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Anime, Manga and the world of Ghost in the Shell
"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn't have to have any goddamn stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something they'd have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They'd get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I'd be through with having conversations for the rest of my life. Everybody'd think I was just a poor deaf mute bastard and they'd leave me alone..." - J.D. Salinger
It is official: I am an otaku. It is all because of Ghost in the Shell. The movies, the series, the soundtracks, the PSP videogame, the Japanese import books, etc. I am completely absorbed in it. It is even inspiring me to work on some design projects like the Laughing Man logo, the Jameson-type, the Seishinkouki Blue Heart Micromachining logo, and of course, the images of Motoko Kusanagi. I hope the fonts in the Blue Heart logo look okay. I don't know Japanese fonts, so forgive me if they are sloppy.
Hope you like the rotating Laughing Man logo from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex that I have featured throughout the site. Props to J.D. Salinger, the Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex Committee and Paul Nicholson who created the "twisted pop icon". It was my first Adobe Illustrator project, and I am very pleased. All Copyrights with respect to Ghost In The Shell are retained by their original copyright holders. I simply offer my sincerest flattery to them. The photos of the girl are from Timo Maas and his Loud album that came out a few years back. She is so expressive that I thought she'd was a perfect fit with the Laughing Man logo.
I don't think there will be any more Ghost in the Shell series or movies. If you have read the manga and watched all the videos, then you know they have pretty much taken much of the stories from the manga to make the anime. Some of it has even been rehashed from one video series to the next. For instance Motoko shooting out a plate glass window and using her thermoptic camo to fly out the window and disappear.
The reason I don't think there will be any more GITS is because they are out of material to copy from. Let's face it, Solid State Society had several parts that had no place in the movie, but they needed something to fill it out. Seeing those scenes copied from the manga and inserted for the heck of it into SSS made me think. For instance, there really wasn't any need to have the Raj Puto sniping incident in the movie. It was tacked on to fill time and give screen time to other characters. And since the manga basically storyboarded all the GIST stuff until now, the novels are useless in creating new materials.
Unless the scriptwriters go in the new direction of GITS 2 Man Machine Interface, with new characters, a complete separation from the current cast, then they got nothin'. Maybe Shirow Masamune can be convinced to create more stuff, but otherwise I don't hold out much hope for anything new.
All Ghost in the Shell designs are Copyright Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex Committee.
Ghost in the Shell, some random thoughts
The Laughing Man Incident
The Laughing Man Incident in GITS Stand Alone Complex was the main story arc of that season. It was a tale of medical/governmental corruption and collusion. It was loosely based on a real incident from 1984 called the Glico-Morinaga case. Check it out as it is pretty fascinating. Reminds me so much of the brilliant Akira Kurosawa movie High and Low about a kidnapping of a child involving a businessman.
The Individual Eleven
It occurs to me that the entire world of GITS is one of alienation and loneliness. With all the technological advances of the modern age, are we better of as people, personally, individually?
I finally watched SSS A while back. I saved the viewing of the DVD for the right long weekend because I really wanted to dig into it, watch it a few times, watch all the DVD extras. Wow! I was blown away. The story line was just so fantastic. Noble Rot senior citizens hooked up to the nursing net, children abducted and brainwashed to be part of a new ultra-nationalistic ruling class, becoming the heirs of those seniors. Major Kusanagi wandering the Net for two years only to come back to Section 9 when she couldn't find what she was looking for. In fact, she didn't even know what it was she was looking for. Like all of us. It leads back to the whole loneliness of that world, which is really a reflection of our world and where we are headed.
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This page last updated on 28 June 2009
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