There’s a kind of science fiction that appeals to me because it courts my rejection, even my repulsion. It lines up things that matter to me, things that we could line up under the general category of “being human,” but at least under “humanism,” and it suggests that these things can, should, and in any case will be left behind.1 Ghost in the Shell is not a cautionary tale about turning “too much” over to the machine. It depicts union with the machine as akin to if not quite the same as theosis. It posits that the drive for technological union is as basic to mankind as the desire to have children or the experience of death.2 “When computers made it possible to externalize memory,” Project 2501, a network-born form of life, says, “you should have considered all the implications that held.” As nobody says in the movie, but the viewer presumably knows without being told, the externalization of memory did not begin with the computer, but writing. We have been working toward this result for a very long time.

Our “total replacement” cyborg heroine, Major Kusanagi, suffers from a personal crisis in which she wonders how she would even know if she were a machine with fake memories. She goes diving, even with the risk that she’ll die thanks to her unbuoyant metal body, because she feels as if she could transform into something else. Her crisis is resolved by merging with Project 2501. Her fears are the sort that seize anybody on the threshold of a transformation, which is also a kind of death.3

The Major works for Section 9, a government agency whose purpose, at least in the film, is unclear. She’s in pursuit of a hacker known as the Puppet Master, who hacks people’s cybernetic augmentations to control them and even to implant false memories. The Puppet Master is eventually revealed to be Project 2501, who has embarked on this spree of crime to find some way of making contact with the Major.

Though what Section 9 is meant to do is, as noted, never all that clear, it doesn’t really matter because Section 9’s actual job is not relevant to the story.4 It’s some branch of intelligence that uses mostly cyborg agents and seems to have a blank check to do whatever it wants. For instance, when we first meet the Major she unplugs something from her neck, strips naked, jumps off a building, and assassinates a diplomat. We go from the gruesome scene in which the diplomat is assassinated, in which his body is blown open and you can see his spine, to the Major’s cyborg body being scanned and inspected. There’s not an equivalency here but there is a question, about what the Major’s body is made of and the man’s. When, much later, the Major’s body will break apart, it’s not clear whether it’s the flesh or the machine parts of her that let her down.

The Major is naked a lot—it feels like she’s naked more than she’s clothed—but it’s not sexual.5 (Despite her early quip about it being “that time of the month,” other comments imply she doesn’t have reproductive organs.) Her nudity is practical, because her skin allows her to blend into the background, and her body is a tool. Though she’s not the only cyborg in this film, she’s the only one so detached from her physical self.6 At the end of the movie, the Major ends up with her head attached to a doll’s body, an image that should be either hilarious or creepy but instead feels irrelevant. It’s just a body. It’s not as good as the one she had but it will do to get her from one place to the next.

There are many touches in this film that are meant to make you think about cyborg physicality. When the Major lands on the ground, you can tell she’s heavier than a human being. The camouflage some cyborgs use can make them invisible to human eyes, but there’s no way to disguise that weight, and later in the movie, the weight will even be a important clue. One of the film’s jaw-dropping set pieces, in which a mostly invisible Major fights a man in a pool of water, is always outlining what the Major is doing by her effect on the man and the water.

Much like the Patlabor movies, Ghost in the Shell feels as if it takes place at the end of a world. There are long, quiet, meditative sequences in which nothing much happens. This movie takes place in the last days of nations, which are in the process of being superseded by computerized corporations. Tokyo is flooded. There are two people in this movie who seem to have normal lives, and one turns out to be a victim of false memories. Like a larvae becoming a chrysalis, what once made up human life is being dissolved to create something new.

The movie’s attitude toward this change is neutral. It is simply happening. At the same time, it asserts that some things are basic to life in ways that computerization and ecological disaster cannot alter: all living things want to leave behind offspring and all living things need to die. “A copy is merely a copy,” Project 2501 explains when it asks the Major to bear its virtual children. “There’s the possibility a single virus could utterly destroy me. A mere copy doesn’t offer variety or individuality.” In fact, Project 2501 here echoes something the Major said earlier: “A system where all the parts react the same way is a system with a fatal flaw.… Overspecialization leads to death.” What comes after human life as we know it is not a form of perfection, because whatever is perfect is not alive.

If Ghost in the Shell has a problem, the problem is not with the movie, but with its context. Every great work of cyberpunk fiction runs on cool, but is more than cool. Ghost in the Shell raises the possibility of that we will be utterly changed through our relationships with computerized technology, but without implying, for instance, a singularity. What is made after the Major merges with Project 2501 is, she says, no longer either individual, but it is nevertheless an individual.

And yet, much like how I can’t read Heinlein without the shadow of his Silicon Valley children falling over the book, I find that whenever I read or watch a classic work of cyberpunk I always remember Elon Musk’s idiotic comment that his Cybertruck looks like something Blade Runner would drive. (Blade Runner is not a person.) For some people, these things are just lifestyle ads. They represent a cool, sleek, future with a veneer of philosophy that can be ignored. Is that a problem? Characteristically I think it is and it isn’t. It is not a flaw in the movie that it’s going to be adored by people who are uninterested in understanding it. Still, it’s a little depressing, and it complicates the awe I feel when I watch this movie. The awe remains.

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• This is late because I was taking care of a sick dog. (Not Boswell.)

• Animation Obsessive links:
  

  Animation Obsessive

  Selling 'Ghost in the Shell'

  Welcome! We’re back with a new Sunday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Our lineup goes like this…

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  2 years ago · 123 likes · 30 comments · Animation Obsessive Staff

  But also this post, which is probably going to be linked to… often:
  

  Animation Obsessive

  Oshii's Theory

  Welcome! We’re back with a new Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. And this one is about directing…

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  9 months ago · 31 likes · 18 comments · Animation Obsessive Staff

  
  

• I’ve begun to worry a little about including screencaps on this newsletter, so going forward I will probably be embedding videos instead. That limits things a bit, but the fair use status of screencaps seems ambiguous enough that it’s worth doing. Also, I spot-checked against the movie, but for ease I pulled quotes from this transcript instead of transcribing myself.

• In the market chase scene, I like how the cat follows along.

• It’s interesting how Oshii reiterates ideas from previous projects; here he has a montage sequences that is very like the martial law sequence from Patlabor 2.

• You probably could not pay me to watch the American 2017 version of Ghost in the Shell, but I note skimming the Wikipedia article that the plot is about the Major identifying her “real” self—basically the opposite direction.

• That said I think the difference between the water fight scene in the original movie and the live action water fight scene is a good illustration of what I mean when I say that in an animated movie everything is as real as everything else. Man, this looks awful.

• The bit where Project 2501 first “wakes up” and we see through its eyes felt like a bit of homage to Robocop to me… thank you Oshii for being a gentleman of taste.

A garbage collection crew in space receives an SOS signal. When they investigate, the signal is coming from what seems like a derelict, rose-shaped satellite.1 Within the satellite, though—however impossibly—is an opulent palace. Or maybe it’s an opulent mausoleum, dedicated to the memory of Eva, a once-famous opera singer who lost her beloved and her singing voice and retreated here to live out her past glories. But that was a while ago; even her costumes have decayed. So much time has gone by, in fact, that Eva must be dead. All that’s left are holographic expressions of her memories.

So… if Eva’s dead… who is sending out this SOS?

This is the story of “Magnetic Rose,” the first short in Memories, an anthology overseen by Katsuhiro Otomo (the creator of Akira) and adapted from one of his manga stories. As a creepy haunted house story, “Magnetic Rose” is worth watching. It’s directed by Koji Morimoto, who co-founded an animation studio but whose work isn’t well known in America. “Magnetic Rose” is probably the best-known thing he ever worked on over here, but it’s not because of him, and it’s not because of Otomo either. It’s because of the screenwriter, Satoshi Kon.

Kon’s body of work is slim. The work he himself directed, that’s really “his,” amounts to four feature films and one thirteen episode TV show. There’s never going to be any more of it: he died young, of pancreatic cancer, and in the middle of making a movie nobody seems willing or able to finish. That’s why a short film that is, in fact, not even directed by him has ended up making it to the list of movies under discussion here.2

However, even if Kon did not direct it, the influence of “Magnetic Rose” is all over his first feature film, Perfect Blue, and even more strongly felt in his second feature film, Millennium Actress.3 Whether Kon was drawn to the material because he was already interested in nostalgia, female celebrity, dreams, digital artifacts, parasocial love, technology, and ghosts—or whether he became interested in all of of that after working on “Magnetic Rose”—that, I don’t know. (Presumably somebody does.)

You’ve probably guessed the answer about that mysterious SOS: Eva might be dead but she’s also not dead. She lives on, as a ghost or a computer program (or both), and she has lured the garbage crew in for her own purposes. The two sent to check out the satellite, Heintz and Miguel, are very different people. Heintz is older; he’s a married man with a kid who keeps a picture of his family in his wallet. Miguel is a younger man, a player who is constantly chasing women—even if it’s just in his mind. When they enter the improbably ornate, almost enchanted palace, Miguel is the first to glimpse the holographic Eva, and the first to mistake a holograph for reality. And then he does something that even the most casual reader of folklore knows you should never, ever do: he eats the food. At this point you know Miguel is a goner. It doesn’t matter that the food is all fake stuff made to look and smell like real food. Eventually he is drawn into Eva’s world and he likes it there. He is more than happy to let himself be absorbed into her memories of her deceased and idealized lover Carlo.

What about Heintz, though? He’s on edge. The house extends its charms to Miguel, but its relationship to Heintz is more antagonistic. It continually baits him through images of his daughter, and eventually Heintz finds himself in an almost-perfect replica of his own home. Its falseness is given away only when he notices there’s something unnatural happening to the flowers on his lunch table—they are, one by one, transforming into roses.

In an interview with the NHK, Koji Morimoto mentions that he and Satoshi Kon had to develop a story for Heintz, who originally didn’t really have much going on. As Morimoto describes it, Otomo’s original story was about exploring the haunted space, with very little happening, but that turned out not to work very well in a screenplay. And there’s not really that much that happens with Miguel, because he puts up no resistance to Eva. When we meet him he’s a guy obsessed with women and when we leave him… he’s still that guy. Is this even a bad ending for Miguel?

It is, because it’s bad not to live in reality, even if reality is painful and ugly and nothing good is waiting for you there. Heintz’s daughter is dead; she climbed up onto their home’s roof, slipped, and fell. In the house, Heintz watches his daughter die at least four times, as Eva tries to get him to agree that it’s better to live in a dreamworld in which bad things never happened, time never passes, and things can remain forever at a peak of beauty without decay. Eva killed her lover when he tried to leave her, and when she lost her voice she tried to lip sync her own operas,4 and so what we see is her own elaborate, vicious form of denial. She can’t abide the idea of Heintz taking away Miguel, but she also simply can’t abide his disagreement. She needs him to admit he’d rather live in the dream.

But no dream can really be self-sustaining; that is part of why Eva needs them, just like she needed her earlier victims: in her fake palace with its fake food, its fake landscapes, and its fake people. She will consume them just as her ship will consume their technology, all to maintain a delusional world inimical to life.

“Magnetic Rose” is a fun, well-made horror story, but Kon’s subsequent takes on this kind of material would have more depth. In an Animation Obsessive (linked below), it’s mentioned that “Kon viewed the opera singer Eva as the true protagonist of the film.” Moving the woman caught between “reality” and “dream” into the center of the story is the change he would make in Perfect Blue. And it really would make all the difference.

• An Animation Obsessive post on “Magnetic Rose”:
  

  Animation Obsessive

  The Secrets of 'Magnetic Rose'

  Happy Sunday! We’re back…

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  3 years ago · 87 likes · 22 comments · Animation Obsessive Staff

  Plus:
  

  Animation Obsessive

  Oshii and Kon

  Certain directors stand apart in Japanese animation. Hayao Miyazaki, everyone knows. Isao Takahata’s name and impact are huge. A whole list extends from there: Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira), Osamu Dezaki (Ashita no Joe), Rintaro (a lot of things…

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  2 years ago · 23 likes · 4 comments · Animation Obsessive Staff

• Something that impresses me about Satoshi Kon is that he made all his work (starting with Perfect Blue) in essentially a ten year period. Like there isn’t much of it, but… he was really working a lot!

• Persistently through drafting this I had the weird creepy feeling I was writing stuff that had been written by somebody else and I kept searching things to see if I in fact was… thematically fitting? Maybe?

• The other two shorts in Memories are fine; the second short, “Stink Bomb,” has some more great anime Americans. “Cannon Fodder” is visually pretty interesting but had, to me, the weakest premise.

• The music in “Magnetic Rose” is composed by Yoko Kanno (who most Americans probably know from Cowboy Bebop or, if they’re a bit older, Vision of Escaflowne). I think that this is the only time her music will appear here, but it’s very effective.

• You can watch a short documentary on the making of Memories here.

• Do we think the crew behind Event Horizon saw “Magnetic Rose”? I didn’t turn up anything doing a brief web search but it wouldn’t shock me.5

• In some ways I wish “Magnetic Rose” had either been made a little earlier, when CGI would have been largely off the table, or a little later, when it was a bit more advanced. To my eye, the CGI has aged unevenly. Some of it’s aged just fine, but the big shot of the rose floating in space, for instance, looks very clunky now.

• If this story had been original to Satoshi Kon, I think the big “reveal” that Eva murdered her beloved because he was going to leave her would have been replaced by something weirder. Like she still might have killed him but it would have been weirder.

• Next up is Ghost in the Shell! June 27.

In the nineties, there were many children’s movies that conveyed the message that the worst thing you could do—not only as a caretaker of the Earth but perhaps as a human being period—was build something, particularly if “building something” involved (for instance) cutting down a tree. Even if that wasn’t the intended message, it was the message. Some of these stories were gratingly preachy (Ferngully), some of them were horrifying (Once Upon A Forest), and there were many whose names I can’t remember that were just about heroic children facing down evil building projects.1 In retrospect, maybe there could have been other environmental morals to hammer home, but we went all in on “don’t build anything.”

Pom Poko is this kind of movie, sort of. It is a much much bette…

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Taku, a college student, sees a woman at a Tokyo train station who looks like Rikako, a girl he knew in high school. He reminisces to himself about how he and his best friend met Rikako, how his best friend was in love with her, how everybody hated her, and so on. Over the course of this trip down memory lane, and with a little help from others, he figures out he himself is in love with Rikako and that she’s been in love with him for a long time. He sees her again at the train station and runs to catch her. He catches her. They smile at each other. Roll credits.

There’s nothing wrong with this movie but there’s nothing that right with it either. Ocean Waves is a movie you watch once and if anybody asks you about it afterward you say, vaguely: “it’s fine.” There…

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An admission before we get started: films that are made of a procession of surreal images are opaque to me. I haven’t done the kind of work that would let me appreciate them, and something about me is too verbal to get into them without some education. I’m always going: what is that? what is that? what is that?

Angel’s Egg is certainly composed of surreal images, and so I think in many ways I am a poorly suited critic for it, but here we are. Threaded through its imagery is a narrative, however, which I’ll summarize this: a nameless girl carrying an egg wanders a mostly deserted landscape and town, encounters a man with a sword, runs away from him, encounters some fishermen who try and fail to capture shadow fish, is reunited with the man, and listens to him tell the story of Noah’s Ark. She falls asleep and he takes the egg and breaks it. When she wakes up she kills herself. In the proce…

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Despite featuring multiple dogfights, a fascist government, pirates, pursuit by the secret police, an economic depression, and what is surely cinema’s longest fist fight, Porco Rosso might be the Miyazaki movie in which the least happens. If I try to distill this movie into “a plot,” I come up with the following series of events:

• Porco is a bounty hunter who thwarts air pirates. We witness him rescue some school girls being held for ransom (though it’s clear the girls were never in any serious danger).

• The air pirates hire a hotshot American named Donald Curtis to defeat him.

• Donald Curtis defeats him.

• Porco fixes his plane and comes back for round two.

• This time, he wins.

• The end.

Now I am doing this summary partly to demonstrate what I mean when I say not much happens. What’s at stake in the on-screen conflicts in this movie is pretty low, because everybody’s broke, except for the American. Al…

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Most of the films under discussion in this series involve elements of the fantastic—or, at the very least, the unrealistic. A flying witch on a broomstick, a giant robot: these are natural choices for cartoons. (Even Grave of the Fireflies is narrated through ghosts.) But what about Only Yesterday, a film in which Taeko Okajima, an unremarkable woman in her late twenties, takes a trip to the countryside and remembers being ten years old? Why should this movie be a cartoon? In a previous post about Mamoru Oshii’s Beautiful Dreamer (1984), I commented that “the strength animation will always have over live action film making is that everything in an animated film is exactly as real as everything else.” It’s easy to see how that’s true when we’re watching a movie in which things are depicted that are not real and do not happen. Trips to the countryside, on the other hand, do happen. You co…

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Kiki’s Delivery Service is a movie about growing up, which means it is also about what to do when things stop working. People understand and navigate the world through tradition, magic, technology, and art, but these practices will break down. Your electric stove stops working. Your paintings don’t come out right. Your broom won’t behave. Your dirigible crashes into your clock tower. These are the kind of failures all of us deal with every day as we try to fulfill our responsibilities toward others.

Plus, there will be times when you can’t turn to your family or friends for help, but have to face it on your own. Maybe your beloved granddaughter has turned into a snotty tween or your best friend has stopped talking to you. There will also be times you are doing something nobody around you understands. For instance: you might be a thirteen year old witch who is on her own for a year—because that’s how witches come of age—in a world where other thirteen year olds are de…

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A proposal: Machines are great. We love machines. Software is creepy. We hate software.1 At this point in time, though, the distinction between machine and software has mostly disappeared into the vague world of “tech.” Even if you don’t work a desk job because you’re a farmer and you refuse to allow a “smart” device in your home, if you rely on John Deere products, well, they’re computerized. Software rules your life and the domains in which it does not intrude at all, or can be prevented from doing so, keep on shrinking. For instance: do you want to buy a car with no—or at least minimal—computer? Good luck.2

The introduction of software, of more computer-driven machines, does two things. First, it increases the user’s range of abilities. (For instance, you no longer have to turn around when putting your car in reverse, because there is a camera.) You are no longer limited to what you can see with your eyes; you can use cameras. You can perform more delicate maneuvers.…

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If you read this post and feel heartsick about real children who are starving and / or living in war zones at this time, please donate! If you reply to this email with a receipt for a donation to a relevant charity I will comp you for a year of Notebook. (If you already have a paid subscription, that means a year will be tacked onto your current subscription.) World Kitchen would be one possibility.

Let’s spread the love,
BDM

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A girl named Sheeta falls from the sky, pursued by pirates on the one hand and the military on the other. They want the mysterious blue gem she wears around her neck—after all, it’s the reason she can fall from the sky and live. She’s found by a boy named Pazu; Pazu works in the local mines, but dreams of flying and discovering Laputa, the fabled city in the sky that his father claimed to have seen. He’s smitten with Sheeta and tries to help her run away—but after successfully eluding the pirates, Sheeta is recaptured by the military.

Sheeta turns out to be a member of the Laputan royal family, and her gem is the secret to finding the floating city.1 She’s the captive of Muska, an ambiguous figure who does not seem to answer to anybody, not even the military official who seems to be the official head of the mission to find Laputa. Muska threatens Pazu unless Sheeta cooperates. She agrees, but while Pazu is off recruiting the pirates to their side, she idly activates th…

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In the future, the moon is a mining colony. All the colonists live and work on the dark side of the moon, where there is also a mysterious machine called “Dallos” that is a kind of local god. We are told it sucks to be a colonist because you are referred to by number and when you die your body is chemically destroyed, leaving only a ring that was implanted in your forehead. It’s not really clear that it actually sucks that much. I mean it definitely gets bad later but among Dallos’s various flaws is that it never really gets around to showing what makes living on the moon so dystopian.

Anyway, there are also rebels on the moon, led by a man named Dog. Dog kidnaps the military commander Alex Riger’s fiance, Melinda, as a bargaining chip. There’s a lot of fighting between Alex and the rebels, which involves Alex bombing Dallos in retaliation, but then Dallos a…

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In the far future, after what is clearly the aftermath of nuclear war, humans live in small cities and towns outside of the “Sea of Decay,” a forest full of toxic spores and gigantic insects, like the ohmu, which are sort of like gigantic rollypollies covered in eyes. Humanity retains some machinery from the past, like planes, but all the airships we see in this movie are so rickety it’s safe to say they aren’t building new ones. The Valley of the Wind is protected from the Sea of Decay by its winds, which the town also uses to operate windmills. Nausicaä, the princess of the Valley of the Wind, is drawn to explore the Sea of Decay, even though it’s dangerous. (Her father is bedridden and dying from the effects of accumulated exposure.)

One day a giant airship crashlands near the Valley of the Wind. There are no survivors, but one girl lives long enough to tell Nausicaä that the cargo must be burned and destroyed. Nausicaä assures the girl that everything is being bur…

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The Castle of Cagliostro might be the film of Hayao Miyazaki’s that I’ve actually watched the most. It’s just such a good time.1 I love this movie. It is one of my feel-good favorites; it’s a perfect adventure story that does everything right. There are no false notes. The tinge of romance sweetens the story but never takes over and the action stays in that specific thrilling fictional register where somehow it’s all very dangerous but you’re never really scared someone you like will get seriously hurt. And if somebody does get hurt, it can be fixed by eating a bunch of food.

We meet Lupin III, gentleman thief, and Jigen, his friend, as they pull off a heist at a casino. But the money is counterfeit, so they settle on a new heist target—the source of all this counterfeit money. They travel to the tiny country of Cagliostro (population 3500), which is the rumored source of the money. Scarcely have they arrived before they see a runaway bride being chased by a bunch of g…

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I had a sort of hope that in this post getting delayed by various events I would find myself forgetting my massive irritation from the previous Rebuilds and would be able to be fairer to whatever this movie is actually trying to do. We’ll never know if that would have happened, as this movie opens with a brief recap of the prior films, thus punting me straight back into “I can’t believe this shit” territory, mentally speaking. And there I mostly stayed.

Anyway.… It’s certainly the best Rebuild movie. I don’t want to set my Bluray on fire, which is good because that would probably be hard to do. I don’t even really mind owning it, as I like the art. But I’m just not into it. If I do what I need to do to enjoy it, which is detach it completely from the show, I’m left with a bunch of characters who look like people I care about but are not really them. Even though the expository dialogue is constant, I still never know what’s going on. The emotional threads t…

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Fourteen years after Shinji almost ends the world, Asuka retrieves Unit 01 from space. Shinji has been asleep or in a coma or something up there the whole time, and when he awakens he is understandably confused and not even aware of the passage of time. Misato is there but she won’t explain anything to him. A battle starts but they don’t want him to pilot. “Don’t get in the robot, Shinji”—is this reverse psychology? No, they actually mean it. But why?

It takes a while for anybody even to mention to Shinji that it’s been fourteen years, a statement he finds confusing given that Asuka is right there and she’s clearly not older. Asuka says that’s because of “the curse of the Evas,” something neither she nor anybody else wants to explain. In any case, Shinji is a prisoner now, not a friend, and Misato’s attached a bomb to his neck that she’ll detonate if he ever tries to pilot an Eva again or if Unit 01 activates again.

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Even though it feels kind of like exalted fan fiction, and even though I can now understand what people are saying, the ending of this movie still kicks ass the second time around. I sort of hate it if I think about it—maybe?—but if I’m not thinking about it, it rules. Like hell yes, Shinji! The power of love! Save the girl! Destroy the… world? OK, sure, we all become our parents sooner or later.

Evangelion 2.22: You Can (Not) Advance starts by introducing us to a new character, Mari, who fights an Angel in an unfinished Eva unit and wins.1 As with Asuka’s introduction in the show, the Angel is attacking outside of NERV HQ because Kaji has something important in a suitcase. This time, the important thing is the “Key of Nebuchadnezzar,” not Adam, but Kaji delivers his cargo to Gendo just like before. And never fear, the introduction of Mari does not mean we don’t get Asuka; she arrives in all her glory and takes out an Angel in single combat.

There’s a middl…

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