Ghost in the Shell - Creating the Visual Language of Cyberpunk - Comic Tropes (Episode 41) 

"High tech and low life"... that pretty much sums up all cyber-punk!

I think you are underselling how much this drew from Gibson. “Neuromancer” and “Count Zero” and other short stories were years before “Ghost in the Shell-“Mona Lisa Overdrive” was the year before-and they all cover a huge amount of the same ground including the descriptions of how cyberspace would be visualized.

I really like the page where they visit the gross government minister who's surrounded himself with cyborg babes. When he orders one to put suntan lotion on him she goes beserk and attacks, with the Major and Batou narrowly saving him by destroying her. When the minister wonders what happened, they speculate that her programming found the task of physical contact with him so disgusting that she became homicidal

Wow, I read this as it was serialized in '95. It was instantly a life-long obsession that included a college course in cyberpunk, blowing rent money on going to Gibson book signings, and eventually even moving to Asia. You've done an excellent job recognizing and refining the elements of cyberpunk, and linking it later with Moebius' A Long Tomorrow is brilliant also. Please, understand I've never complimented anyone's views of analysis of any cyberpunk. You're very, very good at this!

I heard somewhere that Shirow never really wanted to be a Manga-ka his desire was to be simply an Illustrator like Frazetta, Giger, or Sorayama. That he likes Manga Comic art, but wasn't much of a fan of the stories or the industry, and that his early Manga were to get himself know and his art style seen, a means to an end. All truly great artists eventually get to do what they like and make money on it, if doing porn illustrations and stories is what he wants and it makes him cash, more power to him.

I absolutely love the original Motoko Kusanagi (manga), she was very likeable and still you could take her seriously, I would like to see a modern adaptation of Ghost in the Shell directly based on the manga, both in story and visual style

A note on Cartesian Duality: Descartes believed that the mind/soul inhabited and animated, almost possessed, the body and left it to wander after death. The competing materialist narrative is that consciousness is an emergent property of the complexity of the brain and we are "ghosts in machines" only consciously aware and intelligent as a side-effect of the complexity of our brains. Shirow seems to be with the second group, given the effects of ghost hacking in the series.

I am so glad you reviewed this. Ghost in the Shell has been my all time favorite manga.

The Playstation game version widens the world a little bit. It's closer to the manga in style than the animation. The comic is excellent.

Thank you for doing this. Masamune Shirow is one of the artists that got me into drawing comics. I love the margin notes. I often find myself trying not to draw ships and vehicles like his; that's how much I've been influenced.

Might actually pick it up.Good job

The imaginative ideas of great authors like Dick, Gibson and etc... just amazing. Same with how Masamune expanded on those themes and adopted them into Japanese manga/anime format. To think that was even before the age of the internet...! Mind boggling!

Ghost in the Shell is the IP I feel the strongest personal, emotional and intellectual connection to. It's what got me into cyberpunk completely with no going back but, while I've grown to like both the cheesier cyberpunk and the more outright dystopic one, I love GITS's vision of dystopia, not as something worse and more negative than the world we live in but dystopic as it being as imperfect as our world. There is a lot of desperation and treacherous stuff in the world of GITS, but still there is a gleam of hope, it's just that its world is not quite ready yet to take any leap. There's stories in it about war profiteers, corruption, counter-revolution at all costs, political murder, power imbalances and social gaps... it's a world where you'd wonder, what's the place of the natural, non-augmented human? And still the manga and anime tell you exactly what the place is for people like Togusa and it's not as subaltern, but for something that ties into what you related about the Puppet Master: It's so common to see geek stuff and sci fi get caught in the trappings of things that border into... well, cryptofascism... yet GITS gets evolution not only right but also a great alternative take on it. It would be so easy to show these cyborgs as beyond human, super human, superior... but it instead makes a great point about diversity being a failsafe against catastrophes of all kinds, making parallels between the natural evolution of animals and humans, the technological evolution and the singularity of AI and that of ideas and of the perception that people have of others, and how it persists and becomes a kind of reproduction, a legacy. Even the sequel Manmachine Interface (with the offspring of Motoko and the Puppet Master looking like multicultural women, a throwback to humans becoming different as they spread outward from Africa in the dawn of humankind, merge together to form something ultimate... there is no master race, but maybe the thing is that to become the ultimate human we have to make our separate genetic paths meet, become stronger through mingling) and Stand Alone Complex (more with the idea of memes) run with it. Now I've bought Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, because it was obviously a reference for Shirow's philosophy both in GITS and in Appleseed and has been outright referenced in GITS SAC by the Tachikoma.

Throughout the nineties, I devoured everything by Shirow published in the west; Appleseed, New Dominion Tank Police, GitS, Orion (which is nutty as hell and I've never seen anything remotely like it, before or since) The '95 anime Ghost in the Shell is a bonafide classic that's still influencing sci fi in a variety of media. The live action adaptation was an interesting misfire. The filmmakers seemed to not understand what GitS was truly about beyond it's revolutionary visuals. The original is an intensely Japanese story and something was lost in the translation to a western audience.

I love the ghost in the shell movie, you have convinced me to pick up the comic.

I LOVE Shirow and Ghost in the Shell and, though I agree that the animated versions, especially the Stand Alone Complex TV shows have handled the storytelling better, I think the Major in the manga had superior character and presence, though she was almost equalled by the major in Stand Alone Complex. I'll be in attendance of Rupert Sanders' movie but only out of respect for Shirow and love of his IP. I'm really expecting to be frustrated with the story and its overall execution. I've been waiting for a live action APPLESEED or Ghost in the Shell since the mangas first hit U.S. shores and sadly, I'm pretty old and may not live to see this happen again if Sanders makes a mess of it and the studio's decide that Shirow's properties are not worth adapting so, though I don't expect much based on the promotional materials, I'm hoping and praying that I've been deceived by both said promotional materials and by Sanders' previous directorial efforts. I hope he surprises me and pulls off a beautiful adaptation. I've read and loved Shirow's Black Magic, APPLESEED, Orion and Ghost in the Shell, including Man Machine Interface and have seen most of the animes. My favorite of the mangas is APPLESEED but the CG 3D APPLESEED movies seem to get successively worse. Deunan and Briareos were nearly unrecognizable, intrinsically speaking, in the last one, which I believe was a prequel. I hated enough that I tossed the Blu-ray in the trash after viewing it and let it sit there for a few hours before I decided to keep it. My favorite of all the Shirow IP animes, that I've seen, is Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone e Complex because it seems to blend the best aspects of the Appleseed mangas and the Ghost in the Shell mangas and, to a lesser degree, Oshii's movies and the expanse of time given to tell the stories really helps them have the emotional punch that I'm used to getting from Shirow's manga. Thank you for your careful, thoughtful and respectful examination of this complex and beautiful work. P.S: As an artist and long time student of the authentic Japanese manga and anime aesthetic, I can assure you that Major Kusanagi's cyborg body is DEFINITELY Asian. It may not necessarily be Japanese but, it's unquestionably Asian.

Rewatching all the manga episodes in anticipation of the Berserk episode. Sad that Miura is gone but excited to hear your take on his magnum opus RIP Miura

It's probably worth exploring the influence of roleplaying games, and especially the game named Cyberpunk (or Cyberpunk 2020 in its second edition), in developing this imagery since a lot of it seems to have first occurred there, or was developed there from references in Neuromancer.

THIS CHANNEL IS SO UNDERRATED

16:30 HE DAMNED WELL NEEDS TO FINISH APPLESEED!!!! He totally left Book 5 on an open ending! 27:20 Yeah, the Skintight Suit is totally a Shirow Trope, on top of the trope that only his lead female characters wear them On that final note; the way Masamune Shirow writes, if he meant for Kusanagi to be Gaijin, he would have given her a Gaijin name, just like he did for the main characters of Applessed & waaaay back in his first manga, Black Magic.

love coming back to this episode, one of the best.

Cartesian duality wasn't thought of by the greeks but by the French philosopher Rene Descartes. That's where we get the term "cartesian" from, his name! For anyone unaware, Descartes is the silly man who gave us the phrase "cogito ergo sum" (Latin: "I think therefore I am")

Your take on the ScarJo casting is the most even-keeled one I've heard - I wouldn't have, but like you, I didn't think her being cast was anything offensive, so it mostly elicited eye-rolls fron me, like "Oh, hollywood, you silly, silly den of business people"

0:43 Hang on, though. _Neuromancer_ dates from 1984. William Gibson wrote it on a typewriter, because PCs with word-processor software were not exactly commonplace then.

Great channel. You should do "La casta de los Metabarones" Gimenez and Jodorowsky

The density, detail, humor, deep themes, violence, and author’s notes are what I love about Shirow Masamune’s manga.

TY for discussing the Cyberpunk tropes of Ghost in a shell & Neuromancer & Snovvcrash. Extremely enjoyable episode ! You've allvvays had great analysis' of all the comics you cover & your channel has very quickly become my favorite comics reviievv due to the research, respect , inteligence & humor you put in to each & every episode . TY again for continuing to produce great vvork!

I LOVE that you covered the tropes of Masaune Shirow; you're the perfect content creator to cover him! I should have seen this years ago, but I'm glad I'm catching this now. BTW, FUCK that movie...

Really tickled how hen (separated bc comment wouldn't post lol) tai and "Cartesian Duality" are side by side in your cards. It's true to the spirit of the manga and gave me a laugh. I grew up reading the version with those pages cut out and even as a kid was confused about how that chapter started. I didn't know Shirow moved entirely away from storytelling, which feels a bit of a shame given what a gift his worldbuilding and aesthetic sensibilities have been to the genre. But! That work is still ours to enjoy, and much better for an artist to pursue what makes them happy. GITS is a special manga for me and I always enjoy seeing other people marvel at its detail, appreciate the artistic skill, and think deeply about the ideas it presents.

The race of the actress was the lesser of the problems with the live action adaptation... the dumbing down of the story was the main problem. All the philosophical complexity was discarded and the most iconic scenes were just repurposed to fit an unimaginative re-re-remake of RoboCop. I never thought I would use the expression "Americanized" in a demeaning way until I watched that awful movie.

i appreciate the inspiration that i didn't know i had. thanks for making me remember this awesome comic. i also loved the bee's in the GITS 2 comic. imagine virus bees and multiple bodies, so cool.

Stand Alone Complex was an amazing show. I hope I can find it.

Manga Tropes dun duh deh deh de duuuuu Manga Tropes!

Great video, cheers. At 17:20 I'd suggest that the acupuncture needles, especially when placed alongside the high-tech computers, are a good demonstration of cyberpunk's combining of traditional asian motifs with future-tech - pagodas, rickshaws, chinese junks, kimonos, traditional medicine, etc.

Thanks for this video. It's interesting to learn about about the manga, which I somewhat knew to be quite different. I find it a bit odd though that you talk about 2 of the 3 films, but not the tv series that has kind of eclipsed everything else.

Thanks for the great video! Would love a review of the sequel manga! I love the anime and I am waiting for a complete english version of the manga as originally published

6:12 This deserves a noting not just implants "shoddy Hong Kong backstreet market implants" being widely avaible.

Whitewashing accusations for the movie don't land that well. Since the stories fundamentally explore identity and depict the alteration and or replacement of physical traits. Defining people by traits seems obviated. It's like saying the sky is blue and declaring a nightsky to be wrong because it looks different.

Thanks for explaining, I’ve read the book a few times and never fully understood the entire story.

Saturn 3 had the first plug in

18:02 One thing they didn’t predict, though, was ransomware ...

William Gibson was inspired considerably by arcades (and the climate) of his adopted hometown of Vancouver, B.C.

The movies and anime are my favories. Love SAC

When I first saw the trailer for the new film I was a bit shocked it wasn't an Asian lead but then thought, this is one of the only times you can get away with it because it's literally a "shell"

I bought the collection and the first few pages are so full of incomprehensible technobabble that i havent read but a few pages. maybe ill give them another shot.

The themes of science, identity and rapidly growing technology are still very interesting and scary, they only grow more relevant with age. Good manga, but one of those extremely rare cases where I actually like the movies and tv series better 😅

Talks about Cyber Punk's visuals being created. Doesn't even mention Moebius's "The Log Tomorrow", made two years before Ghost in the Shell was first published.

The opening scene of Akira says it all... I love ghost in the shell immensely, but I have to say Akira with the tribal music and mix of old and new nails it... I've fallen in love with the musical group Geinoh YamashiroGumi.. That all being said, GitS is still brilliant

Before there was a Ghost in the Shell, there was Dominion, Appleseed and "F-61 Black Magic". Masamune Shirow had been crafting the esthetic of Cyberpunk for quite some years, by the time he did GitS. And when GitS finally freed him from having to jobbing for paying the rent, he went to do Hentai, which pays much worse but was what he really wanted to do all along. (M. S., The Inventor of the "techno garterbelt" )

Very informative!!

20:14 are you talking about Plato? Apart from him very few ancient Philosophers believed in "substance dualism" as we would call it today

3:50 "Mobile Armored Riot Police" So fitting for 2020....

That intro is 🔥🔥🔥

Love your videos Mr trope, keep up the good work! I also like cartoonist kayfabe channel. It's hard to do fun videos about things we like, rather than reviews of crappy books. Y'all have figured out how to talk about comics you love and be entertaining.

Slight correction - the city was moved to Hong Kong for the anime and that was copied for the movie. The original manga was actually meant to be based on the city where Shirow is meant to be a teacher (don't think it's Kobe where he was originally from). Personally I prefer the Appleseed quartet of manga, but that's personal preference. Keep up the good work - had three of your vids as recommendations (this, Valerian, & Moebius) - hope you're still making these.

It feels like Collage lectures. Gracias. = )

johnny mnemonic reference!

Subscribed!

Seems to me there is a lot of similarity between the shell in this manga and the "B&B" ships in Anne Macaffary novels. I.E. "The Ship who Sang".

That scene of the garbage man was creepy, I saw it in the movie, the very idea is so unsettling

Bought it in '96!! Amazing! Back then if u rented an anime vhs you could end up with Battle Angle Alita, 3x3 Eyes or... Porn! Great times... Keep it up Chris ol'Bean. Love the videos. P.S. Ghost In The Shell is ... necessary reading. Good pic.

Her shell can look like anything. At one point, she is a little girl. Is that youth-washing? No. It just shows that what she looks like is very unimportant to the story.

Nice

nice video. interesting. thanks.

I dunnow why but the way you describe it, this version is closer to Patlabor than um... uh... something else

Excuse, but you're wrong. Cartesian Duality or spiritual-corporla dualism wasn't known for philosophers until Descartes who was a French thinker and mathematician. For Greeks such a problem didn't exist. The closest hypothesis to that could be Plato's ideas and his famous "cave" in which he describes that we are living in the fake world of illusions, because we forget our real origin and our bodies are sort of prison for our souls.

14:50 I heard that the period joke translates from Japanese as a double meaning similar to saying she's running diagnostics. I don't know if it's true. I respect the philosophy, but your body is not yourself. Major is correct even if someone can assault or manipulate your perception. Wouldn't it be easier to jack in at least only on a utility hardware level rather than using a physical typing hand? It seems like a lot of engineering for something with an easier work around. Hell, you could just jack into the typing hands rather than actually using them as your regular hands. It's not white washing as you said, but the movie was unfortunately dumbed down. It's okay, but they could have done more with it.

1:32 Interesting. If you watch the original _Solaris_ movie, guess where Tarkovsky filmed his “futuristic city” scenes?

I realy like this channel, i get it. THanks to the Team. Saludos a todos. = )

I read some of the manga that I was able to get from the public library...but the second time I checked it out they had a bunch of pages torn out...or censored with sharpie. Some violent and some pornographic in nature.

Greeat one

I guess it becomes a theory of whitewashing if Scarlett Johansson doesn't do well with her act as Motoko Kusanagi. But I can understand why original Ghost in the Shell fans might take offense to this, I mean....it was a Japanese Manga after all. It would be so much more amazing to show various ethical actors play different roles in this movie adaptation. In my opinion, it would show Masamune Shirow how it has transcended across the East and has made it to the West, in a multicultural way of course. Maybe then Masamune would give up writing Hantai for a few.

I enjoyed the Anime both the series(s) and the movie. The manga, nope, was a little too "adult" for me. :)

In the ‘95 anime, I thought the Major was an android.

Neil Stephenson i cannot recommend enough.. if yall haven't read snow crash and diamond age... do it... your really missing out.

7:45 Compuserve predates the Internet. It was one of the “online services” from the 1980s, which charged exorbitant fees to customers accessing their content. In other words, in spite of its attempts to adapt, it was rendered irrelevant by the Internet.

what up with majors hair going from blue to brown all the time

The first Gits manga is a timeless masterpiece; 1.5 is a fine collection of stories; too bad Man Machine Interface is just techobubble and panty shots dragged insanely long for no reason.

I actually liked the movie

eh, Neuromancer had implants first. PS Cartesian duality is name after Rene DesCartes in 1600s france....

You forgot Moebius' "The Long Tomorrow" way back in 1975.

I think it's sad that Shirow went from such a intense and forward thinker on cyberpunk and future tech, and for the last decade or more he's just been drawing hentai. :\

I love love love this manga and the 1st anime movie. It reminds me of a FANTASTIC novel called Crossover. If u enjoyed Ghost U will enjoy that book! The show became too kiddy for me though.

It's really sad that Masamune Shirow only does Hentai these days :(

29:33 *points at head*

Well done. Why is it only partially in color, grrr? Would be fun to see an adaption with the more happy go lucky character.

16:38 that's arguable

Is Chris Clairemont your fav writer??

read the manga back in the day as well as appleseed seen both anime adaptation, and yes the ghost in the shell anime goes further the second one was fine but not as great, and haven't seen shows so I can't really tell if they're good. As for the US live adaptation, it's not a good one (as in an adaptation) .. you can change things (the anime proved it) but the core ideas in the manga and the anime were the same philosophycal ones, and they are absent of the live movie (a westernised version of it... i guess) which gave it the unofficial name of a "Shell without a ghost" among fans.

I think I'm the only one who likes the manga more than the movie...

The shell initially used by the major was an espionage model styled after sex dolls that was intended to be generically pretty and attractive to the widest possible range of tastes but not so stunning as to be particularly memorable. When she is side to side with the blonde shell inhabited by the puppeteer it is clear that they are the same model differently tinted. Given the degree of deliberate calculated artifice that went into the major's outward presentation any discussion of race as we conceive it seems a bit preposterous from the get-go, not that this will deter SJW types from seeking offense over an issue that they have not examined closely enough to have any real understanding of. Even from a psychosocial perspective the accident that led to the major being fully cyborized happened in her early childhood at a point where many of our most important aspects of self-awareness, our cultural, gender, racial, and class identity and consciousness, have only just begun to develop. Whatever racial identity she may have had prior to the accident, her entire adolescent and adult experience was as a full cyborg, which even in her world where some degree of cyberization is commonplace is still a status to which many people have religious and cultural objections to the point that they would reject for themselves the extensive surgery which saved Motokai after her accident. The demographics of the world the major inhabits have also changed. Of the four characters in Section 9 who still are mostly meat with limited cyborg augmentation, one is obviously Caucasian and one Latino, and both of those are explicitly displaced veterans from the Americas who drifted East following the victory of the American Empire in WWIII. Of the two implied to be Japanese nationals by birth only one, section chief Aramaki, is depicted as Asian, the other, a former Tokyo police detective with only a cyberbrain, appears to be biracial with some Japanese heritage. Masamune was very aware of demographic trends affecting the composition of Japan's population and seemed to indicate that in his future being Japanese was something in between the Chinese identity inextricably linked to Han heritage and the American identity which is purely based upon the degree of cultural assimilation with race being a defining issue primarily of subcultural, rather than national, identity, The major never expressed, to my awareness (and I have read or viewed all Ghost in the Shell content available in English) any awareness of or reference to any racial identity whatsoever and her only sense of gender identity was a constant sense of amusement towards and exploitation of the fact that people found her attractive.

32:21 Given that the original character has always been portrayed with European-style features, it seems odd to complain about a European-featured actor being hired to portray her...

“Onime”

It is off topic but does your background says to our subconscious that DC heroes are symbols, ikons and ideas whereas Marvel heroes are mere humans struggling.

Mmmmh... the thumbnail reminds me of "Black Magic", not so much Kokaku Kidotai ;]

I gotta disagree my man. GITS is a high water mark and absolutely groundbreaking in terms of artistic achievement but it was hardly the first. Wasn't even the first for Shirrow. All the IT and AI ideas out of GITS were taken directly from William Gibson's Neuromancer. The Puppetmaster is Gibson's Wintermute AI. Straight up ripped off. Appleseed and Dominion Police were both Cyberpunk AF in their own right. With Briareos and Deunan even being mirrored in Batou and The Major. And no nod to Otomo's much earleir designs for Akira? tsk tsk

The 95 movie is great as it’s own film. It’s special to me for how visually stunning and soundtracked it is. Stand alone complex is probably closer to the manga. Every part I’ve seen of the live action movie was horribly boring.

The puppet master is not an AI!

Please what other animes have politics in it like ghost in the shell.

Yeah. The humor is lost in the animated/live action derivatives of Shirow's work. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE--mc-h_jSa5A.html Well. Maybe not all of it. Anyways. Lemme recommend Masamune's "Orion" comic. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE--azEeihKGHM.html