If there is a 3a masterpiece this year that has been in the global attention for more than a year, it must be cyberpunk 2077 produced by CDPR. Since the broadcast of that well-known promo, RPG and sci-fi enthusiasts around the world have been looking forward to it. It was originally expected to be listed in April this year, but it has repeatedly jumped into the ticket until November, and even so, the enthusiasm and expectations of players have not diminished. However, when it comes to cyberpunk works in the acg field, the young 2077 still has to call himself a younger brother in front of another big sister-level anime. This well-deserved masterpiece is Ghost in the Shell.
Everyone is familiar with and i am a big dreamer
The progenitor of cyberpunk in the field of literature can be traced back to Philip Dick's Do Bionics Dream of Electronic Sheep and William Gibson's Neuromancer, The Holographic Rose Fragment. These books set the main tone of today's cyberpunk culture: staggered tall buildings, twinkling neon lights, foggy skies, huge corporations with swelled power to the point of no return, limb modifications that pervade society as a whole, memories that can be replaced and modified at any time, and the resulting alienation and self-cognitive skepticism. I believe that as soon as these words appear, your mind has sketched a repressive world that is highly technologically developed but people do not live freely and beautifully. In the field of animation, the most vivid embodiment of all these elements is the Ghost in the Shell. Ghost in the Shell can also be said to be one of the founders of cyberpunk that influenced many subsequent film and television works such as the Matrix.
The salient feature of the cyberpunk setting: the highly developed and widespread use of mechanical prosthetics
Ghost in the Shell is a very special IP, and it can almost be said that there are only three different works with similar appearances and far differences in the interior of the three hands of the original manga author Masamune Shiro, the director of the anime version Kenji Kamiyama, and the theatrical version director Oshii Mori. In particular, Oshii's theatrical version can almost be said to have written a completely different work with the help of Shiro's authentic background setting, and it is not an exaggeration to say that it is a serious ooc fan work. However, it is this ooc version of the theatrical series that has won high scores of 9.0 and 9.1 in Douban, and has always had a high reputation among anime fans. So today we will start with the theatrical version of Oshii Mori to understand this grandfather-level cyberpunk anime.
Oshii Mori supervised the Shell Theater Edition has three parts, namely the Shell Mobile Team Theater Edition (1995), the Shell Mobile Team 2: Innocence (2004), and the Shell Mobile Team 2.0 (2008), of which The Shell Mobile Team 2.0 is a remake of the 1995 theatrical version, only the screen has changed, and the plot is basically the same. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence ends with the 1995 theatrical version, which sets off a whole new story based on this setting.
Although the characters in the theatrical version are significantly different from the original, they adopt the same world view setting. The shell-piercing worldview is the foundation of its expression of the essence of cyberpunk culture and deserves to be described in detail. The story is set in 2029, and the high level of technological development has made it possible for communication terminals to be implanted directly into the human body, and the human body and mind can now interact directly with standard computers and networks. These implantable components eventually developed into electronic brains and various artificial limbs and organs. Almost all humans have been modified, differing only in degree—some limbs or the whole body, except for the brain. The boundary between man and its integration into the body of righteousness has gradually blurred, and whether it has a "ghost" (the original setting word, which can be simply and crudely understood as a soul) has become the criterion for distinguishing between man and machine. To be more extreme, an all-man-made prosthesis, controlled by programs, is the machine AI, and entering ghost becomes a human. However, how to define ghost is a philosophical question when pondered.
For this kind of mechanical part that seems to have emotions, the heroine Suzi once asked, "Thinking that there will be ghost in the chariot?" ”
In such a situation where the human brain can connect with the external network, the human brain has undoubtedly become an object that can be hacked by hackers like ordinary computers. In the case of being hacked, the personality of the whole person, including past memories and personal physical judgments, will be completely at the mercy of hackers. In order to combat this terrible form of crime, the Ministry of the Interior specially appointed Daisuke Arama as the minister and formed a secret special unit headed by Sōsa Kusanagi, the Nine Lessons of Public Security, nicknamed the Ghost in the Shell. Incidentally, according to the official statement, this word should be the qiao (four sounds) of the shell, not the ke (one sound) of the shell that was widely circulated before. Of course, these things are actually not important, and it is good to express them clearly
The first theatrical version of the story revolves around a mysterious hacker named "Puppet Master". In the process of tracking down the hacker, the heroine of the Ninth Lesson of Public Security, Suzi keeps seeing things that do not exist, but things that exist will be ignored, and even the memory has begun to be confused. This is precisely because the social society caused by science and technology is highly developed, so that hackers can invade the inside of the human shell and cause terrible consequences. As the tracing progressed further, the Nine Lessons of Public Security were surprised to find that the hacker was not any individual or even an organization, but a piece of code on the Internet. Subsequently, the Nine Lessons of Public Security facilitated the setting of traps on the Internet and reality to round up the puppet master, and successfully forced the puppet master who was wandering on the network into a righteous body and arrested him.
The beautiful puppeteer, or his temporary prosthetics
In the process of talking to the puppet master, the rethinking of the concepts of memory, reproduction, thought, etc. makes Suzi begin to wonder about the definition of life. Just when the Ninth Lesson of Public Security was thinking about the method of handling the puppet master, it was raided by a team: because the puppet master's procedure was a code for manipulating human beings conspired between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Sixth Lesson of Public Security and the technology company, they wanted to erase this stain and must not let him seek political asylum. Suzi and her comrade-in-arms Bart flee with the puppet master. The puppet master proposed to merge with Suzi, because as a piece of code, he could only copy himself, but could not achieve true reproduction that could produce diversity, and he hoped to merge with Suzi to achieve complete completion. Seeing that the pursuing soldiers are about to catch up, Suzi's desire to discover the meaning of soul and life makes her strongly want to insert her consciousness into the puppet master's mind to find out, so even though her comrade-in-arms Bart repeatedly reminds that this may contaminate the electronic brain, Suzi still links herself to the puppet master.
With the help of the interface behind the brain, it is possible to dive into the depths of consciousness
Bart struggled to resist the pursuit of the pursuing soldiers, and the opponent's sniper rifle was already aimed at Suzi and the puppet master. The gunshot sounded, and one bullet shattered the puppet master's head, and the other bullet only hit Suzi's neck due to a slight shift, and her head rolled to the side- but Suzi's consciousness had just entered the puppeteer's mind at the time of the link, and at this moment, was there really Suzi in this skull?
The image reappears in the field of vision, and in the lens is a girlish suzi. Bart explains that this is the only prosthesis he can find on the black market for the time being (i.e., not to satisfy his particular proclivities). And Suzi, or the puppeteer, or a new individual who is very different from both, she just walks to the top of the building, overlooking the huge city, and the infinite network world that is wider than the city.
Genuine Lori is a royal sister
The second theatrical version that followed only inherited the special state of the heroine Suzi at the time of the first part's basic setting and ending, and was relatively independent in plot, telling the story of Bart's pursuit of the murder of the sex service robot. Since the plot has quite a lot of complexity, and is not as full of monologue philosophical discussion as the previous one, it is recommended that you watch it for yourself. In addition, the graphics of this one are quite an improvement over the previous one, and although it was a work from 2004, it still seems that it can easily surpass most animations today. Unlike the first part, which is philosophically prominent but somewhat lengthy in plot, the second part is excellent in terms of graphics, plot, soundtrack, and depth, and it will have a fairly good experience even if it is not considered to be an ordinary movie even if it is not considered by its ideological core. Therefore, I will personally evaluate the second part higher, and I sincerely hope that everyone can enjoy such excellent works together.
As a film from more than ten years ago, its picture is really exquisite and delicate to be incredible
On the whole, Oshii's Ghost in the Shell Theatrical Edition makes a profound discussion of many philosophical issues such as the existence of man, the definition of life, and what is the source of matter and consciousness, and its depth of thought is an important factor in making the work offered to the altar. However, this inevitably leads to the work making some people feel drowsy, and even seem a little confused (for example, in the original work, it is not me who simply said words such as mind or consciousness, but mentioned a puzzling "ghost"). The Hollywood adaptation of ghost in the shell attempts to remove these disadvantages and tell a pure Hollywood-style revenge story, but the self-righteous "for the sake of the audience" film did not succeed. The reason is that it is precisely that part of the thinking about the positioning and direction of people in the case of extremely developed technology that makes this work an unavoidable classic when talking about cyberpunk culture.