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Dreamworks Acquires Rights for Ghost in the Shell
Anonymous GiTS fan noted a Variety story informing us that DreamWorks has acquired the rights to Ghost in the Shell and has plans to produce a "3D Live Action" version of the popular anime. This happened apparently because Spielberg is a fan. He says "'Ghost in the Shell' is one of my favorite stories ... It's a genre that has arrived, and we enthusiastically welcome it to DreamWorks." I hope they add a talking donkey.
Does anyone else get a sort of Outer Limits/Twilight Zone feel when they watch Ghost in the Shell? I've only been exposed to what's on Adult Swim but for some reason I liken each episode to those shows. Something odd or peculiar is happening and there is a startling revelation at the end of the episode. I know on the surface it's just a police thriller with sci-fi themes of artificial intelligence and robotics but I still get this feel. I also get the same feel when reading a Philip K. Dick or some of Ray Bradbury's short stories.
Then again, when watch Cowboy Bebop I feel like it's modern day Clint Eastwood western with the shiny veneer of space. And I just read The Watchmen for the first time last week and it felt more like a philosophical analysis of power than a simple graphic novel.
Despite what many times goes wrong with movie adaptations, I welcome this as it will expose the Ghost in the Shell themes to younger people without the insane licensing fees I've come across when trying to acquire this anime.
My work here is dung.
Sure Ghost in the Shell is quality hard edge cyberpunk style sci-fi but as far as I can tell there is nothing left in the story to tell. This probably means that anything Dreamworks makes will be a rehash of previous material which isn't automatically bad but not something some will automatically look forward too.
I predict some cyber-gang up to cyber-shenanigans vs Public Security Section 9 with a ethical/philosophical twist. It can work but they better not slack on the quality or they'll risk alienating the mainstream and the hard core fan base.
Make up your mind: it's either good, bad or just another medium out there, no more prone (nor less) to being misused than any other comic (or any kind of art, actually). For some definition of misused, that is.
Anime.. a genre? What are you talking about? Anime is a medium like live action and cg. The genre Spielberg is talking about would be cyberpunk. All your bizarre opinions about the medium aside, your post is based on a flawed premise. Ghost in the Shell is closer to Blade Runner than it is to Sailor Moon.
The seekers do no need truth, the seekers do find truth and the finding do be painful
They may not go after the anime audience, expecting them to watch weather or not it is good. If they do this right, many people will go see it. It has very deep and Matrix-like ideas (I believe Ghost came first). I am not a fan of anime, but I have seen the first Ghost In The Shell movie and enjoyed it. I watched it in a college film class on movie theater equipment. It all has to do with marketing it properly.
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
Well established precedent?
Seriously, until recently any treatment of a comic-book or video game inspired subject was done completely badly by Hollywood. X-Men and some of the better ones seem to have done a good job by being true to the material. But, you still get some pretty badly done adaptations as the one studio decides that since another studio did well with a good comic adaptation, they should be able to get away with one too.
The problem is, sometimes the people adapting the material don't understand it, don't respect it, and don't know what to do with it. The result is something that the core fans don't like, that the people who have never heard of it can't figure out, and generally turns out to be a crappy movie.
I have no confidence whatsoever that Dreamworks can capture the feel and mood of Ghost in the Shell. I think you'll end up with some POS film adaptation which will be overly clunky and gimmicky, and it won't be able to tell a story. Some things are best left in anime since you have so much more freedom with the medium.
This all comes down to who does it -- get Bryan Singer or someone who has been able to deal with some of the Marvel stuff well, and you have a chance. Get Uwe Boll, and we're all screwed.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Another amazing anime story line that will be destroyed with American directors dumbing it down to be a blockbuster hit.
I don't expect this to be a good thing in anyway. A great example would be what hollywood did to the aeon flux comic book / cartoon.
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More evidence that popularity is not an indication of quality.
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*puts on vader helmet* DO NOT WANT!!!!!!!\
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This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I watched GiTS in the original Japanese, then I started to watch an episode overdubbed in English. Man the voices sucked. For me GiTS is nothing without Atsuko Tanaka's rendering of the Major. If they switch to English they've gone and lost at least one customer.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Happily, when they can actually release a dub with quality voice actors - as in, sometime around never.
Voice acting for big releases in Japan pays well and is a huge business - think of the star quality you get in a Disney movie.
Dubs of anime films are usually done by studios specializing in bringing as many anime films over as possible as cheap as possible, and use voice acting roughly on par with cheap children's programs.
It's like watching Star Wars with Sir Alec Guinness's award winning voice replaced by some guy just out of community college theatre, who is also doing the voice of Leia using a bad falsetto.
Combine that with the consistent problem of bad obnoxious translations ("Believe it!") and the core, unavoidable issue that different languages have entirely different pacings to them (ie, trying to fit the whole english translation of a sentence into the same amount of time as the japanese sounds ridiculously forced and unnatural) and you can see why quite a few people would really prefer subtitles. With a little practice you can read it fast enough to go watch the screen at the same time. I've noticed it's only people who have only watched one or two subbed movies in their life who seem to have problems keeping up with it -- but most of them pick it up fairly well by the end of a series.
And yeah, we are certainly going to have a form of stylized 3D. The scifi-subset of anime sounds like a very obvious candidate for pioneering work in the field.
Hand-drawing every single frame of a movie just doesn't make sense these days. Computers can draw much better for the same price, and a director can do things like change his mind about a scene and redraw it. Humans are slightly less happy to see their hard labor being scrapped. And the particle effects and physics are plain evil difficult to draw. That's a bunch of reasons off the top of my head.
Yes, I know there is a lot more to anime than "stylized 2D". But with computers doing the 3D drudge work the designers can focus on getting all the storyline, atmosphere and artistic details just right.
I lost my sig.
Read faster?
They simply couldn't have run out of ideas.
I am pretty bummed about this. I think there's a good chance that Masamune Shirow did. He was displaced by the Kobe earthquake and the rumor has it that he's been in declining health for a number of years. His newer work hasn't really been story oriented... when it's come out at all. The writing team for the series did a great job of rearranging and expanding his stories, but the challenge of keeping things fresh seems great.
Then there's the problem of concepts that were once innovative being absorbed into the mainstream of pop culture: If your stories stay the same, you become a has-been. If you change them to suit the audience you're a sellout. Or you can develop something different entirely. If he develops his work further I wouldn't be surprised if he decided to work on Appleseed again.
It would be neat to see them try the main arc of the first season of Stand Alone Complex, to see the world's premiere meme factory fuck up a story about an prolific, errant meme. Some sort of irony or something.
Well, that's your opinion, and you're entitled to it.
I find that those stories are open ended enough that you can bring your own interpretation to it. Simple, closed-ended allegory in which everything is wrapped up for you all nicely in a package is lame. And, is usually what we get in Western cinema. One of the things I like about the story lines in Anime is there is more room for ambiguity and shades of gray. They're not going to spoon feed you what it right or wrong, and they're not going to tie off all of the threads for you.
Just because you don't like or appreciate a little more open ended thing which is subject to some interpretation doesn't mean it's neither a good literary device nor interesting to some of us. It actually involves thinking about it, and coming up with your own interpretations.
The parts you don't like are the parts that are appealing to some of us.
And there are an equal number of people who can say how lame something is that they don't get -- and assume that if they don't get it it has no merit. In the end, if you don't like Anime, don't watch it. You can keep the Tom Cruise films or anything with Will Farrell in it -- I'll go for something a little more though provoking.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
the medium is CG or cel animation. anime is the genre of japanese animation.
There is no genre called "japanese animation", anymore than there is a genre called "Hollywood movies" or "silent films". These are not genres.
A genre describes a work's "aboutness". It's a broad category that describes a set of themes. "Japanese animation" does not do that, and hence it is not a genre. All you know if somebody tells you a work is Japanese animation is that it was produced in Japan and if there is spoken dialogue, it's probably in Japanese. You know nothing of what the themes or aesthetics might be.
The Simpsons is animated in Korea. Does that makes the series' genre "Korean Animation"?
This is film theory 101. (Literally. That's the class I learned it in, 15 years ago.)
The only way I need to express my dissatisfaction with Mr. Boll is to simply not see his movies.
To loosely paraphrase a well known quote, I may hate his movies, but I defend his right to make them and for people to watch them.
Signing a petition to ask him to stop doing it just seems rather pointless to me. I'll vote with my wallet, thank you.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
No, but I doubt someone who starts asserting that anime is "nothing more" than a legal outlet for paedophiles (as in anime being some kind of low level trash comic) will consider any anime good: painting anime in such broad brush strikes doesn't leave much place for consdering qualities. As such, his saying there is good anime looks too much like a troll (and it probably is).
More and more I've come to the conclusion that The Incredibles is my favorite super-hero movie. Granted, it was done in CG so they had much more latitude than a live-action movie. However, the story line was great and you got a sense of depth to each of the characters that you just don't normally see. If it wasn't for the fact that Pixar is too firmly in the 'family' movie camp to be able to get away with the boobies/violence in Ghost in The Shell, I'd think they could do a really interesting movie set in that realm. Note: I didn't say 'remake' I said 'new'.
Ok, I realize that you're probably just trolling at this point, but what the hell.
Well, there's a lot one can say here, but it's important to remember that movies are (gasp) entertainment.
So basically what you're saying is that reading isn't entertainment?
I'm afraid the enlightened cosmopolitan movie watcher thing is rather laughable at times. It's a disease most prevalent in community college students and high school kids trying to shore up their self-esteem. The fact that a Blockbuster employee would stand behind a desk in one of those polyester polo shirts and be appalled at the plebeian tastes of patrons also hurts my head..or my funny bone, not sure which.
I don't really know where to start. First of all, believe it or not, yes there are people who actually care about the quality of the movies they're watching, and who are open to watching more than the latest gorefest. Secondly, as for you remark about my job at Blockbuster, it was just that, a job. Nothing about it defined me, just as nothing about my current job (as a software engineer) defines me. The fact that you decided to make it a point in your post says more about you than it does about me (especially so considering that you decided to post anonymously).
As someone who is genuinely multilingual and a trained linguist, I must also point out that for many of the world's languages, no, you wouldn't catch any significant nuances by hearing the original and reading the subtitles. European languages are easy; do you really think you'd be able to pick up subtle nuances in Turkish or Farsi that a good voice actor couldn't reproduce with proper direction. Are you even aware of how few universals there are with respect to suprasegmental features?
You're multilingual, good for you. I still call BS however. I speak/read/write Spanish and Japanese (though admittedly not fluently in either one), and I can say from personal experience that there is definitely a loss of nuance when dubbing is used. You're either very new to picking up languages, or you aren't nearly as good at them as you obviously think you are.
As for effectively reproducing these nuanced with properly directed voice actors, I agree that it's certainly possible, but it's also extremely rare. More often the studio is only interested in getting the filmed dubbed and out the door because foreign markets are typically after sales and the owners don't want to spend money on voice acting.
I can't help but think that the very act of watching foreign films demonstrates some openness to other cultures already. You think those vulgar masses fail to appreciate that a film is foreign because it's dubbed?
Sorry, but I disagree again. You wouldn't believe the number of people who pick up any random movie that has a cover that caught their eye only to find out after the fact that it was a foreign film. I'm not saying that this covers every case, but it still happens and probably more often than you think it does.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
I remember visiting my cousin and watching her subtitled Sailor Moon movie. I noticed two things:
First, it sounds a lot less retarded in Japanese. That's probably partly because I can't understand what they're saying, but probably also because it seems to be the same exact group of voice actors doing every single English dub of Anime. Kind of ruins it for me to have Shinji of Evangeleon sound exactly like Goku of DragonBall Z.
I do feel better about it being a reasonably large company getting the rights, though. When Disney does Studio Ghibli movies, they actually get talented people -- and different people -- to do the voices. (Patrick Stewart was in Nausicaa, I think.)
Second thing: While I had to have this pointed out to me (no way I was going to sit through the movie again), there was a fair amount of censorship just from the subbed version to the dubbed version. I assume they were both US releases... Apparently, two of the older Sailor Scouts are lesbians, and there's no secret made of it in the subbed version -- but dialog like "There are so many fun things to do when you're an adult!" get completely dropped in the dubbed version.
If they can manage to screw up Sailor Moon, imagine what they'd do to things like Ghost in the Shell?
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And I suppose making the guys "cutesy" serves the same purpose? Or, for that matter, the cute children? It's made pretty clear who is what in anime.
Not that this really deserves a response. To even suggest such a thing is some combination paranoia, trolling, and a revelation -- what kind of a sick mind looks at Ghost in the Shell and calls it pedophilia?
I thought it was nothing more than an outlet for pedophiles? Make up your mind -- is it for pedophiles, or for toddlers?
Actually, you said exactly that.
WTF? I don't remember Spirited Away having anything to do with the future.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!