Ghost in the Shell frightfully good - July 9, 2007

In gloomy suburban basements across North America, millions of geekboys are in cyber-heaven right now. And I say that with respect for this subterranean cult, whose members are usually hardcore fans of Japanese anime. The cause for celebration is the new DVD release of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society. A convoluted title, all right, but, in the world of anime, the title Ghost in the Shell is gold. The franchise started with anime legend Mamoru Oshii's origi-nal 1995 film, continued with two segments of the Stand Alone Complex TV series in the 2000s and then moved to Oshii's 2004 feature film sequel, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. Now the story culminates in this latest feature, directed by Kenji Kamiyama, who also directed the 2002 Stand Alone Complex series and therefore knows Oshii's peculiar and very particular future shock world intimately. All the films use a digital, industrialized, geometric style of animation. In Japan, the new film Solid State Society is a mega-manga hit. It was on top of the box office race when it was released there last fall; it is now touted as the best-selling DVD. The move to North America this month gives the film even more credibility as an anime blockbuster. Mainstream audiences in Canada and the United States usually think of commer-cial animation as kids cartoons or snappy Disney-Pixar films. That has always been a good thing with Pixar, so I am not criticizing their artistic creations. The point is that the fare is usually upbeat and humorous with plenty of happy endings, so it falls into the family film category. There is a much darker world to be explored in the anime of Ghost in the Shell. It is so not kids' stuff. It is Philip K. Dick territory. It is incredi-bly challenging. Viewers need to be attentive, open to mysteries, able to follow a myriad of parallel plots lines and not be afraid of blood (even animated vio-lence and viscera can be shocking). There is some sexualized material in Ghost in the Shell: A hospitalized man in the new film has a fetish for nurses in revealing outfits that suggest an orgy more than a get-well program. And one of the key characters, maverick su-per-agent Major Motoko Kusanagi, is a bombshell when not cloaked in her long overcoat. But Ghost in the Shell is very tame, unlike some truly pornographic anime. It is not about sex, it is about a state of being in a future world living on the edge of chaos. Like all anime, it originated in adult comic books called manga. The Japanese characters all have Caucasian features and the females have huge round eyes. Oshii once told me it is because, in post WWII society, Japanese were dealing with self-hatred and manga artists expressed that in visual terms, a traditional that continues now through habit. As a storyline, Solid State Society is concerned with action, warfare and terrorism, with a philosophical, existential and meditative bent. Any connec-tions between the original Ghost in the Shell and The Matrix series are abso-lutely not coincidental -- and Oshii's opus came first. INTRIGUE The story in Solid State Society is set in 2034, two years after the Major has left the state police force's Public Security Section 9. There are suicides, mass child abductions, peculiarities with elderly heathcare technologies, con-spiracies, political intrigue, computer hacking and viruses, corporate corrup-tion and interpersonal issues involving our favourite Ghost in the Shell charac-ters, from the Major to moody Batou. The production values in this $3.2 million US film are high quality. Charac-ters move smoothly. Action scenes are spectacular. Yet the human element is al-ways keenly felt, paradoxical because some characters are part machine. In this era, it is challenging to discern between human and cyborg. On DVD, there are two choices, both widescreen-only. One is the conventional release, which contains the film -- in both the original Japanese with optional subtitles or in a good English dub -- and limited extras. The other choice, the Limited Edition, is classy, arriving in a beautiful metal box with three discs. One is the main film -- also in either Japanese or English but with a DTS audio option in each case -- plus greatly expanded ex-tras. A third disc is a CD, Yoko Kanno's cyberpunk soundtrack. This is the one for the geekboys.