Over the past few weeks, I sat down to watch all of the visual media half of the Ghost in the Shell franchise, in part, to get myself ready for the new Netflix release of Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045. Would we be getting a reboot of something familiar, or a bolder approach into a new story? I hoped for the latter, as Kamiyama Kenji was one of the directing forces. So far from the opening episode, I have not been disappointed.
This story begins in 2045, two years into the “sustainable war” begun by the American Empire. Section 9 has been disbanded, but Kusanagi, Batou, Saito and Ishikawa are still working together when the story begins. And they appear to have both Tachikoma and Logikoma with them.
The animation is wholly CGI, but as used as we are to CGI games now, this is no longer the affront to the sensibilities it was in 2008. In fact, my first thought on seeing the animation during the opening action scene was “good gaming mechanics.”
Obviously, with a set-up that is set in both our future and a future within the story, this isn’t attempting to be part of a continuity in any meaningful way. The Prime Minister from SAC: 2nd Gig makes a cameo in a photo. But the story feels very much like a manga story, as opposed to an anime and, again, my first thought was that with the current setup and the opening scene, this series felt very much like it “belongs to” the Global Neural Network manga anthology published by Kodansha in 2018…an anthology I really liked and which, having been done under Shirow’s watch is considered by him to be canon. In that sense, we can think of 2045 as an additional entry in that anthology. ^_^
I expected the opening to be the “building a cyborg body” segment – I was not disappointed. But I quite enjoyed that the body is now 3-D printed. The rest of the segment is, as it always has been, low-key prurience. The music was a pretty clear indication that we were getting something a little less “Japan of the future,” and indeed, we open the story in an American Pacific which looks like it has been overtaken by the desert it more properly belongs to, if the golf courses were left to die. As another bridge to an American audience, Section 9 has a new recruit, Stan, subtly nicknamed Clown so you know exactly the level of respect America has in this series right from the get-go. ^_^
Since her sexuality is something we’ve talked about in the past, I want to nod to the scene where the hookers are checking Kusangi out. I’m okay with this.
Ratings will be held until after I’ve watched the whole thing, but…
Overall so far – 8
What I now look forward to is this iteration’s balance of dive into the meaning of personhood/self and action series…and I hope it gives us the multiple-identitied Major that I’d really like to see explored.
