My Ghost in the Shell Movie Analysis Video

General discussion about Ghost in the Shell

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LogosSteve
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My Ghost in the Shell Movie Analysis Video

Post by LogosSteve »

So I made this video and my YouTube channel doesn't really have much exposure so I figured I'd come here. Any feedback is appreciated. I work in how it inspired the Matrix and end with talking about Ghost in Shell being representational of Japanese science fiction and how that differs from western science fiction.

http://youtu.be/upwkqW6REpA

Couldn't quite figure out how to embed it, not sure if i can do that on this forum.
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THYREN
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Post by THYREN »

Interesting video!

What`s the anime at around 20:30??? What is said there is already applicable today (re: smartphones). :wink: (update: nevermind, I just saw the credits at the end. I've never watched Pshycho Pass but that clip makes me want to watch it!)

PS: welcome to the forum 8)
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LogosSteve
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Post by LogosSteve »

Thanks. I'm just trying to get me some exposure and I'm really not sure where to go.

Yeah that moment in Psycho-Pass stood out, it's still ongoing and that episode is only a couple months old. it's not usually like that (trying to make philosophical points about technology), in fact cyborgs in its universe are barely brought up, it's kind of like a cop show if it was in a sci-fi anime universe but with really good writing and with a good premise. I started watching it because it was written by the same guy who did Madoka Magica. The premise is that in its universe determining if someone is a criminal or not is reduced to a quick non-invasive brain scan which is a really good one, the natural story being that it's not actually always right which creates huge problems when the whole society is structured based on the AI system that delegates jobs to people based on it. After the pilot they don't actually get around to addressing that issue though until about episode 11 which is its biggest fault. Still it's definitely very worth a watch especially for Ghost in the Shell fans.
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GhostLine
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Post by GhostLine »

Interesting analysis. I can't keep from wondering how GitS was developed at a time when the net was still budding...and if we know that Project 2501 A.I. was born from the net...what kind of consciousness would be born from the internet as we know it...meme jokes, ads, and porn. :shock: Just a self-amused thought. :D

I have to agree with you that there is certainly a lack of spiritual element in Western sci-fi...but then again Star Wars had more of a western mythology component (even though the Force was of eastern influence), and The Matrix carried a spiritual template in that Neo was very much a Messianic figure. Perhaps it is the fact that eastern film...and particularly noticeable in anime in its contrast to American cartoons utilize depth, characterization, and spirituality...of a reflective, zen quality. Even ainme that was developed to sell toys are ideologically gripping such as Heero Yuy explains in Gundam Wing how pilotless suits go against any semblence of honor...which has shaped my attitude towards manless drones today.

Throughout history, religion has been the main shaper of culture...and I think since that is being abandoned and now media and consumerism is a powerful and manipulative player...I can see GitS as a crisis through the eyes of The Major as she is asking all the right questions in a world that is losing it's depth and spirituality. The hope is that we will not lose our depth and will be able to correctly assimailate the monumental changes without killing our species.

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Freitag
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Post by Freitag »

GhostLine wrote:Interesting analysis. I can't keep from wondering how GitS was developed at a time when the net was still budding...and if we know that Project 2501 A.I. was born from the net...what kind of consciousness would be born from the internet as we know it...meme jokes, ads, and porn. :shock: Just a self-amused thought. :D
So if Skynet evolves from 4Chan instead of a military... <shudder>
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Jeff Georgeson
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Post by Jeff Georgeson »

Very interesting ... I don't necessarily agree with everything you say, but am totally behind you when you talk about the West's fear of machines (and science) and cyberization (at least as far back as Frankenstein, and extending to pretty much everything Hollywood puts out. There are even differences in how we deal with CG actors (Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within embracing the idea of nearly realistic CG; Hollywood in S1m0ne making it a bit of a joke and punishing those who would create digital actors (and making such people fraudsters to boot).

Yet, amusingly, we always want the latest machines, and are generally happy to have science lead us to a "better tomorrow." (Although this latter is changing, possibly because of the relentless push from some sectors of society to cast science as the bad guy, usually for political reasons.)

As an AI programmer, I find it sad that so many people seem so afraid of anything they don't understand and often assume I'm working on something creepy or scary or potentially out of control. Rather than learn more, be interested, be curious, we would rather curl up in a ball of the familiar and hide.

That said, Skynet from 4Chan ... eep! :)
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Freitag
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Post by Freitag »

I think the media companies here just carry on this trope because they are afraid of losing control of the profits.

The stories do not I think portray science as the bad guy, they portray a bad guy using science. For some machine to be a bad guy it has to be an independent moral agent. Even Skynet is a hidden facelless enemy - we only ever see the tools it deploys.


There will be a whole can of worms opened up when someone makes a new John Wayne movie (for instance).

Assuming they do it well enough to *be* John Wayne.
As a consumer, I'd love to see The Duke in more films. But since at that point you really are leveraging a specific individuals image and fame as capital, who gets the proceeds?

S1mone (I didn't see it, just the ads) creates an artificial persona. Who "owns" that? Although I guess the business models around Hatsune Miku already work out some of that.

Hmm, that suggests that in order to succeed the first few movies actually need to suck and be badly done - so that they do not come under attack by profit minded people. Maybe Hollywood is the best place for that to happen?

Need to go listen to some Vocaloid music now, see ya....
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Post by LogosSteve »

Interesting analysis. I can't keep from wondering how GitS was developed at a time when the net was still budding...and if we know that Project 2501 A.I. was born from the net...what kind of consciousness would be born from the internet as we know it...meme jokes, ads, and porn. Shocked Just a self-amused thought. Very Happy

I have to agree with you that there is certainly a lack of spiritual element in Western sci-fi...
I think you're misunderstanding how AIs or for that matter neural networks and human beings think. Just because we have experiences that consist of things like memes, jokes, ads and porn doesn't mean that determines our character. Our character is determined by the experiences that are the foundation for our personality. For us it's emotional experiences when we're young, for AIs it's conceivably going to be some kind of programming logic. The pointless information doesn't have any effect on that except for the AI to learn what we like as animals.

Getting the future right isn't about guess exactly what's going to happen next like with how the internet has evolved, it's about understanding the underlying principles. Memes were an inevitable manifestation of technology and the human mind finding dense entertainment on the internet.

Also I don't necessarily see spiritually/religion as remotely important really. It's about whether you believe in fact or fiction, or rather how much of your fiction is about reality. If anything I pointed out the angel symbolism because that's really the true kind of enlightenment we should be talking about: knowledge and power through technology.

Also I'm going to do a matrix analysis/review soon so feel free to subscribe and check out my other vids.
Very interesting ... I don't necessarily agree with everything you say
I'm curious, what don't you agree with me on?
I think the media companies here just carry on this trope because they are afraid of losing control of the profits.
They carry it on because they view it as psychologically effective (for making money), if that changed tomorrow then they wouldn't do it any more which is why it's going to take good science fiction to change the trend.
The stories do not I think portray science as the bad guy, they portray a bad guy using science. For some machine to be a bad guy it has to be an independent moral agent. Even Skynet is a hidden facelless enemy - we only ever see the tools it deploys.
No you're dead wrong. Anyone who watches Terminator or even Terminator 2 is going to think the movie is still saying machines are bad or at least start as bad, faceless or not doesn't change that fact. Sure some western sci-fis do try to be smart and pass it off as a bad guy using science but the subliminal message is still clear as day.

Hmm, that suggests that in order to succeed the first few movies actually need to suck and be badly done - so that they do not come under attack by profit minded people. Maybe Hollywood is the best place for that to happen?
Oh no no no. They should be very successful. I have high expectations, I want to write one of the first true pro-machines western science fiction movies that Hollywood makes.
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Post by GhostLine »

I think you're misunderstanding how AIs or for that matter neural networks and human beings think.

Probably, as this is not my area of expertise...I was more or less making a funny comment based on the idea that if a consciousness arose from the primordial soup of the internet...what sort of sick humor it might develop based on the prevalance of lowbrow.
Also I don't necessarily see spiritually/religion as remotely important really. It's about whether you believe in fact or fiction, or rather how much of your fiction is about reality. If anything I pointed out the angel symbolism because that's really the true kind of enlightenment we should be talking about: knowledge and power through technology.
Yeah, I found it interesting in Ghost in the Shell, how the angel/gunship appears before Motoko's/2501 coup de grace...but in 2.0 I don't recall seeing the angel hallucination, so that may have some meaning. I see the original GitS film as as a spiritual journey on the part of Motoko...in the middle of a existential crisis...and to me it seemed she achieved what she was looking for, obviously having her consciousness reaching its union into the electronic universe...the next stage of evolution. Yet in the film and in the next film as Batou starts down the same journey...that path seemed to require lots of introspection and spiritual/existential confrontation...which I think why it is flavored with sporadic references from sacred texts...as those sacred questions were being asked long before technology provided the vehicle to look beyond and try to grasp the wheels within wheels.
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Post by LogosSteve »

Probably, as this is not my area of expertise...I was more or less making a funny comment based on the idea that if a consciousness arose from the primordial soup of the internet...what sort of sick humor it might develop based on the prevalance of lowbrow.
Ack, sorry my bad I can be horrible at detecting sarcasm.
Yeah, I found it interesting in Ghost in the Shell, how the angel/gunship appears before Motoko's/2501 coup de grace...but in 2.0 I don't recall seeing the angel hallucination, so that may have some meaning. I see the original GitS film as as a spiritual journey on the part of Motoko...in the middle of a existential crisis...and to me it seemed she achieved what she was looking for, obviously having her consciousness reaching its union into the electronic universe...the next stage of evolution. Yet in the film and in the next film as Batou starts down the same journey...that path seemed to require lots of introspection and spiritual/existential confrontation...which I think why it is flavored with sporadic references from sacred texts...as those sacred questions were being asked long before technology provided the vehicle to look beyond and try to grasp the wheels within wheels.
Whether or not the angel was present in the 2.0 version ultimately means nothing when talking about the original version. With respect to original intent with works of art the creator's intent is irrelevant, what matters is the actual work itself. I could argue for example that whether Michael Bay thinks Transformers is high art or low brow has no bearing on what it actually is... which is crap by the way of course. You already know that the team who worked on the 2.0 version lacked the consistency of vision that was present from the original movie just for the sheer fact that digital information is no longer even the iconic green or as saturated of a color (a device that is very smart to strongly imply something to the audience visually even if they don't know it) which has been adopted wholesale by The Matrix and has practically become a cultural icon itself. In other words it's clear to me they disregarded wanting to stay true to the original vision in the first place. I hate to bring up the comparison but just think about George Lucas and the special editions of the original Star Wars trilogy. Movies aren't made by a single person and not everyone who's ever involved necessarily has the definitive answer on what it was trying to say or do, that's what the work itself is there to say and we're here to judge. Otherwise if you believed that creator's intent should affect your enjoyment or opinion of a movie then you'd be basing how good you think Transformers is on what Michael Bay thinks.

Anyway I can see where you're coming from in trying to see it as a spiritual journey. Your different interpretation is intentional on the creator's part to give the story more variety of meaning to make it more accessible because the journey is illustrated from many angles which include as I mentioned: spiritual experience of attaining a state of god-like knowledge which is what the angel most likely represents, evolutionary progress in adopting new information to sort through to protect against possible digital pathogens (viruses), the union of man and woman which is actually a sub-meaning from evolution but one which your average person could related to more viscerally, answering the Major's concerns about feeling confined, etc.

As for Innocence I think you're looking into it far too much and a lot of those quotes sadly remind me of the forced, out of place philosophical dialogue of the Matrix sequels (particularly Reloaded) in that they were very bad at trying to communicate the theme purely with dialogue that didn't actually have to do with the movie's own story. But I might make a movie about Innocence at some point down the line to explain all my problems with it.

Long story short I don't think Batou was having any kind of struggle other than failing to let go of the major, that was it (which never goes anywhere really, he still misses her by movie's end and nothing has changed), along with the external conflict of doing his job. Unlike the Major in the first movie Batou in Innocence never actually displays any kind of personal conflict that relates to the theme of the movie which is that humans struggle to think of themselves in terms of being machines or to think of machines they make as having souls (both of which are represented by the dolls). Sure you could argue that him preferring actual dog food and an actual dog shows his stance of preferring real over artificial but that never matters in the context of the story, it never forces him to make some kind of choice with consequences that changes his character. At no point does his view of man and machines make a difference in his investigation. Batou can quote from the bible and famous literary figures all the writer (Oshii) wants him to but that's no substitute for an internal conflict.

By contrast in the first movie whether the Major was interested in merging with the AI or obeying her orders instead and shooting it actually mattered and showed an intersection of her personal struggle with her external situation. Was she going to take the AI up on the offer? Would it give her a feeling of release from her boundaries or not? Would she just destroy it? There are none of these questions in Innocence, Batou never has any personal stake that affects the resolution of his case except that it's his job which is also a pretty poor motivation for the external conflict. Oshii really isn't that good of a writer and it shows.
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Post by Freitag »

This conversation reminds me of one of the Majors conversations.
People tend to look at you a little strangely when they know you stuff voodoo dolls full of Ex-Lax.
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