The following year saw the release of the first new Appleseed feature film since 1988. Directed by Shinji Aramaki, best known as a mecha designer for a variety of anime for television including the original Bubblegum Crisis, this Appleseed brought the world created by Shirow into three dimensions while retaining many of the conventions of cel animation.
By 2007, a second feature, Appleseed Ex Machina, took a further leap across the Uncanny Valley. Ironically, Aramaki, again as director, was able to achieve a sense of realism that wasn’t off-putting, this time by shrinking the eyes to proportions closer to an adult human face. This made it possible for Deunan to express, through motion capture, a variety of subtle facial expressions.
The story by Kiyoto Takeuchi forces her to jump through a number of emotional hoops. Recall that the human Deunan and the cyborg Briareos were lovers as well as partners before Briareos ended up in a cyborg body. Olympus has decided to create a new bioroid based on Briareos’s DNA. Of course, the resulting bioroid, Tereus, ends up looking like Deunan’s old flame. This kind of conflict has been anticipated in a number of science fiction manga, especially in the work of Moto Hagio. The emotional conflict thus anchors the movie in traditional anime plotting (in which emotion plays an important part) and keeps it from being just a wall-to-wall action movie. The main gimmick of the plot is a twenty-first century twist: a social network device that is more than it seems.
Even having a well-established name doesn’t rescue filmmakers from the practical aspects of making a movie. Movies need publicity, which these days can be about making the movie and not about the movie itself. Appleseed Ex Machina was able to draw attention by having two of Deunan’s outfits in the movie designed by the fashion house Prada. Similarly, the first remake of Appleseed had an eclectic score that included music by Ryuichi Sakamoto, leader of the influential electronic-music trio Yellow Magic Orchestra and winner of an Oscar for scoring The Last Emperor.
The New Testament: Ghost in the Shell
Ghost in the Shell, released in 1995, is an amazing visual achievement in a medium based on amazing visuals. Animated by Mamoru Oshii and based on a heavily footnoted manga, this feature film will inevitably confuse its first-time viewers, dealing as it does with the Byzantine round of backstabbings and powerplays that characterize Japanese politics in the future, both domestically and internationally. The politics of New Port City are the solution but also part of the problem. Instead of terrorists, we’re dealing with diplomats and politicians as the bad guys.
There was a hint of this in Appleseed, but the apple had blossomed and borne fruit by the ’90s. With the bursting of the economic bubble, Japanese politicians of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party had trouble finding anyone left to run the ship of state—especially after reports began surfacing of financial sweetheart deals between assorted politicians and business interests. Nobody seemed to be clean of the stain, and the tendency of those already in power to continue to rely on the old boy network to get things done only assured that nothing would get done. Skepticism turned to cynicism, and popular mistrust of the government may have hastened the activities of those who claimed to offer an alternative way, including the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult and other “new religions.”
The action in Ghost in the Shell centers on Section Nine of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This is a wide-ranging group, dealing with covert operatives from America, deposed dictators from the Third World, and—in the opening sequence—attempts by another country to convince a computer programmer to defect.3 Growing out of this governmental gamesmanship—and not by anyone’s design—is a piece of software that has taken several names. Its creators refer to it as Project 2501, and intelligence agents call it the Puppeteer. Whatever its intended name, it has, like other software in other sci-fi works, acquired enough information to become sentient. It’s being chased by Major Motoko Kusanagi of Section Nine. It’s also chasing her at the same time, in part to seek political asylum to protect itself from its creators. The question for Major Kusanagi is: what does she do with it once she’s got it?
The Major, it seems, is going through something of an identity crisis. She’s ninety-five percent artificial, with a cybernetic body that superficially makes her indistinguishable from ordinary mortals. There is a wonderful sequence in the movie, with Major Kusanagi riding a boat down one of the canals of New Port City. She passes a glass-fronted coffee shop, and seated on the other side of the glass is herself. It’s really someone else who happens to have the same make and model of cybernetic body, but this wordless encounter, backed up by Kenji Kawai’s haunting score, brings the whole question of identity and humanity into sharp focus.
She is, in spite of heightened strength and abilities, an ordinary mortal, asking the same old questions mortals have asked since the dawn of time: Who am I? Is there a reason why I’m here? What happens after I die?
Ancient Japan offered answers to all of the above in the animistic belief—transferred to Shinto—that spirits abound in the world, and aren’t limited to living things. A mountain may have a spirit, or a piece of wood carved into an arch, or even a locomotive.4 Japan has also spent centuries coming to terms with machines that seem human. Karakuri ningyo—clockwork wooden dolls that resembled people—were first built in the Tokugawa period. Such dolls would “bow” their heads while carrying cups of tea on a tray. Lifting a cup from the tray would stop the doll until the cup was replaced. A legend in the twelfth-century Konjaku Monogatari tells of a farmer who used a similar doll in the ninth century to water his crops. When the spirit and the clockwork doll intersect, there can be problems, as will be seen in the chapter on Key the Metal Idol.
The real problem here, though, is that the machine is no longer obviously just a machine. Is the Puppeteer sentient, or merely a program designed to seem sentient? And how much of herself can Major Kusanagi trade in for mechanical enhancements and still be human?
The Major finds out by going through a cyborg version of sex, birth, death, and rebirth—merging with the Puppeteer and being transplanted into a new cybernetic body after her old one is almost destroyed. Brought back to life as a young girl, she tells a colleague that she is now neither Major Kusanagi nor the Puppeteer, and that she is off to seek other offspring of this union, born into the World Wide Web itself.
But the Major’s dilemma isn’t a purely mechanical question. The manga contains elaborate discussions of karma, and one sequence re-affirms that, regardless of enhancements, Major Motoko Kusanagi is still human at the core. In this sequence, the Puppeteer announces that it will “cast off all restrictions and shells, and shift to a higher-level system.” It then appears to be transfigured up to Heaven, in the wake of an angel, of which we catch but a brief glimpse. At this moment, Shirow draws a very tight close-up of Major Kusanagi’s face, and we see (for the only time in the entire series) the pop-culture proof of her humanity: the tears in her eyes.
The look of Ghost in the Shell is surprising when one remembers that it is essentially traditional cel animation. There are alternatives, though, including a 2008 “remix” of the movie, titled Ghost in the Shell 2.0, that adds 3D CG versions of some scenes. It is a little jarring at first, but after a while the viewer accepts the move between two very different animation technologies. The surprise is perhaps that, as recently as 2008, more scenes weren’t redone in the new style.
In the meanwhile, the first real sequel to Ghost in the Shell appeared in 2004. Subtitled Innocence, it extended the technology of animation while keeping the story connected to the original film and therefore to Shirow’s original manga.
The story happens after the original movie. Major Motoko Kusanagi is nowhere to be found, but Section 9 is still searching for her because of what she may know about the Puppetmaster. Bato, meanwhile, is the star of this film, as he investigates a series of murders committed by cyborgs who were supposed to be sexual playthings. At the autopsy of the movie’s first victim, director Oshii and screenwriter Shirow slip in an in-joke: the aut
opsy is being conducted by a cyborg medical examiner, who says she wants to be called Haraway. As in Donna Haraway, a philosopher whose 1991 “Cyborg Manifesto” is a fascinating post-feminist look at the role of women in society. If there is a single statement in the Manifesto that sums it up, it is this: “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.”
As Bato investigates the murders, following a version of the script laid out in a manga episode by Shirow, he finds that the sexual cyborgs are actually frauds. Instead of machines with manufactured “ghosts” (a mental consciousness that makes them seem human), the cyborgs simply make multiple crude copies of the mental activity of kidnapped young women to make the cyborgs seem sophisticated. Bato gets too close to the truth and is about to be overwhelmed by a small army of the cyborgs when the Major (whose reappearance we in the audience had been expecting) rides to the rescue. Not literally; she’s downloaded.
After Innocence, the first season of a TV anime based on Shirow’s dystopian vision aired in Japan. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex once again has Major Kusanagi in a shell and part of Section 9, tackling covert and ticklish matters for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In this season, the main plot thread revolves around a terrorist hacker known as The Laughing Man (although ultimately The Laughing Man turns out to be a diversion covering up criminality by major corporations). This gave series director Kenji Kamiyama the ability to explore a different aspect of Japan: the growing cyber-life of the twenty-first century. He also had the chance to look back at Shirow’s manga and find comic relief in the tachikoma, small personal tanks that get together for long rambling conversations.
The second season, telling a completely different string of stories, appeared in 2004 under the name 2nd GIG. This time, Japan is dealing with the aftermath of a regional war, a crush of refugees, a terrorist group called Individual Eleven, and some loose nuclear weapons (see the chapter on war in anime). In both TV series, the modernist abstract music written for the films by Kenji Kawai is replaced by the distinctive melodic score of Yoko Kanno (see the chapter on idol singers).
And in 2006 the Stand Alone Complex group did a made-for-cable-TV movie, Solid State Society. The plot was a mash-up of several Shirow elements, from the Puppetmaster to bureaucratic corruption and a senior citizens’ center used as a front. It was later released on DVD with two OAVs: “The Laughing Man” and “Individual Eleven.”
And this isn’t all that Shirow and company have done. He developed the concept for the anime series Ghost Hound, while the Production I.G. crew under Kenji Kamiyama moved from Japan’s techno near-future to its magical past with the 2007 TV series Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit. Based on a series of fantasy novels by Nahoko Uehashi, the lead character, a woman warrior named Balsa whose favored weapon is a spear, is clearly a human ancestor of Major Kusanagi.
After the first movie, or even the second, the next Masamune Shirow project could have been predicted, up to a point. No longer. Having gotten away from cyber-reality to Japanese spirits, Shirow has become officially unpredictable. And that’s how it should be.
1. The film’s mecha unit was supervised by Hideaki Anno, one year after The Wings of Honnêamise; Gainax was one of several studios that worked on the anime.
2. Again, this is nothing new. Recall Jupiter, the central computer in the shonen ai OAV Ai no Kusabi, or Evangelion’s Magi.
3. In the manga the other side tempted the Secretary of Commerce; the anime script by Kazunori Ito introduces Project 2501 from the very beginning.
4. Frederik L. Schodt, Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics, and the Coming Robotopia (New York: Kodansha International, 1988), 196. Note that in one of the stories of the Don Dracula manga by Dr. Osamu Tezuka, a locomotive was possessed by a spirit that had to be exorcised.
The Man in the Mirror: Satoshi Kon
What do an idol singer stalked by a crazed fan, an actress on a lifelong quest, a blocked artist, three homeless people, and a Magical Girl in a dream world have in common? Their creator: Satoshi Kon.
Near the end of his life, Osamu Tezuka spoke of the new generation of manga artists and animators, men and women who had the talent that in another era would have taken them into other media: painting and sculpture, novels and cinema. They brought a new level of sophistication to those media regarded in the West as the most childish and the least likely to reach the realm of art.
Among the directors who have already assembled a body of work, one of the animators of this new generation has gathered worldwide praise for only half a dozen titles. Director Satoshi Kon rose up through the ranks and not only moved from strength to strength, but has done so with a consistent artistic vision. Most of his works bounce perception against reality, bounce the way people are against the way people seem to be, and keep bouncing until something explodes. He then turns the explosion into art.
In the Beginning
Kon was born in 1963 on the northern island of Hokkaido; it may not be a coincidence that Hokkaido was a featured locale in Kon’s 2002 masterpiece Millennium Actress. But there were other, earlier stops along the way.
He studied painting at Musashino Art University in Tokyo, founded in 1929 as the Imperial Art School. The school started out teaching fine arts and industrial design; later it added animation among what it called “imaging arts.” While in college Kon created a manga called Toriko; at a reception where Kon received a “Superior Newcomer” award, he met manga artist and anime director Katsuhiro Otomo. In 1991 Otomo directed his first project after the history-making feature Akira: the live action film World Apartment Horror. Kon worked on the manga that inspired the film. This led to two other Otomo projects for Kon: background designer for 1991’s Roujin Z, and screenwriter and mecha designer for the “Magnetic Rose” segment of the 1995 anthology film Memories. Even as early as these Otomo-related anime, the die seemed to be cast that would define Kon’s artistic vision.
Roujin Z is a political comedy about a mechanized hospital bed programmed to take care of an elderly patient; it’s also covertly intended to test weapon circuitry. However, the patient’s friends decide to re-program the bed with the personality of the patient’s late wife. The essential theme of this anime is that things, and elderly people, are seldom as harmless as they seem. On the other hand, “Magnetic Rose” went full-tilt into Kon’s trademark conflict of appearances and reality: a space ship salvage crew finds the orbiting home of a retired and reclusive operatic diva. The diva is now dead, but the ship computer continues to simulate her whims, preferences, dreams, and performances.
Singing the Blue
1997 saw the release of Kon’s first feature as director and co-writer with Sadayuki Murai: Perfect Blue. Influences in this film, based on a novel by Yoshikazu Takeuchi and animated (like all of Kon’s projects) by the studio Madhouse, were less Walt Disney and even less Katsuhiro Otomo, and more the thrillers of Brian De Palma. The suspense ratchets up and up to nearly unbearable levels.
Perfect Blue focuses on that quintessential Japanese invention: the modern idol singer (see part 1, chapter 13). It starts with the last performance of the pop trio CHAM. Its lead singer, Mima Kirigoe, has decided to get out of singing and pursue an acting career. However, the switch is hardly easy. She’s cast in a made-for-video series called Double Bind about a woman suffering through a career change similar to Mima’s. In one sequence, where her character in the video series plays a stripper who gets gang-raped in the club where she works, the actors get carried away to the point where Mima begins confusing fantasy and reality.
It doesn’t stop there. Someone is dissatisfied with Mima’s career change and expresses their displeasure first in postings to an unauthorized fan website, “Mima’s Room”; later, corpses start piling up.
Perfect Blue used Kon’s past association with the creator of Akira to sell the film overseas; it was shown in several foreign film festivals where aud
iences looked beyond the mention of Otomo and realized that this was a vision worth watching.
A Thousand Years at the Movies
Kon’s second film still draws on blurring the line between reality and perception; however, it strikes a completely different tone as a saga of love, its illusions, its compromises, and its intense passions. Millennium Actress also deals with love of movies; it’s as perfect a love poem to the movies as has ever been made.
Written by Kon and Murai, Millennium Actress starts (as it ends) with scenes on the moon reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. When the image starts shaking, we realize that we’re watching a movie within a movie; director Genya Tachibana is screening clips from an assortment of productions by Ginei Studios, which is tearing down its “obsolete” studios after seventy years.1 Many of their movies starred actress Chiyoko Fujiwara, who made her first movie at age fourteen. After thirty years at the studio, Chiyoko went into a secluded retirement; Genya is using the studio’s demise as an excuse to hunt her down for a documentary interview. It’s no coincidence that Genya’s had a lengthy crush on Chiyoko.
When Chiyoko appears, it’s as a skinny, elderly woman who still has star quality: regal without being arrogant, attractive without being vain. We find out that the earthquake that morning (the reason for the shaking image) may have been an omen, since she was born September 1, 1923 during a major Japanese disaster: the Kanto earthquake that leveled two-fifths of the buildings in Tokyo and almost all of neighboring Yokohama. The quake killed Chiyoko’s father, who made good money as owner of a confectionery. However, it was only the first of several quakes that would highlight her life, some of which would be natural and some created by movie magic. (The several small quakes that hit the day of the interview were symmetrical, since it would also be Chiyoko’s last day on earth.) When Chiyoko was fourteen, she was “discovered” by the head of Ginei Studios, who was impressed with Chiyoko’s looks. He wanted to use her in a maudlin love story that was also to be a propaganda piece about the Japanese occupation of Manchuria; the studio head tried to sell Chiyoko’s mother on the film by calling it part of her patriotic duty.
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