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Review of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
Lawrence Person writes "Given how the series itself touches on so many topics near and dear to the hearts of Slashdotters everywhere, I thought my review of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (first season) at Locus Online would be of interest. It is longer and more in-depth than the average review, and touches on GitS:SAC's relationship to obvious cyberpunk and postcyberpunk source material, the elements that make it unique among anime science fiction, the role of P2P networks in popularizing anime, and how GitS:SAC compares to the other great science fiction TV show currently on the air right now, Battlestar Galactica."
I have prevented any lame trolls from getting the first post.
I still own and enjoy many anime series, however. As I'm sure all slashdot readers are familiar with, Shinichiro Watanabe has two series that are particularly well done. Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo are two series that I particularly enjoy. They have great plot lines that usually don't depend too heavily on the viewer to know a lot of background knowledge about the technology used in the show. Watanabe seems to be a master at taking pretty simple plot lines and mixing in great characters to get a light anime that's easy to enjoy. On top of that, those two series amazingly blend together two different genres and cultures which probably make them even more appealing to myself.
Then, there's another kind of anime I really like--which is old school hack-and-slash animes such as Vampire Hunter D. Again, you can pretty much sum the movies into one sentence and you don't need much else. Great stuff to throw popcorn in your mouth to.
Maybe I'm just a stupid American who wants cheap entertainment that I don't have to work for, but I sure hate watching a show and not being able to understand what's going on if I missed the other episodes.
My work here is dung.
Season two ("Second GIG") is finished and a third one is rumored. Was about time people started talking about it (outside anime-centric sites that is :-)).
My advise: if you watched the movies and found them to hard to follow, don't worry. The series are closer to the source material and despite some odd episodes (like the one covering a online chat session and nothing more), it's really worth it.
The season finale is incredible.
"You superiour intellect is no match for our puny weapons" - The Simpsons
I'm interested in watching much more Ghost in the Shell and getting caught up with it- I watched what I believe to be the first movie from 1995 a few months ago but I'm not sure if i've jumped in in the middle of the story.
Could someone in the know please tell the noobs here what we should watch to get everything in, and what order we should watch it in. I'm mildy offtopic but I think if this review has piqued anyone's interest, some info on how to catch up on what we've missed would be excellent.
Thanks!
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
Odd, that the series hasn't had more attention on /., because it touches the subjects that slashdotters are sensitive to. GITS tries very logically to describe tomorrow's hi-tech world, where giant corporations are in power and government can easily spy on anyone (wait, it's not tomorrow's world :). I also like the political depth of GITS, because it places constraints on what is possible to do, and thereby makes the series more realistic.
Who is John Galt?
The original manga had Fuchikomas, puckish AI tanks. The Ghost in the Shell movie sorely lacked them. The series finally got this right (in a slightly modified form as Tachikomas). In fact, the movie lacked a lot of the manga's cool innovations and feel, while the series came much closer. It almost seems like Masamune Shirow had more input into the series, but it's hard to know.
I'm a real sucker for the Tachikoma.
Something about having AIs with child-like curiosity (and voices to match---well, at least in the original audio, not so much in the dub (however, despite my being a sub snob, I will admit that the dub is acceptable to watch)) in high-performance, well-armed machines really does it for me.
The reviewer states that the first season will set you back about a benjamin if you buy it on DVD. Meanwhile, a season of the Simpsons or Futurama is at most $40, and you can get it for under $30 if you are good at hunting bargains, so why is anime so much more expensive? I know it costs a little more to produce, plus you have translations etc. but I fail to see how that is $60 worth of services. However, the Americans can buy it for much cheaper than in Japan or as far as I can tell Europe(It's about $60 per dvd for some series in Japan, and I saw a bunch of anime at a comic book shop in Austria going for no less than 30 euros. But that same store was also selling a snoop dog action figure for 65, so they may not be representative)
I'd buy more anime if it was priced sa
Monstar L
Cartoon Network Adult Swim is running episodes on Saturday nights at midnight and 3am Eastern currently, along with another great series running right after it: Fullmetal Alchemist.
However, both shows are currently in the middle of their second seasons in the rotation on AS. Stand Alone Complex's second season (aka "2nd GIG") has a plotline relatively unrelated to the first season, so you don't necessarily have to watch the first season first, but there are plot elements that will make more sense if you watch a particular season from the start.
Fullmetal Alchemist's two seasons are almost all arc episodes, meaning that if you plan to start watching it, you should start from the beginning of the first season (in other words, at this point you'll have to rent or buy the DVDs).
This is just a way to tell a story. The other way is to introduce a story from the very beginning to the very end, but this means you can spend far less time on the middle. Sci-Fi like this wich at least pretends to want to ask a moral question without force feeding you the answer doesn't really have an "ending" anyway. It just puts a situation to you and then asks you to consider it.
So don't worry about feeling there are things happening outside the picture (as in motion picture clever pun ne?... though crowd) there are. They just don't matter. Well UNTIL the movie became very popular and they could be used to make sequels and prequels out of it.
Should you read the manga? Well perhaps, is a bit like asking wether you should watch the animatrix before watching the matrix movies. If your a fan then sure, gobble it all up. If not, well you started with the movie. That is a nice introduction BUT it was based on a manga (strip/comic). You might want to start here. The manga spawned a sequel with the imaginative name Ghost in the Shell 2 (yeah those crazy japanese). This in turn spawned a tv series. And finally a movie.
If you really want to know the story, read the manga. It is what everything else is based on. Just be warned that it has a different style.
Oh and if you decide to plunge in to the seedy underbelly of the net that is the anime/manga forum please do not proudly boast that you watched ghost in the shell. It is kinda of like going to a sci-fi con having only seen Star Wars. Or like posting on /. using windows XP.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
One thing that's rather glossed over is Shirow Masamune's writing style itself. The manga in original Japanese was very complex, and written in mostly in kanji (chinese characters) which has caused even the average Japanese difficulties in understanding it. To give you an idea of the use of kanji, the common Japanese only needs to know about 500 or so kanji to be literate, resorting to hiragana and katakana the rest of the time. The common Chinese needs 1200 (Since it's all chinese characters).
This is very normal of Shirow's style as his writing and stories and a partial reason of why his stories are quite intricate. To give you an idea, it would be like comparing the writing styles of JK Rowling to William Gibson, one is very simple and easy to read, the other is very high-level and in-depth. Even Shirow's earlier works like Appleseed (Which is also very good), Black Magic, Dominion Tank Police, etc., are very detailed and intricate if you dig down into the origial versions of them, which unfortuantely is lost when much of it is translated. Even the bloke that brought the material over (I can't remember his name, Terrance-something-or-other I think), and knows the reclusive Shirow once complained that even he had problems).
The complexity of the socio-economoic, political, and contempoary moral issues that is personified in GITS:SAC is what sets it apart from shows like Cowboy Bebop (Which I also loved, I'm still trying to find one of the limited edition box sets). It's in a different genre of anime (yes there are a ton of genres in Anime) and definitely not comparable to Cowboy Bebop. Both are fun, likable, and are a treat for your senses, but CB is more entertainment while GITS:SAC is more a commentary. It's like Starship Troopers vs. 2010; They're both movies about space, but you watch one to be entertained, and you watch the other to be inspired.
GITS:SAC actually takes place pre-GITS manga, but does overlap and transmutate into some section of the manga. Avid GITS fans will draw the parallel of Kusanagi getting snipered in the TV series, and her body getting shot in the manga, as well as many other similarities that do occur between the two. It's one of those "Let's retell the story, but change a few things around to make it work, even though it'll screw up the interdepencies". Any avid Asian film buff will know what I'm talking about, it happens quite often even in "live" movies (i.e. Windstruck and My Sassy Girl).
One other thing to mention is that the 2 movies were Oshii's movies. Oshii tends to take this weird spin on the GITS world, and often leave out a lot of the details Shirow puts in, and more often than naught, substitutes his own views and imagery in (Read: the damn basset hounds). If anyone's ever seen Oshii's "Avalon", you'll know what I'm talking about. The style and subject matter is the same as the 2 GITS movies, and so is the way he presents his imagery (and the damn basset hounds again). Shirow has always defered creative control to Oshii in the movies, but has retained it, and works very closely with Production IG for the SAC series. Hence, this is much more true to the feel of the original manga, and is greatly departed from the movies, hence the additional complexity. It's almost an impossibility to compare the TV series (both of them) to the movie due to the differences in direction.
-Misao Little Weasel Girl
In Japan, anime DVD's are much more expensive. In the case of series, they tend to pay per episode as opposed to per disc. A single disc with three episodes could cost $45 or more. If prices in the US were drastically lower, most people in Japan would simply import their anime from us. If that happened, the Japanese companies would stop licensing source material to the US because it would cost them too much money.
I think that the general opinion is that it can be good, and bad.
For a good series, a fansub will generate a lot of interest, and mostly people (well... at lease most of the people i know) will go and buy it on DVD when it comes out. Because it is a "must have" in their collection.
But, for an average series, the opposite tends to happen, people will watch the fansub, then they probably won't bother to buy it on DVD when it comes out because they've already seen it, and it wasn't good enough for them to spend money on.
Its a bit different now, but I knew fansubbing clubs back in teh 90's that would only release things that weren't released State side. Mostly because they were aware of copyright violations and internet p2p hadn't taken off then.
From my recolection many series would not have been released in the states if it had not been for the Fansubbers and the reaction to those tapes going around. Even if you did get a VHS copy from Japan you still wouldn't know what they are saying.
But today we have the internet and things are generally released within a year of being released in Japan now so there isn't that 5-10 year lag between releases in Japan and the States.
But like all piracy, I say that theoretical sales losses are bunk and made up arbitrary numbers by people who have no clue how widespread (or little spread) it is. I'd say piracy affects real sales in a minimal way because most people who pirate that much would never be able to afford all those items with their actual income. Not that I would know anything about internet piracy or what not... I actually bought the whole DVD series and got the nice tin can box for SAC.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
If you take a look at CD Japan and look at how much new region 2 disks are to the Japanese and do your own conversions into Euro/Dollars/Whatever, we are getting a deal. Fate/stay night 1 [Limited Edition] (which is HOT at the moment), is episode 1-3 listed 6190 Yen so it will probably end up being between $55-$50US. Sometime next year, Gennon will release it in the US for about $30 for the same 3 episodes with other goodies (like a box). We are not only getting shows that are filtered (the less popular shows are not offered, material on DVD is often revised and reedited), we are getting it cheaper.
The fact of the matter is that they are charging exactly how much the market seems to support. Anime is now and probably always will be a "fringe element of a fringe element". To make money at the sales rate they support they have to charge this much, which it seems the market is willing pay. In any event, if they are making money now at what is deemed "expensive" what incentive do they have to lower? It is all market forces.
BTW, if you an entire series that seems too cheap, it is probably a bootleg (there are exception but few and far between). Buy it if you wish but realize almost almost nil of any of that money is going back to the talent or producers.