What do you think?
Rate this book
Ghost In The Shell
A science fiction classic that was largely overlooked on release, Ghost in the Shell has grown in stature with the support of such Hollywood fans as James Cameron and the Wachowskis, and in 2017 was controversially remade as a live-action spectacular, starring Scarlett Johansson.
Anime expert Andrew Osmond focuses on the original 1995 film, tracing the paths of the Japanese talents who came together to make it, including the visionary and maverick director, Mamoru Oshii, as well as the original manga creator, Masamune Shirow, and how their different sensibilities came together.
Other chapters look at the film's unusual international co-production with the UK's Manga Entertainment; discuss the figure of Kusanagi, the film's iconic cyborg heroine who's both a James Bond-style killer and a contemplative philosopher; examine Ghost in the Shell's debts to Blade Runner and Japan's tradition of robot fantasies; and ask if it's really a cyberpunk film, as it's so often labelled.
Anime expert Andrew Osmond focuses on the original 1995 film, tracing the paths of the Japanese talents who came together to make it, including the visionary and maverick director, Mamoru Oshii, as well as the original manga creator, Masamune Shirow, and how their different sensibilities came together.
Other chapters look at the film's unusual international co-production with the UK's Manga Entertainment; discuss the figure of Kusanagi, the film's iconic cyborg heroine who's both a James Bond-style killer and a contemplative philosopher; examine Ghost in the Shell's debts to Blade Runner and Japan's tradition of robot fantasies; and ask if it's really a cyberpunk film, as it's so often labelled.
122 pages, Paperback
First published September 12, 2017
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 2, 2022
I thought this was a great overview of the 1995 anime - although it's fair to say it covers Oshii perhaps as much as the film overall. Which is as it should be.
There's a lot of nice detail in here - an interview with the composer, showing how Patlabor 2 is very much a dry run for Ghost in the Shell, coverage of GitS's breakout in the west.
A lot of stuff I've not seen anywhere else.
Better than it has any right to be.
There's a lot of nice detail in here - an interview with the composer, showing how Patlabor 2 is very much a dry run for Ghost in the Shell, coverage of GitS's breakout in the west.
A lot of stuff I've not seen anywhere else.
Better than it has any right to be.
March 27, 2025
This was all over the place in terms of how good it was. Sometimes it stays on topic and sometimes rambles on tangents. The author’s writing is very inconsistent. One minute it’s trying to be academic then the next it’s full of slang. A good example is how sometimes he will eschew using “I” as is academic convention and write “the author of this book” but the next section he will use I. More importantly I mostly found the author’s writing to be very pompous and self important which made for a mostly unpleasant reading experience.
Some of the statements and opinions given are bizarre. In one section he says that Oshii’s other best known works are Patlabour, Avalon and Sky Crawlers and skips over Angel’s Egg (he brings it up later at least). He also implies that Ghost in the Shell isn’t really Cyberpunk because we don’t see a virtual representation of cyberspace which is extremely confusing considering how important hacking and hackers are to the story. I have to wonder if Blade Runner is cyberpunk in this case.
While much of the information shared in this book is relevant, the vast majority of it could probably be gleaned from just reading Wikipedia articles and their sources. There is far too much surface level information with a play by play retelling of the plot of the movie being particularly egregious. Oh, and how could I forget: Masamune Shirow’s ‘name is written “Shirow Masamune” on his manga and on Ghost’s opening titles, as family names come first in Japan’ (p. 44).
Thanks captain obvious!
The last gripe I have with this book is how the author is clearly so upset that others were upset about the whitewashed casting of Scarlett in the awful (imho) 2017 remake. He whines about this over and over again, offering various what-aboutisms to show how much more clever he is than those pesky critics. All of which demonstrate a fundamental ignorance of why people felt the way they did. His argument that the 1995 movie “isn’t set in Japan” because the city’s design was based Kowloon Walled City in Hongkong is absurd. Hong Kong is still in Asia last I checked!
Not recommended unless you know literally nothing about the movie. And even then there simply has to be better writing about it out there somewhere.
Some of the statements and opinions given are bizarre. In one section he says that Oshii’s other best known works are Patlabour, Avalon and Sky Crawlers and skips over Angel’s Egg (he brings it up later at least). He also implies that Ghost in the Shell isn’t really Cyberpunk because we don’t see a virtual representation of cyberspace which is extremely confusing considering how important hacking and hackers are to the story. I have to wonder if Blade Runner is cyberpunk in this case.
While much of the information shared in this book is relevant, the vast majority of it could probably be gleaned from just reading Wikipedia articles and their sources. There is far too much surface level information with a play by play retelling of the plot of the movie being particularly egregious. Oh, and how could I forget: Masamune Shirow’s ‘name is written “Shirow Masamune” on his manga and on Ghost’s opening titles, as family names come first in Japan’ (p. 44).
Thanks captain obvious!
The last gripe I have with this book is how the author is clearly so upset that others were upset about the whitewashed casting of Scarlett in the awful (imho) 2017 remake. He whines about this over and over again, offering various what-aboutisms to show how much more clever he is than those pesky critics. All of which demonstrate a fundamental ignorance of why people felt the way they did. His argument that the 1995 movie “isn’t set in Japan” because the city’s design was based Kowloon Walled City in Hongkong is absurd. Hong Kong is still in Asia last I checked!
Not recommended unless you know literally nothing about the movie. And even then there simply has to be better writing about it out there somewhere.
August 22, 2022
Occasionally meandering, this is a broader history of media influences on the film and ancillary works of some of its creators or their (influential) contemporaries (with personal opinions and anecdotes from the author inserted periodically); personally, I did not mind this approach and found many interesting tidbits scattered throughout as a result.
January 6, 2025
An interesting examination of the film, but it stumbles in places and feels like it could just be the booklet for a nice Blu-ray edition of the movie.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews