Mamoru Oshii
Ghost In The Shell

I tried, also instigated by currents of greater force, to like manga action figures and various Japanese pop culture items but nothing: the comics read backwards, balloon-like eyes, the fuku are not for me… I search, search, search but I never find that latent ethos typical of the book - a narrative that allows imaginative inferences - or of the feature film – a projection that creates a transcendental fade in the viewer…

Allow me to create a mental architecture of possible worlds or, on the contrary, to ramble and conjecture beyond the frame outlined by the Camera…

The comic, the so-called middle ground, ends up debilitating the peculiarities of both one and the other and, in my very personal opinion, is of almost evanescent emotionality…

In short: what pleasure can art provide, what art is an art that has no other interpretation than the purely tangible one, already inscribed in its content???

Not that the Japanese lack creativity, to be clear, (I don't change my perspective because to appreciate the badass Section 9 I had to watch the anime) but to find the aforementioned ethos, I need to feel cradled by the cybernetic frames, something that gives color to those faded captions, that makes me shiver and shoot from cervical to the soles of my feet with irreproducible hormonal impulses…

"Ghost in the shell" is born from a strongly Orwellian cyberpunk concept which, after 2001 and Neuromancer, completes the circle of interpretations on the immeasurable conflict between man and machine; that is, the first (see Major Kusanagi) in fervent search of the sidereal expansion of one's self, and the second (project 2501) being “the perfect cognitive extension”: the so-called creativity within calculation - and here intervenes the strong comparison with Hal 9000 of which there is a strong vocal resemblance - which pushes to repudiate the algorithmic malleability inherent in the computer [by its very creators, in this case the  corrupt Section 6] as a bug, and as is evident from the vision, forced to find a volatile physical universe (birth – life – death – reproduction) to be able to imprint tangibly and not just psycho-cybernetically its own creative coercion.

The film's greatest merit is the contrast between the weak, and otherwise little explored, evolution of the plot and the gigantic screenplay, which, although contained in just over 70 minutes, succeeds in the arduous task of making the protagonists' synaptic shocks our own, the deep sense of resignation given by the growing subjugation of the soul to the brain's serotonin pressures, and the constant and relentless sense (and this matrix is heavily indebted to) of feeling like boundaries that are fragile and easily permeable by the external environment, ready to hack and compress our synapses, until making us aspire to a new meta-reality.

Technically, more than positive mention for the excellent soundtrack, especially for how it is conceived: even in its now syncopated, now martial cadence, it manages to be a carpet of reflection on the hypertechnological and at the same time metropolitan and decadent environment, the true hub of the human condition.                                   

…Anyway, one day I swear I'll buy the "Ghost in the shell" paper version, I'll appreciate it to the point of telling the anime to go to hell with all my heart, and you'll call me a fool until I delete myself from the site; hopefully late. But until then, you just shouldn't bother me J ok? With all due respect to Diabolik and Topolino which I adore…

Forgive the strong personal imprint contained in the review…