in the shell

I mean such hollywood movie makers like James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Zack Snyder, Guillermo Del Toro, David Fincher, MIchael Bay, Jonathan Mostow, Alex Proyas, Terry Gilliam, Quentin Tarantino, The Wachowski Brothers, and more are huge fans of this masterpiece including to Akira and Miyazaki's stuff.

Nice to see hollywood filmmakers love GITS.

7 years late but I tend to think of anime during the late 80's to mid 90's to cinema(well more especially sci fi/fantasy genre films) as rather like Krautrock in the 70's to music. In a period where you could argue the western mainstream had become quite conservative an outside culture was arguably producing some of the best work that ended up having a very lasting influence among artists.