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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.
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.
More evidence that popularity is not an indication of quality.
"A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing." - Alan Perlis
*puts on vader helmet* DO NOT WANT!!!!!!!\
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
The SAC mini series is great; but the surreal feeling you are talking about from stand alone complex is minimal when compared to the full original movie :)
Its a matter of opinion, but I like the SAC series better than the movies mostly because its more down to earth or in a sense it strives to deal with modern issues in a new context of a society on the verge of dealing with a technological singularity.
That and it often follows into more detail about the lives secondary characters like Batou and Togusa.
The movies are of course better visually and theatric wise, but the SAC series is one of the better Anime series out there to date.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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.)
If you haven't seen the original version of the first ghost in the shell then you should find a copy of it and watch it.
Or better, find a copy of the manga and read that. It's so much better that there's no effective basis for comparison.
Same here... I still remember the episode that largely took place in a chat room as one of my favorites. GitS is good action, but the plot is why I watch.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
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!