The Cart Driver

Ghost in the Shell has gone through a few hands in its life. From the cyberpunk manga origins by Shirow Masamune, before he turned into a weirdo who only drew calendars full of pictures of impossibly proportioned naked girls covered in machine oil, it then went to Oshi. There it had its most visually striking entrant with a gorgeously directed movie, albeit one lacking a little in character. Then he made a second movie which we should all probably not talk about. Then it was handed over to Kenji Kamiyama and was allowed to spread its wings a little in two full length TV series. With this space it was able to explore a wide range of typical cyberpunk topics with frightening levels of depth in what I consider to be the strongest the franchise has ever been.

The latest instalment sees it placed into the hands of Tow Ubukata as the chief writer and I will admit I was a little bit worried. This is the man whose most famous previous work was Mardock Scramble, a novel series that certainly had its interesting ideas but sorta lost track of them around about the time Norio Wakamoto was being eaten by flying homosexual sharks. Actually I think it was the dolphin that was homosexual…anyway, gay marine animals aside, it was a huge mess. So I tuned into Ghost in the Shell Arise with my expectations tempered significantly.

So, Arise. It’s a prequel-of-sorts to Stand Alone Complex (apart from the fact characters’ backstories have changed so it’s not actually a prequel at all but it hardly matters) featuring a younger Major Kusanagi leaving her old military unit to form Section 9 on behest of a boring old man called Aramaki. Despite the backstories changing and therefore COMPLETELY RUINING the franchise, each character introduced feels like slipping back into comfortable old shoes. The Major is still her headstrong self with that self-doubt and temper hiding beneath. Batou is still the cyborg dudebro with a kind heart. Togusa is still that intelligent family man. The rest of the crew whose names you can never remember are still hanging around in the background being not as interesting.

The story for Arise over its 4 episodes is about the nature of memories and how can you trust your cyborg brain when it can be hacked and change you as a person. Things you considered vital parts of your psyche could be lies and you doubt your own humanity when you can be so easily rewired. Who do you let past those defences you have built up in your fear that you may become something you are not. Who are you really and can you trust your body to represent you. Are you defined by your memories? Pretty standard stuff if you’ve ever experienced any previous iteration of Ghost in the Shell, but it hasn’t stopped being a fascinating subject in that time.

Arise focuses on memories most of all and builds on this theme in some really quite excellent ways that aren’t immediately apparent from the start. Part of this is because the show is so bloody difficult to follow. Episode 1 is the worst in this regards. Being incredibly complicated to the point that you can feel your brain slowly dribble out your ears through exertion is again something very common to Ghost in the Shell. Making a Ghost in the Shell not complex would be like making a Gundam anime without robots. But when you start throwing in an unreliable narrator created by false memories altering what it is she sees to the point that you question whether anything you saw previously is true, that’s when you’re just being mean. The show is complicated enough as it is without making us doubt everything we’ve seen.

Thankfully it improves immensely after that. Episode 2 is a perfect example of how to do it and should be a good outline for how to do every Ghost in the Shell episode. It’s about a military unit who have been put on a show trial for war crimes they didn’t commit so their boss shuts down the city by hacking into its traffic computers, so the Major and her team have to track the perpetrators down through both an epic car chase and hacking battle. It’s an episode that’s simple enough to wrap your head around with understandable motivations but still with the depth to the conflict that makes it interesting. It even has a twist involving the false memories that works because it’s only a single change that you can instantly understand the implications of and even throws in some character depth and themes of how our memories can define us.

It also has a kick-ass car chase involving Arise’s versions of Tachikoma doing their best Attack on Titan’s Survey Corps impressions, swinging through the cyberpunk city with their absurdly cute high pitched cheers. For as much as I like to talk about all the depth and complexity of Ghost in the Shell, I also want to see the Major punch someone in the face so hard her own cyborg arm is crushed. The production values here are about equal to that of Stand Alone Complex, which is a little disappointing in that we haven’t progressed that much in the 10+ years since then but since Stand Alone Complex still looks fantastic today that’s not as negative a point as it sounds. Fights feel impactful and I even like the Major’s character design revamp (it’s about time she put on some bloody clothes).

Where is has really upgraded is the CG. Where Stand Alone Complex CG cars look awful, Arise looks a lot better and even exciting. That car chase wouldn’t have looked anything like as good had Stand Alone Complex tried it with its CG. It can admittedly jump back and forth in quality though. Arise uses a hell of a lot of CG animation and it can be jarring when a character changes from one scene in CG to the second in hand-drawn, and it still lacks that all important weight that CG seems to be permanently saddled with. But it didn’t make me go “ewwww CG” which is an improvement in almost all other CG. On a cinematography standpoint though I feel Arise is the weakest in the franchise. The best it gets comes in the fourth episode when it makes some very deliberate call-backs to the movie.

In the end I came away feeling quite positive about the whole experience. It definitely has its weaker points. It can’t match the movies visual flair nor have the space to recapture the depth and character of Stand Alone Complex, but it does get somewhere in between the two. The most positive thing I can say about it, as a huge fan of this franchise, is it definitely feels like Ghost in the Shell. Its characters, themes, writing and even general flow feel like Ghost in the Shell. It doesn’t come across as bad fanfiction tacked onto the franchise or anything like that (which this same author seems to be doing with whatever the fuck he’s done to Psycho Pass). It has all the things I love about the Ghost in the Shell franchise. Not any more than that, but not any less either.