Philosophy of Ghost in the Shell (2012)
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The anime has some problems; namely pacing and the density of narrative. There are two episodes dedicated exclusively to exposition with no action, and they can be really hard to follow due to the mediocre translation. But if you can see past the very real flaws, there is a gem of a story about the nature of what it means to be human in a connected society.
I wouldn't call those problems, in that those are the hallmarks of the entire Ghost in the Shell franchise: relatively slow pacing, extreme density of information/concepts, and lots of exposition. If you're getting into a GitS work either you accept those and enjoy it or you don't and have a bad time. It's like saying Naruto has too much fighting.
Otherwise, I completely agree about Stand Alone Complex, and to me Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GIG was even better. It's astonishingly prescient, it seemed to absolutely nail how the 2016 election would go down to having a Steve Bannon figure who uses manipulates the media and intelligence information to achieve his goals.
I still think the show is worth watching despite those issues. It's easily my favorite anime series (also agree that 2nd Gig is the better half of the show; they're only separated because of how anime was funded in blocks of 26 episodes in the early 2000s).
The show is divided into 2 types of episodes; about half are one-shot episodes that are only loosely referenced by the main story arc (but they usually explore an interesting theme). If you watch the episodes in the order they were released it can be hard to follow the overall plot.
(For German readers I recommend the German sub, the used the same people who dubbed the Stargate series which did a really good job in both cases.)
That being said the English dub is pretty good too.
Unless SAC is one of those incredibly rare pieces of Japanese animation where the voices were recorded prior to the animation being completed, the Japanese voiced version is just as much a dub as the English version.
>https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dub>dub verb (2)
>dubbed; dubbing
>Definition of dub
>(Entry 4 of 5)
>transitive verb
>1 : to add (sound effects or new dialogue) to a film or to a radio or television production —usually used with "in"
>// They dubbed in the music.
But for my money, I think GitS has been one of the most prescient pieces of futurology. It's depiction of the impact of omnipresent telecommunications and technology on society is eerie.
Comparing this element alone with the nature of the 2017 Hollywood film really has helped me identify so many other similar events in media where I previously would have struggled to pinpoint why I felt certain responses to something I watched.
The most recent example being the comparison of the pacing of The Mandalorian with The Rise of Skywalker.
She even has a line towards the end of the SAC:SSS movie that says something like "next time you meet me I might be a completely different person". But there is indeed a "base" personality that she tries to hold on to (e.g. via her watch) despite the wide range of memories she acquires.
What separates the Stand Alone Complex from normal copycat behavior is that there is no real originator of the copied action, but merely a rumor or an illusion that supposedly performed the copied action."
"...A key point is that due to the electronic communications network that is increasingly permeating society, more and more people are being exposed to the same information and stimuli, making the overall psyche and responses of large groups of people increasingly similar, the result being that the potential increases exponentially for copycat behavior that forms a Standalone Complex. There is no original Laughing Man, no leader. Everyone is acting on their own, yet a coherent whole emerges. There are people who employed the copycat behavior before others, but what started the coherent whole is indefinitive."
> "[...] You exercise your right to "freedom" and this is the result. All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems. Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in "truth." [...]
The full version is something like 20 minutes long, but basically the AI argues that digital communication leads to the decentralization of 'truth' and that the solution is employ narrative shaping algorithms against the general public.
GITS is an absolutely brilliant ode to emergence and second order effects.
>we may have access to the same information flows but everyone has their own bubble, typically part of an ideological camp.
Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no original, or that no longer have an original.
The original is more of a love letter to technology [SPOILER] and ends with the first merge of human and AI in to something new [/SPOILER] (it's not about technophobic humans policing the bad runaway machines).
American live action Death Note was the same: I was hopeful since they cast Willem Dafoe and he's usually in good stuff, but no, it was also pretty bad. It seems like American film companies are just trying to capitalize on the popularity of anime without grokking what made the best anime great.
J. J. Abrams is the living embodiment of this approach, which is why his Star Trek and Star Wars movies look gorgeous and individual scenes are awe inspiring, and the overarching story arcs are all fantastic on paper, but the world building and and actual in-world logic of the setting or character decisions in it just don't make any sense whatsoever. Zack Snyder is just as bad.
But now they've devolved into beautiful looking action movies which exist just for the sake of action, with the story being secondary.
Both films mentioned were commercial successes, but I think in the long run they burned audiences for this sort of film. I won't see any more American remakes of anime for some time.
Don't bet on it. Also the live action Akira is currently on hold, but Taika still seems keen to do it.
The other American live-action remakes mentioned were profitable, but by much more narrow margins. If what people are saying about it being truer to the source material is true, then it seems that producing better remakes does in fact produce greater profits. We only have a narrow data set to look at for this, though.
I really don't know what a live action Akira would look like. The body horror scenes are going to have to be CGI, which could go really badly.
I’d probably suggest Rurouni Kenshin (Samurai X) or Gundam Zeta instead. They have interesting themes, are more adult and have amazing art.
The Patlabor TV show is definitely much lighter material, a lot more accessible to children.
I think maybe it's the high-concept, almost frightening, aspects of GITS that resonated with me. But I understand why it's not popular with most people.
Obligatory Patlabor 2 opening title sequence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsMTpSDAGxM
Patlabor is slow, sure, and purposefully so (it has and deserves the reputation as being the "boring" mecha show), but cheezy? I haven't seen the TV show which I hear is a lot more comic, but I wouldn't call the original OVA/first 2 movies cheezy.
Wikipedia link (warning: spoilers ahoy): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_Agent
NGE can be philosophically heavy at times but is too diluted by its action sequences and fan service moments.
The first GITS movie is a philosophical tour de force and a piece of art that transcends time. A masterpiece.
It may also be that a lot of anime are series, and require a time investment.
The only other (comparable) anime that jumps to mind and something I can definitely recommend to you, is Serial Experiments Lain.
Also, just the psychological warfare aspect of having a military tank with an adorable personality is great.
http://web.archive.org/web/20180514064448/http://ghostinthes...
Looks like the following is the original author. They mention it on their portfolio page:
Thankfully, the Wayback Machine preserved it.
Incidentally, to the degree there's irony here, archive.org's modification of the content seems more relevant than it's deletion. Forgotten isn't wrong, it's just forgotten.
If there is a serious issue with an article, then fine, quarantine it or somehow set it aside. But to remove a well-written, well-cited and interesting article for dubious reasons really seems unnecessary. Maybe if they had incorporated it into the regular article on GiTS, it would make sense. But there is zero mention of the philosophical content:
There have been a lot of articles deleted over the years. There was a great porn purge where they removed a ton of porn stars and history of pornography unless topics were considered noteworthy. The linked article probably didn't have enough sources or too much original research.
Honestly, the first thing you should look at with any current or controversial article is the Talk Page .. and the history on the talk page. It's often way more useful and has current theories that may not have the best sources.
There is also Deletionpedia, but honestly archive.org is probably a better bet for deleted articles. Deletionpedia didn't really get started until a lot of stuff had been purged, and it still has a lot of gaps.
Character pages were deleted in bulk even when they were properly sourced, individual episodes pages were all merged together.
Administrators and moderators are pushing all this stuff to Wikia/Fandom, the sister project that is riddled with advertisement, user tracking and bad design.
I wonder if the people removing articles on fictional works are moving it to Wikia by themselves.
A similar article might stand if it had good citations for literally every phrase, but this article doesn't have that, it looks like original work.
Mildly irritating
https://web.archive.org/web/20120224113551id_/https://en.wik...