of fighting monsters or conquering countries, they're battling with leaky faucets and going out on dates. With a premise like that, one wonders what you need the video game for in the first place. Or maybe that is precisely the point: We can use the simulation to be vicariously ordinary, to feel more real than we might normally feel.

I find myself frightened by such an idea. Many friends of mine are fairly heavy video-game addicts; they spend a great deal of money and time in on-line games that are huge, elaborate multiplayer simulations featuring tens of thousands of people at once. For the truly hard-core, their real life is nothing more than a holding action until they can get back online again. I can hardly say my own hands are clean, so to speak — one of my major side projects is an on-line gaming community I designed from scratch. I definitely understand the allure of a simulated world that threatens to replace or supplant the real one.

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A miasma of great sadness and anger hangs over Jin-roh: The Wolf Brigade. Here we have a violent but also heart-rending modern-day fable that takes "Little Red Riding Hood" as one of its themes and turns it into a grim meditation on violence and duty.

People who come on board expecting to see a John Woo action-fest are not going to walk away happy. The violence of Jin-roh isn't the exhilarating arcade-game exhibitionism of Ghost in the Shell (whose director, Mamoru Oshii, also oversaw Jin-roh); it's more like the bleak and senseless violence we read about in the newspaper. More, in other words, what violence is like when it actually happens to us, and not what we dream about it as.

The story is set in an alternate version of Japan's recent history. After the end of WWII, extreme social unrest provoked the creation of the Capitol Police, a special elite guard unit with heavy armor, night-vision goggles, and machine guns. Their masked, inhuman faces are reminiscent of death machines, or maybe more like abstract evocations of the emotionlessness of Nazi SS guards.