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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.
I don't know. On one hand, sounds like a good idea. On the other, some crappy Hollywood writer will find a way to fuck it up.
it is way more popular and has a large fan-base in america
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When I first read this, I thought "Cool!" I'm a big fan of the anime. However, with a series like Ghost in the Shell, one almost has to worry that Hollywood will take the signature wheels-within-wheels plot lines will and severely dumb them down for us "simpleton audiences" on this side of the big pond. Hopefully not; we'll have to wait and see.
3d bewbs -n- bullets ftw.
You'd think so, but actually Stephen Spielburg is Steven Spielberg's non-union equivalent. Sort of like Senor Spielbergo is his Mexican non-union equivalent.
You might think it odd that he would have his own non-union counterpart working at his company Dreamworks, but actually that's a typo in the summary. The actual company that bought the rights is Dreamworks' non-union equivalent, Dreemwerx.
as a GitS fan, I should be excited by this, but why do i have a feeling that Hollywood will water-down, bastardize and destroy everything that makes the original great?
(and yes, i am talking about the beautiful nude scenes with the stealth suits breaking off. it was beautifully done.)
please, be faithful to the original.
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How about releasing a version of GiTS2: Innocence that's dubbed into English first for those of us who want to be able to look at the art and not have to read all the subtitles?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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
Why do I get the feeling that Tom Cruise is somehow gonna get cast in the movie?
Great, now she's gonna be running around fighting baddies with... a RADIO. And they will be shooting back at her... with RADIOS.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
"I hope they add a talking donkey."
/me ducks
Sorry, but I believe Hillary will be on the campaign trail for at least a little while longer.
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.
the medium is CG or cel animation. anime is the genre of japanese animation. the genre is also cyberpunk. amazingly enough movies can belong to more than one genre.
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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A 3D vision movie you watch through red-green glasses?
A 3D first person shooter?
All of the that? None of that?
-- LP-Research
"Is there anything Hollywood won't shit on?"
So, let's see: Tom Cruise can play Batou. I know Batou is suppoed to be a big dude, and Tom Cruise is 4' 10", but I'm sure Cruise's face can easily be CGI'd onto a big, special effects body. Maybe they can also CGI in some acting ability. Jessica Simpson can play the Major. I know she's not Japanese--hell, she's a blonde--but what does that matter? We can wrap her in some tight, revealing costumes and no one will notice her from the neck up! She's made for the part! And instead of Japan, it can take place in L.A. And instead of hunting criminal, they'll hunt terrorists. Or maybe people who are mean to puppies. Or they guy who yesterday put whole milk instead of skim into Spielberg's latte.
Now, please excuse me while I got stick forks in my eyes.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
> I hope they add a talking donkey.
Slightly O/T, but this brings up an interesting question: can't anybody in the world use Jar-Jar Binks without legally infringing on Lucas' copyright, since Binks is a pre-packaged parody of himself? (The same would apply to the donkey in Shrek, though perhaps more so since he's just Eddie Murphy and is the same character in so many things it would be hard to argue a new copyright existed just because he was a talking ass.)
--
IANAL. This post is a joke. If you use it as legal advice, you probably deserve to get sued.
I think the OP means that a live action version is a good idea, not necessarily a Spielberg version.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
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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.
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.
2D Live Action ...the possible permutations are endless. Use your imagination.
3D Dead Action
3D Live Comedy
1D Live Drama
4D Dead Romance
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.
Actually he has been active, just doing standalone art (he does a lot of stuff for prepaid phone cards and the like) and more recently he's been developing the story concepts for shows instead of directly developing his own work. Ghost Hound last season and Real Drive which is currently airing in Japan are both based on story concepts by Shirow.
I don't know if I would have called AI a sugar-fest. The best description I've heard of it was that it had all the warm characterization of a Stanley Kubrick film, coupled with the hard-nosed realism of a Spielberg flick.
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.)
As a GitS fan, I am exciting but at the same time worried about what 'Western' adaption of GitS would look like. Also although the original GitS movie was good, the SAC season I and II series are superior in the sense that fully a full 26 episode season really allowed the story and its universe to be examined in detail, something that a movie can never truly do.
With that said, I'd still be eager to see Hollywood version of GitS, even if I may very well end up hating it.
I can't say that I'm entirely sad that Michael Bay isn't creating an Alita movie. Sure he may be preventing other people from working on it, but at least we won't have to sit through a summer blockbuster where she hacks Tiphares with a mac and everything explodes constantly.
I read the internet for the articles.
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. 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 :)
They are all good, but then again I am avid fan of Motoko. If you get the chance then I highly recommend getting the graphic novels, since not only is the artwork amazing, the stories are good and seeing all the little comments Masamune Shirow puts in really helps understand some stuff.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Mod parent troll, please. Battle Angel is a Cameron project, not a Bay project.
Which is good. With Bay we would have gotten decent pacing, top-knotch effects, good cinematography, massive continuity errors and zero rewatchability.
With Cameron, we'll get great pacing, excellent visual effects, killer cinematography.... and Celine Dion.
The idea shortage in Hollywood continues. As Harper's pointed out, more than half of the top-grossing movies of 2007 were sequels where N > 2.
Cartoon (not comic) to live action translation hasn't been that great. "Boris and Natasha: The Movie" (1992) was something of a flop, as was "Dudly Do-Right" (1999). A third try, "The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle" (2000) was a dud, too, although it was at least funny. "Underdog" (2007) is the most recent dud.
"The Flintstones" (1994) was one of the few successes. "Casper" (1995) was a success, mainly because CG animation had become good enough to be used convincingly with live actors. Those had the novelty of a cartoon as live action. But that's been done now, and the novelty has worn off.
Comic books have been a more fruitful source of material, enough so that Marvel now has its own movie studio.
We've talked with the people at Dreamworks, and here's a quick list of the improvements that they hope to bring to the latest installation in the Ghost in the Shell franchise:
10. Cute kid to follow everyone around and ask a lot of questions
9. Helpless female with nasal voice that screams a lot and has to be rescued over and over
8. Less edgy animation so that American audience doesn't find it quite so jarring
7. Speaking of jarring, do you think we could borrow Jar-jar from Lucas?
6. Deep philosophical conundrums replaced with pop psychology and Jedi aphorisms.
5. More clothing to avoid the R rating
4. More senseless violence to fill in the parts we had to take out.
3. A properly evil villain so people know who to hate.
2. Good old-fashioned technobabble.
1. A talking Donkey (Nice call, Rob!)
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
How about we just say that it sucked and leave it at that?
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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'.
If you missed the ending you might have the misconception that it was a good film.
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!