The Melancholies of Motoko Kusanagi
History repeats itself, Marx has said, first as tragedy, second as farce. Or as blood out of a stone of a venerable and much beloved anime franchise. I'm not saying that Solid State Society sucked, but it certainly did not live up to my astronomically high expectations. For Haruhi's sake, this is Ghost in the Shell after all, Ghost in the Shell!
I went into it with my eyes open, informed, in equal parts, by Washi's review *gentle poke for post-raw thoughts* and by a raw I downloaded. Bought the GITS:SSS DVD from Forbidden Planet. It was beautiful, it was well paced, it was entertaining, it built on the stories of GITS:SAC and 2nd Gig, it ended nicely with the major threads tied up but also with a big loose end hanging out there. That is, GITS.
But the formula seemed somewhat diminished. Still good, relative to many other anime OVAs or movies, but rather less good, relative to its own franchise. There's only a certain number of times that the Major can leave. And then return. Likewise for the tachikomas. Or for stories, drawn from the original manga, retold in a different light, in a different context.
I admired and enjoyed Kenji Kamiyama's work in SAC and 2nd Gig very much. I loved how, particularly in 2nd Gig, he masterfully made the Major so much more human by digging into her past, delving into her Unfinished Love Story with Kuze; likewise, the same master strokes with the back stories of Saito and Pazu. But I didn't feel that the length and structure of the movie allowed, afforded him the time, the space to weave together the different plot threads and personal stories in the same way. The Major's angst, about the simultaneous freedom and powerlessness of the individualistic individual, seemed almost trite, even petulant. Likewise her leaving and rejoining. It just seemed a step backwards from how SAC and 2nd Gig had dealt with this tension between individual and group action; Section 9 isn't about teamwork, they said, but surpasses that with each member acting in their own way to produce the Stand Alone Complex.
The Major's possibly splintered subconsciousness, which interested me the most, was left as a 'Surprise!' at the end, almost as brief as the hint in the beginning. I had adherently hoped for this to be explored more fully, drawing on the materials from the Human-Error Processor and/or Man-Machine Interface manga but alas.
In contrast, despite watching them again and again, I've never gotten sick of the first GITS movie or Innocence, even though I was a tad ambivalent about it after the first time watching it in at the now defunct Odeon cinema that was on Wardour Street. As such, I agree heartily with jpmeyer's claim that 'Masamune Shirow does not make an anime good. Masamune Shirow is only good at drawing cheesecake pinups. Ghost in the Shell was good because of Mamoru Oshii.'
For a start, visually, I preferred the darker brooding noire style. And Oshii's two movies had a strong focus on one major character, Motoko and Batou respectively. Both are great characters and had the shoulders to carry a movie from start to end. There was a lot of brooding and casual pseudo-philosophizing that could have been irritating but I never really was irritated with the Major or Batou.
I've also come to appreciate Innocence for how much more deeply, yet quietly, the absence of the Major was initially felt and conveyed, mainly through Batou's sullenness. And how much more impact she had when she graces us again with her Ghost. As such, perhaps because the prequel nature of GITS:SSS left it at a serious disadvantage; by the time of Innocence, she has moved on. She is, as she tells Batou, at peace. Once lost, Paradise or Innocence cannot be regained but once one has moved on, looking back to where one has moved on from seems almost unbecoming. Between the existential melancholy of the first GITS movie and Batou's slow burn melancholy of Innocence, the diluted melancholy of GITS:SSS's Motoko Kusanagi was that much less satisfying. Keep moving onwards and engage with the newer material already!
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January 20th, 2008 - 01:26
Interesting read. I probably haven’t kept up with the GiTS franchise as closely as I should have, as the first film was an early foray into anime for me, and remains a much-loved favourite. Innocence, on the other hand, managed to irritate me with its ‘casual pseudo-philosophizing’, but maybe I’m just too irritable.
January 20th, 2008 - 02:12
Your expectations were far, far too high – this was basically an extended episode of 2nd Gig, with a complete story arc compressed into two hours, more like the Individual Eleven movie/compilation than anything else. And I don’t recall the Major leaving at any point during either season… which leaves me scratching my head as to ‘there’s only so many times the Major can leave and return’. She hasn’t done it before, and in the movies she left… and has left permanently, even if you count her ‘appearance’ in Innocence through Batou’s hallucinations.
This is NOT the philosophical meanderings of the Oshii movies; those tend to delve more into the philosophy, IMO, than they do the characters. Yes, we see Motoko’s alienated fro the world in the first movie, and that Batou’s also similarly jaded and disillusioned in the second, and then we mix in a bunch of amazing visuals with a good soundtrack and a lot of action.
The SAC universe and the movie timelines are completely different settings, with the movies straying heavily from the manga before it got ‘rebooted’ for Man-Machine Interface. The SAC universe is a tad closer to the characterizations of the manga, from what I recall, and your trying to tie them all together is rather like trying to link the Kashimashi anime’s events to those of the manga; they’re two different takes on the same source material, with the differences due to the directors involved. Oshii enjoys making what is pretty near a moving painting with the emphasis on superficial appearances and some philosophical musings about the nature of the soul, while the SAC series and movie are more ‘traditional’ action-adventure with a less dystopian bent to its own brand of solipsism (or so it appears, given how the series treats ’souls’ and the question of AI’s and the nature of the Stand Alone Complex), and the latter are closer to Shirow’s original work.
If I remember it correctly, it’s stated elsewhere that the movies and SAC have no relation to one another, which explains both the differences in style and characterization – they take place in different timelines, where the Puppet Master never existed and Motoko was less… isolated than she was in the first movie. While there were some homages to the movies both here and at the end of Second Gig (involving the Puppet Master/Puppeteer, the Fuchikomas/Uchikomas, Major Kusanagi’s disappearance from the team and Batou’s preoccupation with it), they are not the same beast.
You might as well try to tie together the first manga version of Haruhi with the light novels and the KyoAni anime if you’re going to do the same with the various GITS movies and the SAC franchise. Of course, you do realize that the original author of the light novels completely disavowed anything from the first Haruhi manga adaptation due to the way the mangaka ‘reworked’ the characters. Ditto Akamatsu and the first Negima series; try linking THAT into the original manga, or to the new Negima!? series or OVA’s.
This is an action-adventure story, not an art movie masquerading as a detective story; that is the difference between the other two movies and SSS. The first movie, IMO, had a ‘deeper’ philosophical tone to it, with Motoko trying to cope with her own growing distance from her humanity as a contrast to the Puppet Master’s desire to experience the human condition, versus Innocence’s focus on impressive CGI and Togusa coping with both Batou’s problems as well as trying to keep up with the basset hound he was babysitting.
January 20th, 2008 - 09:42
IKnight, as such I think you’ll enjoy SSS more than Innocence.
Haesslich, great points. Thanks.
About the Major leaving and returning, my mistake; though I think what I was thinking that although I know that SSS is a prequel, its chronologically later release still gives it a sequelly sort of feel. However the tachikoma returning was something that really grated esp since the very good and respectful decision was made at the end of 2nd Gig not to bring them back again.
Manga-anime. Again, I agree that it’s not reasonable to expect complete congruence, unless the anime merely repeats the manga material e.g. Black Lagoon; they are both different types of media with different imperatives and some creative interpretation in the anime can add value and enjoyment. I suppose what I wanted was more of certain elements from MMI in SSS rather than just the little hint, given that the anime version has not been shy about appropriating and rejigging Shirow’s material.
Genre. Guess now I know that my preference, re: GITS, is the art house movie format vs regular action adventure. Then again, my own double standards mean that if the regular action adventure format were used, outside of the context of comparison to the two GITS movies, for other anime series, I’d be more pleased and less bellyaching. As you said, expectations being ‘far, far too high’ but that’s a marker of the success of GITS in of itself.
January 20th, 2008 - 23:52
No, it’s not a prequel to anything. It’s a sequel of sorts to 2nd Gig, given that it was shortly after the death of Kuze at the end of that series that she left Section 9, perhaps due to Gouda’s manipulations of the government and Section 9’s own role in what led up to Kuze’s death, as well as the deaths of quite a few refugees at the hands of the JSDF and her team.
The Tachikoma’s return is something that has been complained about before – but at least it’s explained this time. If you notice towards the end of Episode 26, the Tachikomas took the memory space they’d begun preparing in Episode 25 on the Major’s orders (originally to hold the memories of all the refugees who were about to get nuked) to store their own data. We can see in that last shot of them before they enter their own private memory space to await their deaths that it says ‘Tachikoma All Memories’, which why the Major said that she ‘built them with some data she found on the Net’.
Now, what puzzled me was why they’d kept the Tachikoma bodies around all this time, given that the AI satellite had been destroyed. And as for art movie… if you were looking for that, the Stand Alone Complex series was not meant for you. The SAC series and franchise, as a whole, is more of a cop show with action/adventure combined with a Sci-Fi bent; more Blade Runner or Akira than Magnetic Rose or Millennium Actress.
Seriously, I can’t see how you watched the same series I did and took away ‘art movie’ from it. Yes, the animation is stunning and the drama fairly good, especially in 2nd Gig, with the ‘courtroom drama’ of Episode 10: TRIAL (Togusa being put on trial after he tried to stop a rich socialist cyborg from killing a woman, and failing). The most artistic episode, of the Oshii style, is Episode 11: affection, which had a similar type of imagery and surreal feel that the second movie did.
January 21st, 2008 - 00:10
When I said art house in my previous comment, I was referring to the GITS and Innocence movies, and *not* SAC/2nd Gig which are, as you point out, belong to different continuities/time lines.
The dark, brooding style of the two movies worked well within their context; I don’t think that would have been sustainable in the context of a tv series. As a result, SAC and 2nd Gig did their thing and were successful and enjoyable. But I didn’t think that the SAC / 2nd Gig vision translated all that well into the OVA/movie format – it didn’t feel quite grand enough for me.
January 21st, 2008 - 01:23
I don’t think SAC was meant to be ‘grand’ or ‘high concept’ the way the first two films were supposed to be. As I indicated, it’s always felt more down to earth in its approach, less pseudo-intellectual (the second film, I feel, suffers from this) and more aimed at the audience as entertainment which takes some of the same ideas but twists them to keep it entertaining rather than pander to the movie critics.
SSS is an OVA, and one that got a TV broadcast over the satellite networks from what I recall, as a PPV movie; a direct-to-DVD type of film, rather than something that you’d find in the theatres like the first two movies. It’s very more more a film in line with the compilation movies (Individual 11, The Laughing Man) than Innocence. Putting them all in the same category is not doing a favor for either the original theatrical films or Solid State Society, in my opinion.
January 21st, 2008 - 09:05
I suppose my expectations were affected by the length (time-wise) of SSS without taking into account that it was a PPV, direct to DVD movie rather than a movie theatre release; as well as being unclear about the genealogy of the various franchises, thanks for clearing that up.
Re: pseudo-intellectualism. I actually thought Innocence handled it ok in its own way, by conveying it into the ‘man to man’ banter btw Togusa and Batou, making it less angsty and more casual, flippant. It was an interesting difference from the Major’s own philosophizing in the first movie. Funnily enough, I tend to read Innocence as a love story… mainly as Batou still keenly feeling the loss of the Major and found the movie satisfying because it gave him some closure at the end.