攻殻機動隊 (Ghost in the Shell)

Oshii's film adapts Masamune Shirow's manga, and the distance between them is the interesting part. Shirow's manga is dense, jokey and heavily annotated in the margins. Oshii strips the comedy out entirely and slows it down, holding long wordless passages over the city, so what is left is the question the manga raises and does not sit in: whether a mind that has been wholly replaced by hardware is still a person, and what a ghost is once the shell is manufactured.

Shirow is working inside the world Gibson published five years earlier, and the vocabulary is shared down to the furniture: a net that people jack into directly, cyberised bodies bought and serviced like equipment, corporate power that outranks the state, and the question of what is left of a person when the brain is the only original part. Shirow's own contribution is the security state rather than the criminal margin. Gibson writes freelancers working against corporations; Section 9 is a government unit doing the same work from inside, which is what makes the manga a political procedural and not a heist. Filed MEDIUM: cyberpunk was a shared movement by 1989 and the debt is to the movement as much as to the one trilogy that defined it.

Tezuka asked the question Japanese science-fiction manga has been answering ever since: is a manufactured mind a person? Astro Boy is a robot built to replace a dead child, and the stories are mostly about the legal and social consequences of that rather than about fights. Shirow inherits the question and moves it: the Major is a human brain in a manufactured body, so the boundary Tezuka drew between made and born has stopped being locatable. The ghost, in Shirow's usage, is precisely the thing Astro Boy's opponents keep insisting he cannot have. Filed MEDIUM. It is the debt of a whole tradition to the person who founded it, and the map already records the same source reaching Akira.