GHOST IN THE SHELL 2.0
Rather than Ghost in the Shell: Innocence, which was marketed in the states as Ghost in the Shell 2, this is a partially-reanimated version of the original. As you know, I’m pretty damn obsessed with this movie, so like any true hardcore fangirl I’ll take any variation of the original just for completeness sake.
Right now I’m comparing the Kick-Ass Anime release of the 1995 DVD version and the THORAnime 720p Blu-ray release which are different in plenty of ways aside from the content. But let’s pretend you were shown these two versions of the same film in blu-ray and you can buy one, which should you go for?
First of all, this 2.0 release is from 2008, so the quality of the new digital animation is really high. Probably the thought was trying to update this film to match Innocence, which is absolutely gorgeous and seamlessly uses both digital and conventional animation.
Yet back in 1995 when GitS was first released, its animation was top-notch too. Even now, if you compare the animation and cinematography to other contemporaries, it hasn’t aged very much at all. The 90s feel is unavoidable, though. It’s in the hair styles and fashion and those aren’t things you can just re-animate away. Those character designs are iconic.
So really what you end up with is one or two newly animated scenes, including the opening scene where we are first introduced to Motoko, and the rest of the movie intact. It makes sense to update the computer screens and that sort of thing, but they don’t even update all of those. Really, it’s rather disappointing knowing the work they did on Innocence and how even more gorgeous this film could be if it was given a whole new working over. The original animation is beautiful in its own style, so sticking random CGI in once in a while is just jarring.
Now it’s hard to say whether this is the fault of the KAA release or not since THORA releases are always very good, but the audio quality on 2.0 is amazing. It definitely seems like they re-recorded a lot of the sounds. I’ve seen this movie so many times when something is missing I notice it, or if there’s something that wasn’t there before. Even the voices are slightly different although the dialogue is the same, it makes me wonder if they got the VAs back in to record all over again or just restored the old recordings.
This is especially noticeable in the case of the Puppet Master. In the original, the voice was male although since it’s a sort of AI it has no real sex. In 2.0 the voice is now female. In the original, the fact that the Puppet Master had a rather male voice was jarring because he was trapped in a very female cyborg body. It was an interesting metaphorical point, especially when you hear that voice coming out of Motoko’s body. You have to wonder why they made the change.
And of course we must talk about the subtitles. THORA’s 2.0 release is surprisingly poor. They didn’t indicate where they got the subs so I assume they’re a direct rip from the DVD. If so, it’s not giving a good name to official subs. They totally missed the as in a mirror, darkly reference which is key to the plot, and translated the lines straight up. Which is confusing, because at the end of the movie Motoko recites the next few lines to the poem. If I hadn’t seen this movie before (many, many times…) it would have made no sense. There were some scenes where even I know what the Japanese means and it was translated slightly off. Little things like when the Director calls Motoko “Major” (shousan) they translated it as Kusanagi, her last name. The fact that they call her Major is a big characterization point and I don’t think that’s just me being nitpicky.
The very last scene of 2.0 was reanimated to make the city larger and more busy, making it match Innocence’s feel. It’s a nice touch. But really that’s the only time the new animation was a positive influence rather than just seemingly tacked on.
The original stands on its own, even after fifteen years. While a remake is an excellent idea and is working well for Evangelion, in this case it was done half-assedly to a film that really requires you go all or nothing. You might as well watch the original, you will lose none of the content and the animation is still sexy as hell. Even if the two films were the same price on the rack I would go with the original just because of the fact that they remade the opening scene, which I really like the way it was.
Tags: ghost in the shell, laudation, non-fiction, review
