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Comment by Shinchy | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what others are saying, I re-watched Ghost in the Shell again recently and I had forgotten just how brilliant it is. There is something pure about it that you just don't find in modern anime, something that really resonated.

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Every part of GiS has been, per article "endlessly ripped off, referenced and remixed". Whatever one liked about original GiS, there's a derivation out there that turns dial to 11 and makes the original feel basic in retrospect. But that's testimony to GiS greatness.

I watched The Shining for the first time in around 2012 and when commenting to an older friend about it I said something to the effect of "It's good, but I didn't feel it was exceptional." to which he replied saying that "Yes, but consider that it was the first real film of that genre, it only seems "okay" today because you're comparing to all the films of the same genre which came after and were largely influenced by it."

I don't know enough about films to know that if he said was accurate, but it's stuck with me.

I was about 16 when The Matrix came out and I find it interesting asking people who were born after it came out what they think about it, if they've seen it their reaction is typically (much like me with The Shining) "seemed alright", while for me at the time the movie was phenomenal and in terms of many of its special effects, unlike anything I had ever seen before.

There are a number of films: The Matrix, the original Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Avatar, I’m sure many others that were just so different and jaw-dropping in many ways when they first came out—in those cases because of effects of various types mostly—that it can be hard to appreciate their novelty at the time.

Some stand up better than others.

Citizen Kane, Casablanca

Appreciating "modern" before modern times requires taking the production date into context and being aware of what contemporary media was doing.

Unfortunately, the entire reason you're watching famous media decades later is because contemporary media is comparatively boring.

F.ex. How many people who have seen Citizen Kane have seen Louisiana Purchase? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1941_in_film

Those are two of my favorite films. But Citizen Kane was largely unique as opposed to a precursor of a type. And Casablanca just put everything together in a package that really wasn’t that distinct from plenty of other love stories set against a WWII backdrop on the surface.

To me, both Citizen Kane and Casablanca feel pretty revolutionary in editing, compared to what was prevalent at the time. But this has intrigued me to do some '41/42 comparisons.

In comparison to many of the lazy movies of today I find The Matrix still as jaw-dropping. Even the two sequels tried to push the envelope.

But the original one was just so brilliantly made

The matrix to some degree is inspired by Ghost in the shell .

There is a common trope about this very effect: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnceOriginalNowC...

The "Lord of the Rings" novel is that way too to anyone not steeped in fantasy. It might be hard to imagine for many people these days that "elves" and "dwarves" strictly meant children's fairytales before Tolkien. Magical rings, wizards, dragons with tunnels of gold ... seems so cliche now it is easy to see why someone would wonder what the big deal about Tolkien is.

Elves and dwarves didn't strictly mean children's fairy tales prior to Tolkien. There's plenty of semi-popular prior art where they feature, like the Worm Ouroboros or The King of Elfland's Daughter. Poul Anderson also published The Broken Sword the same year as LOTR, which shows a lot of the same influences as written by a very different author.

Tolkien's importance is that the specific kinds of creatures he wrote became the default for virtually all subsequent authors and the popularity/quality of the works were pivotal in establishing fantasy as a "proper" genre.

Plus Wagner's ring cycle.

same deal with neuromancer

I have to disagree with both. I help a colleague teach a class in which students often read necromancer, and it often has a deep impact on them. The cloned ninjas and laser weapons are uninteresting to them for the reasons mentioned above, but the Necromancer + Wintermute dynamic and central plot is fascinating to them.

I think it’s slightly different. Tolkein made fairy tales grow up, but people already had some familiarity with these things. Tolkien gave them a new way to think about those things.

Gibson’s strength was that he could describe—in an accessible way—concepts that were quite foreign to most people at the time.

Not the original GIS, but GIS: Standalone Complex is still one of the best examples out there of "realistic" special forces action scenes. A lot of screen time spent getting all the pieces into position, culminating in just a couple seconds of fast-paced action.

Any examples that make GiS inferior to a copycat?

Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex is much better. Movies don’t have enough time to tell the story when there’s a lot of political intrigue.

That something is acetate.

This is why I think Akira can't be surpassed. Not just because it was done on acetate, but because of the level of skill and consideration required to animate that way. You can't just undo that brush stroke onto the cel and try something else.

As much as technology has democratized the field, I think it also lowers the heights. I desperately hope I'm wrong and just old, but I haven't met someone who puts up something that they think is better. Maybe it's just because we're in the transitory phase - but digital animation has been around for decades at this point. Maybe it's Ikea versus handcrafting, and the shift is in the expected quality rather than the art elevating itself to meet priors.

Watch into the spider verse sometime if you want to see what modern tech can be when it’s fully unleashed, versus kept under budget.

I think the democratization means the heights won't be big-budget corporate things, they'll be on YouTube or Patreon.

Akira was a big budget corporate thing though. It's technical excellence came from having the budget to employ multiple highly skilled animation leads and hundreds of animators drawing hundreds of thousands of cells.

Conspicuously though Akira is a product of the manga industry and not the anime one. This is why it deviates from the norms in so many respects.

> You can't just undo that brush stroke onto the cel and try something else.

That's why you animate with pencil on paper first.

I think animation done in computers can be excellent, but is disadvantaged because computers make it easier to do thinks quick and cheap and the economics of animation incentivises taking that direction.

Redline is a rare example where I think it's done well.

> Redline is a rare example

Tekkonkinkreet

Akira is a cult classic and a pivotal point in anime - much more in the US than in Japan. If you don't know of a film surpassing it in skill and consideration in the thirty years since it was made it probably says more about your exposure to anime. Maybe it's just that Cyberpunk is less popular now and the big genres are of less interest to you.

The big genres of modern anime seem to predominantly be pandering to base weebs. Waifu shit meant to sell body pillows. Where is all the serious animation like Magnetic Rose at?

Eras that produce masterpieces are unsustainable.

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