Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex
The anime season has been particularly dry for me, even considering Mai Otome which is cute and fun but not really stuff I get into as a series. I prefer my anime a bit more serious, dark and mysterious and cool. That’s just not happening. Speed Grapher got mired in mediocre execution after a promising start.
When the new stuff doesn’t quite cut it, it’s time to poke through the old. I have to admit, overlooking GitS SAC was a rather massive failure on my part as an anime fan. It’s one of the most highly regarded series in the last couple years, production values and storywise. I guess I didn’t really take it seriously when I was in Ann Arbor last year, because there were no subs at the time. And I knew too well that even for my level of Japanese, Shirow is simply beyond my grasp. Add in the fact that I didn’t consider the movies that good (too much philosophical mumbo jumbo as opposed to say Patlabor), and so I just let it sit and forgot about the whole deal.
Now, faced with the risk of brain decay, I finally decided to correct this. 5 days for the torrent, and I was happily in possession of the first series.
I’ve seen the first 7 eps, and it’s definitely living up to its reputation. No, it surpasses my expectations completely. The art and animation is excellent for a TV series, even given Production IG’s pedigree. The direction is brilliant at times. Some of the stand-alone stories may not be all that original or deep, but the overall quality is beyond what you might expect of any long-running series or movie, much less anime.
Most of the credit goes to the background setting. The world of GitS SAC is fascinatingly cyber, so alien and half fantasy, yet so very plausible because of the way the characters have been portrayed. They are all larger than life, badasses who are the best of the bunch, recruited from the military mostly, I think, although all their interactions hint that they walk the other side of the law with little guilt. Cyber hacking and roughing up people to make them talk, all in a day’s work. And the tools they use could be exactly the way the lone sheriff looked after his six-shooter and horse. No fuss, no special awe about the melding of digital and human.
Everyone in SAC treats ghost hacking and cyber inplants as just another fact of life, the way we got on using our computers to buy things online, despite the possibility of identity theft, hacked credit cards, paper trails on our activities… The world of SAC is our world, just a little more techy. It makes for a compelling draw, it becomes so easy to immerse yourself into Shirow’s creation.
Because for all its connotations about the nature of personality as a tangible, changeable, hackable “thing”, for some reason life is still fine and normal. It’s not that different, not really bleak or full of despair. This sets it apart from other superbly grim cyberpunk stories like Blade Runner, The Matrix, take your pick, where you don’t really want to live there, and you really don’t want to imagine humanity falling there either.
Next: The best part about SAC – The Major and the end credits
