She and her team are hunting the Puppet Master who is hacking into cyborgs all across the city for an unknown reason. “Maybe I died a long time ago…Maybe there never was a real me in the first place,” Kusanagi wonders. The “shell” in question is the cybernetic body of Major Motoko Kusanagi, an elite government agent who is almost entirely artificial, possessing only the barest humanity in the form of organic brain matter. Beyond the visual beauty lies a story about the near future where hackable, always online wearables (in this case cyber augmentation from brain implants to enhanced eyes to replacement bodies) are forcing users to rethink consciousness and what it means to be human. It influenced many subsequent Hollywood films, most notably The Matrix trilogy.
In 1995 Mamoru Oshii debuted Ghost in the Shell, a “cartoon” masterpiece that set the standard for what adult animation can be. Tokyo, the world’s first mega-city, became the setting for dystopian animated movies like 1988’s Akira, and manga (Japanese comics) embraced the grime of cyberpunk and drifted further into existential questions about humanity’s future. Artists began to reflect on what this might mean for a hyper-connected, de-personalized society. After all, technology brought the atomic bomb and the rise of robotics displaced throngs of Japanese workers. In the 1980s Japan experience a bubble economy whose crash resulted in a deep sense of unease and a disaffection with technology’s promises. In post-war Japan, rebuilding quickly meant embracing new technologies. Every decade brought more advancements and a deeper integration of burgeoning computer power. The high-tech future, always a part of Japanese popular imagination, became a source for hope, international competition, and national pride for a people still under the thumb of Western powers.
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