#Kenji Kusanagi

[garadinervi]

Shinpei Kusanagi, 404 not found, (acrylic on canvas), 2024 [Altman Siegel, San Francisco, CA. © Shinpei Kusanagi. Photo: Kenji Takahashi]

Exhibition: Shinpei Kusanagi: ‘A view from a platform’, Altman Siegel, San Francisco, CA, March 21 – April 20, 2024

[omercifulheaves]

Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2002)

[sunlightfeeling]

TOKIO (Kusanagi Tsuyoshi Solo): Pop Up SMAP (2006)

[kinghijinx22]

Ghost in the Shell adaption tier list

The original manga would also be in Pretty good for me, good for what it is but the sillier tone of it is not why I fell in love with GITS and it's a little too horny for me. The Oshii films are masterpieces of psychological cyberpunk storytelling, philosophical discussion about identity and moody atmosphere. The Stand Alone Complex show is also phenomenal overall and occasionally peak but is a 2 season show so some of it is better then other parts, but it has the strongest characterization of the Major and the rest of section 9 and uses it's cyberpunk setting to explore political themes more. Solid State Society is the film for SAC so it's more of that. Arise is also pretty good in the same ways but doesn't feel quite as interesting in it's story and there's less of it which also goes for it's associated film, and also the SAC follow up 2045 which also has the below average 3D animation that does not look as good as the usually gorgeous 2D. The american live action one with the straight white woman playing a bi/pansexual Japanese woman that also completely misinterprets the themes of GITS to make a generic "technology bad" plot doesn't exist.

Made this because the new one that seems to be sticking closer to the original manga just got announced.

[morganhopesmith1996]

Rewatched the first Ghost in the Shell Film Last Night and it’s such an amazing film! And it looked amazing on this bluray!

[agendaculturaldelima]

#ProyeccionDeVida

🎬 “FANTASMA EN EL CAPARAZÓN” [Ghost in the Shell / Kokaku Kidoutai]

🔎 Género: Animación / Ciencia Ficción / Acción / Crimen / Robots / Película de Culto / Cyberpunk / Thriller Futurista

⌛️ Duración: 83 minutos

✍️ Guión: Kazunori Itô

📕 Manga: Masamune Shirow

🎼 Música: Kenji Kawai

📷 Fotografía: Hisao Shirai

🗯 Argumento: Año 2029, en la ficticia New Port City, una mujer robot policía -cyborg- Motoko Kusanagi investiga las siniestras actividades del misteriososo hacker/fantasma Puppet Master, supercriminal que está invadiendo las autopistas de la información. Los datos fluyen a través de redes corporativas y el cerebro puede recibir todo el flujo de información. Es en este universo, el comandante y su equipo deben combaten los delitos de ciberterrorismo y detener al maestro títiritero.

👥 Reparto en Voces: Motoko Kusanagi (Atsuko Tanaka, Mimi Woods), Batou (Akio Ōtsuka, Richard Epcar), Project 2501 (Tom Wyner, Iemasa Kayumi), Togusa (Kōichi Yamadera, Christopher Joyce), Daisuke Aramaki (William Frederick Knight, Tamio Ōki), Shiki-kan (Atsushi Gotō) y Daita Mizuho (Mitsuru Miyamoto).

📢 Dirección: Mamoru Oshii

© Productoras: Bandai Visual, Kodansha, Manga Video & Production I.G.

🌎 Países: Japón-Estados Unidos

📅 Año: 1995

📽 PROYECCIÓN:

📆 Sábado 17 de Agosto

🕗 8:00pm.

🎦 Cine Caleta (calle Aurelio de Souza 225 - Barranco)

🚶‍♀️🚶‍♂️ Ingreso libre

🙂 A tener en cuenta: Prohibido el ingreso de bebidas y comidas. 🌳💚🌻🌛

[infamous-empire]

So I watched The Sky Crawlers

Woo boy, this is gonna be a long one.

Alright, so I’ve been interested in Mamoru Oshi films for a long, long time. He’s one of the most acclaimed directors in the anime industry, and most of his films are highly-regarded masterpieces, so I’ve always had an interest in his work. Then I watched Ghost in the Shell and it didn’t do much for me, and I promptly lowered my expectations. Still, I was curious as to whether his other work was any better, and thankfully this one delivered

MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR THE ENTIRE MOVIE AHEAD

Firstly, there’s one thing I can’t help but talk about in regards to this film: the atmosphere. This film has one of the most immaculate vibes I’ve seen in anime, and that largely just comes down to how every single part of the film is built to convey it to near perfection. All of the characters, even the more lively ones, are more than a little apathetic with understated expressions, the sound design is subtle and tends to emphasize silence a lot of the time, Kenji Kawai’s musical score is just eerie & haunting.

Hell, even the shot composition supports this (and it should say something that this movie managed to make me catch on to something as subtle as shot composition), most of the scenes are framed in a way where the places they’re in feel empty and the characters seem utterly alone even when in places where there’s other people with them. And this is even further backed up by the fact that the film rarely, if ever, uses background extras, making even the more “crowded” scenes feel pretty empty compared to most anime.

All of this comes together to create a subtle feeling of haunting emptiness which permeates the entire film, a feeling which is perfectly complemented by the character writing. Now one of my biggest complaints with the last Oshii film I watched, Ghost in the Shell, was how barebones the character writing felt, making everyone feel so unenjoyably hollow, but Sky Crawlers manages to rectify this in two ways. The first being that it does feel like there’s a sense of personality to all the characters present, on the subtlest level, even the supporting characters have their own little quirks which set them apart, and the two main leads get some fantastic development, which I’ll get to in a moment.

The other thing I enjoyed about the character writing is how it took the dry hollowness of Oshii’s writing and actually made it a compelling part of the film. The main character, Kannami, is a bit bland on the surface, of the film’s primary characters, he’s by far the least emotive and expressive, always approaching everything with the same look of detached apathy and never seeming that interested even in the ongoing plot. However, this is all by design. He’s a Kildren, someone genetically engineered from birth to be eternally young and fight in this war forever. He has no past to speak of or future to look forward to, no loved ones to ground him or home to come back to, nothing to fight for or believe in. All he has is a robotic persistence to move forward in this war because that’s the only thing he’s ever known. And it’s that same hollowness which makes the film’s ending all the more poignant, he subtly grew to care and love over the course of the film, all climaxing when he finally had something to fight for and believe in at the very end. And even if he’s dead, his and what he fought for will continue forward through Kusanagi.

While I’m on the subject, I’mma also talk about the film’s other lead, Suito Kusanagi, since she’s by far the movie’s most interesting character. Throughout most of the film, she’s something of a mystery, she’s cold towards Kannami and we see bits & pieces of what she does without much understanding of her internal logic. We’re fed details about her one bit at a time and slowly come to understand her more and more in a way which is incredibly engaging for me. She’s a Kildren who’s survived longer than anyone could have predicted, driven to suicidal depression by the monotony of fighting a meaningless, repetitive war while living an empty, repetitive life. Despite her coldness, she’s the most emotional of the characters in the film, as it’s made clear she truly does care about those she fights with and has the most strong emotional moments of the film. And the ultimate resolution of her arc at the end, being inspired by Kannami’s drive to change things and seeing hope in the future for the first time in her life, is just beautiful.

One last thing about the character writing, having a strong backbone of characterization makes some of Oshii’s other writing quirks work a lot more for me, specifically the lengthy philosophical discussions. Mitsuya infodumping about the nature of the Kildren works really well since it also doubles as her having an existential crisis and being able to unload about it to someone for the first time to the point where she’s breaking down in tears by the end of it. Or Kannami philosophizing about the monotony of Kildren life near the end, which feels earned rather than forced since it followed up on almost two hours of him slowly coming to terms with the nature of his existence.

The fact that I’ve rambled about this film for paragraphs and paragraphs without even talking about the themes yet is a testament to its depth and attention to detail, but let's get on with it. Fundamentally, Sky Crawlers is a war film, but it’s also a commentary on the frustration of our generation and on the nature of war itself in relation to modern society. It’s about the monotony of living life in a world which increasingly drives you towards pessimism and depression. The Kildren are people who have no hope for the future, the overly commercialized society which created them to fight in their wars has stripped them of any chance of a life beyond war and exploitation by the megacorporations who built the infinite meat-grinder they have no choice but to fight in. And without anything to look forward to or dreams to strive for, how do you meaningfully mature and grow as a person? How do you meaningfully develop a sense of time or continuity when every day is the same and you can’t even form new memories because of that? And without memories of the past or dreams of the future, how do you even form a reliable sense of self? These questions are at the core of this film, and they make its ending all the more powerful to me: Kannami and Kusanagi do finally find some sense of resolution at the end of the road, when they each find hope that one day they’ll be able to change the system. It’s only when they find hope in tomorrow that they begin to truly move forward. And Kannami’s death only enhances this for me, an acknowledgement that trying to change the world and truly progress is nearly impossible, an insurmountable obstacle which few might ever be able to achieve, but it’s still worth trying, worth moving forward, regardless.

I’d also be remiss not to mention the tourist scene. A bunch of tourists come to the base and treat the war they’re fighting in like a team sport they use to entertain themselves from a distance, then proceed to offer shallow pity when one of the Kildren is shot down and dies in front of them, offering vague platitudes about “fighting for a peaceful world” that not even the Kildren believe in. It’s a truly biting commentary on the sensationalization of war in modern media and adds weight to Kusanagi’s words later when she talks about how War is necessary in society because the idea of ongoing conflict in the world makes people living in peace behind the lines feel good about themselves by emphasizing the importance of peace. Plus, the scene of Kusanagi calling out the tourists is a great moment for her

One last thing, I got a lot of enjoyment out of comparing this film to Eighty-Six, my second favorite anime, since there’s a lot of interesting similarities to dig into. Narratively speaking, both are about a class of people designated to fight in someone else’s war and how they cope with being born on the battlefield & having no future, as well as having one of the main characters being one of them who’s survived longer than everyone else. Both commentate on the relationship between war and peaceful society (hell, Kusanagi’s scene of calling out the tourists feels like something right out of 86), and both have some incredible CGI fight scenes.

Presentation-wise, the film was great. The 2D animation is masterfully crafted and brilliantly subtle, and the CGI, while PS2-tier, is honestly really well-integrated, so I didn’t get any uncanny valley feelings. The music is incredible, easily one of Kenji Kawai’s best soundtracks.

So, yeah, this film is a masterpiece and I loved every second of it

[roskirambles]

(Archive) Animated movie of the day(2): Ghost in the Shell (Kōkaku Kidōtai, 1995)

Originally Posted: January 8th, 2022 Now that we discussed a bit of Katsuhiro Otomo's cyberpunk epic let's go back for a bit to Mamoru Oshii. And keeping with the early to mid 90's wave of anime in America, let's talk about what many consider his magnun opus. It shares quite a few things with Akira: it's cult classic status, it's futuristic setting, the exploration of complex themes, being a source of inspiration for films like The Matrix and flat out being quite misunderstood by the some of the mainstream market. When people see Kaneda do that famous motorcycle slide or Major Motoko Kusanagi kick a criminal while invisible with water droplets in the air they're quick to think that movie's gonna be something high on style and prominently badass. That wasn't the case on Akira and it's specially not the case here.

This movie is slow paced, bordering on lethargic at points. While the art direction and animation are an absolute delight, a good chunk of the film is quiet, contemplative and simply letting the viewer think about the concepts it introduces. Concepts that, albeit in different form as they were shown and first thought back in the 90's, are today being discussed as the next potential step in the technological revolution. And this is nothing to say of it's philosophical discussion: this film has one of the most powerful, sobering and nightmarish scenes of existential angst and dread in anime history because of it's elaborate discussion on the concept of identity. The metaphysical value of the soul, whether the reality we experience is actually real, transhumanism, it just goes hard with the questions that many are afraid to ponder upon.

All of this is enhanced by the beautifully haunting score by Kenji Kawai, who deliberately made a mismatch of instrumentation and composition to illustrate the marriage of the organic with the mechanical. This is, once again, not a popcorn flick. It is, however, transfixing once it sinks it's teeth.

[selketshaula]

ダイナミック×Gガンろぐ by シャル

[garadinervi]

Shinpei Kusanagi, One and another, (acrylic on canvas), 2023 [Altman Siegel, San Francisco, CA. © Shinpei Kusanagi. Photo: Kenji Takahashi]

Exhibition: Shinpei Kusanagi: 'A view from a platform', Altman Siegel, San Francisco, CA, March 21 – April 20, 2024

[modernhybrid]

[skeletonfumes]

Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 (2020-2022)

[ultimateanna]

Album name: Ghost In The Shell - OST (1995)

Song name: Floating Museum

[sassyfishesandscorpios]

[morganhopesmith1996]

One of my fave songs off of the Ghost in the Shell Soundtrack (Besides Making of Cyborg).

[geekcavepodcast]

Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 Final Trailer

Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, a sequel to the Ghost in the Shell SAC series, is based on Shirow Masamune’s manga. The series is directed by Kenji Kamiyama and Shinji Aramaki. 

“In the year 2045, the world has entered a systematic “Sustainable War.” Hired as a mercenary unit, the former members of Japan’s elite Section 9 are faced with the sudden appearance of “Post-Human,” a being with tremendous intelligence and physical capabilities.” (Netflix)

Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 will release to Netflix on April 23, 2020.