Frankly, I don’t know why Manga decided to go the dick-waving route in terms of providing so many dub tracks.
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"Memory can not be defined, but memory defines humanity."
--"Ghost in the Shell"
Once upon a time, I worked as an entertainment editor for "The Cornell Daily Sun". One of my reporters wrote a review of "Perfect Blue", and I could not believe my eyes when I read her review. Basically, she talked about how it was inconceivable to her that people would draw naked bodies and bloody violence, that it was hard for her to accept Japanese animation after years of American animated fare. I shook my head at her ignorance...
Such is the state of American cultural awareness, that the majority of us have been so used to "family values" animation that the mere sight of blood or nudity causes even mature adults (who have had a little hanky-panky of their own) to cringe at the images of an animated film created to provoke thought and philosophical debate. The Japanese do not have that problem, however, allowing them to create beautiful animated features that examine something as serious as existential dread. "Ghost in the Shell", a movie about the growing consciousness of computers, pits existentialism against the "mind-over-matter" philosophy.
In "Ghost in the Shell", a special team of police officers oversee crimes connected to computer espionage and other intelligence matters. The Major, our heroine, is made mostly of machine parts (she´s a bit like Robocop, her brain and her mental identity kept alive by being housed in a "shell"). As weird events begin to happen in Tokyo, the Major uncovers a secret government project that has caused a computer program/virus to become "self-aware". The self-aware computer identity wants to find its own "shell", to be able to move about freely and to join the physical world of humans.
Her contact with "The Puppet Master" causes the Major to doubt her own identity. Is she simply a machine, too? After all, as she points not, nobody has really ever "seen" his own brains, so how does anyone know that he´s "really" there?
Of course, the primary dichotomy of the existential philosophy is that people have "thought" it into existence, that without thought, existentialism would not exist. Yet, existentialism has a point--without some physical construct to actually "contain" a self-awareness (be it a brain or a hard drive), there CAN be no existence. Hm...
The ending blurs many lines. What happens to the heroine´s body and mind will leave many viewers troubled about both the fragility and the flexibility of humanity.
The lush, stunning visuals of "Ghost in the Shell" will startle you. For years, the Japanese have been moving towards photorealistic animation. While no one will mistake "Ghost in the Shell" for photorealism, you can see that Japanese animators have devoted hours and hours to minute details and dimensionality. There is a scene near the beginning of the film where the Major free-falls off the side of a skyscraper in order to carry out an assassination. The vertiginous look of the animation is simply astonishing.
Video:
In my review of Manga´s first "Ghost in the Shell" DVD, I wrote that the picture looked very good. Video quality has gone up across the board to the point that the 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen image offered by this release, while better than the image of the previous release, looks terrible. Everything is very soft and fuzzy, possibly due to excessive edge enhancement. Colors are rather drab and even look "sick" sometimes. The video looks marginally better than what one can get with a VHS tape, and even THX-mastered VHS tapes look muddy. When you look at how many audio options the DVD has, you know that Manga wasted valuable disc space on dubs that the vast majority of people will never use.
Audio:
In addition to Dolby Digital 5.1 EX and DTS 6.1 ES re-mixes of the original Japanese-language track, you get DD 5.1 EX English, DTS 6.1 ES English, DD 2.0 surround Spanish, DD 2.0 surround French, DD 2.0 surround Italian, and DD 2.0 surround German dubs. Frankly, I don´t know why Manga decided to go the dick-waving route in terms of providing so many dub tracks. Japanese-animation enthusiasts prefer watching movies with their original-language audio, and the French-, Italian-, and German-speaking populations are commercially negligible. As such, not only do the audio tracks gobble up valuable disc space that should´ve been saved for the video presentation, the DD 5.1 EX and DTS 6.1 ES tracks aren´t even worth a commotion.
The digital options are very front-heavy, with the center channel doing most of the heavy lifting. Occasionally, there are some surround effects, but there aren´t a lot of persistent ambient effects. Therefore, the audio sounds very artificial. The best thing about the 5.1 EX and 6.1 ES tracks is the fact that LFE (low level effects), especially during music-only moments, enhance the moody atmosphere of the narrative.
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[release]15097[/release]