The Old and New Testaments of Masamune Shirow
Artificial organs, cloning, robotics—the science fiction of yesterday is filler in today’s newspaper. What will it be tomorrow? Consult a pair of anime by Masamune Shirow.
The Anime Movie Guide, by British pop-culture analyst Helen McCarthy, starts in 1983. There were anime produced before then, but that was the year that direct-to-consumer videos (OAVs) were introduced. That was also the year a student at Osaka University of Art self-published the first volume of a manga series titled Black Magic.
The name of that student was not Masamune Shirow. Like Monkey Punch or Fujio Fujiko, that is a pen name under which he creates his manga. It also gives him a persona to hide behind; unlike many artists who revel in the publicity that comes with success, Shirow prefers to stay out of the spotlight. In an inversion of the way the game is sometimes played, he has never allowed himself to appear in public in that identity. He knew, after all, that Shirow would be the center of attention, while the “real” artist would be below the radar of fandom.
One other aspect of his life is a bit out of the ordinary: Masamune Shirow came to manga relatively late. He focused on sports in his youth and didn’t discover comics until he was in college. His choice of Osaka University of Art wasn’t because he wanted to further his cartooning skills but because he wanted to study oil painting. However, his manga Black Magic caught the eye of the president of the Osaka-based Seishinsha publishing company, who invited Shirow to turn professional. His first work as a pro was Appleseed, which was animated in 1988. He’s perhaps best known, however, as the creator of Ghost in the Shell, animated as a groundbreaking feature film in 1995. Viewing the two anime back-to-back is instructive regarding both works as well as the manga artist who created them.
The Old Testament: Appleseed
In the beginning was the apple. For Masamune Shirow, the new beginning of life on post-apocalyptic Earth was Appleseed. The use of the Old Testament symbol of the apple was conscious and deliberate on the artist’s part, as he created a future metropolis where all do not live happily ever after.
In 1988, when it was adapted to an OAV and directed by Kazuyoshi Katayama,1 a lot of philosophical subtleties in the manga were tossed by the wayside in order to boil the multivolume story down to seventy minutes. What’s left, unfortunately, is like quintessential ’80s Hollywood: a lot of explosions and guns and chase scenes. Even the music is ’80s Hollywood synthesizer chase music. There’s still a story, to be sure—more of a story than most of the Sylvester Stallone or Eddie Murphy films of the same period—but the action is too Hollywood to be believed. One all too clear example: a SWAT team barges into a room where terrorists are holding hostages. There are four terrorists; four shots are fired at them; they all hit the mark; and they’re all head shots to the brain. That’s entertainment.
Our first look at the terrorists is through a dream. A man searches for his wife through their high-rise luxury apartment, and finds her in the studio, sitting next to an open window. The room looks like it has been ransacked. The birdcage is open, and the bird has just been set free. Then—as her husband watches—she lets herself fall through the open window. Before she gets halfway to the ground, the dreamer awakes in a cold sweat, but in those few seconds we feel something of his terror, and we later understand what drives this terrorist (also a policeman) named Calon. It wasn’t a dream; it was a memory.
The story focuses on the efforts of two policemen to stop the terror: a young woman named Deunan Knute and her partner Briareos, who’s mostly robot and whose design makes him look like a giant metallic rabbit. As an aide to Athena Areios, the inspector general of Olympus, describes them, “as police they’re excellent; as people, they’re eccentric.” They’re also two among many rescued from the non-Olympian wasteland by Hitomi, a government “caseworker” conducting an unspecified “experiment” in bringing people from the wilderness to live and work in Olympus.
Olympus is to be the flagship city built out of the rubble of World War III, its every detail coordinated by a supercomputer called Gaia.2 Some of the wartime rubble, including tanks and the rotting corpses within them, is still visible. The inspector general is concerned about keeping order in Olympus, and worries—rightly, as it turns out—about “immigration of unstable elements” from the wilderness disrupting the peace.
Post-apocalyptic scenarios have become standard in manga and anime. Think of Neo-Tokyo rising from the ashes of war in Akira, or of Tokyo rebuilt after a disastrous earthquake in Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040, or of Tokyo just picking up and moving to the Izu Peninsula after the melting of the polar caps in Evangelion. In these cases and so many more, while officialdom and industry put the capital back together, they also have hidden agendas that do not bode well for the common people.
These doomsday stories all contrast with less cynical stories in the same post-apocalyptic genre, for example, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, in which global war destroyed all of civilization and required thousands of years for humankind to rise back to even a simple agrarian life. Appleseed’s scenario owes more to early twentieth-century science fiction, especially films such as William Cameron Menzies’s Things to Come and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, both of which inspired early manga by Dr. Osamu Tezuka.
Terrorists attack a pyramid-like structure called Tartarus. The choice of name reveals a neo-Greek theme. Tartarus in Greek mythology was a sub-level of Hades. In some accounts, after the Titans were defeated by the gods, Zeus imprisoned them in Tartarus. The name Tartarus was later employed for the place of damnation where the wicked were punished after death. There are classical statues all over this modern city, inspector general Athena’s secretary is called Nike, and even the name Briareos has Greek roots as a fifty-headed giant.
There’s something else happening, however; a literary allusion, deliberate on Masamune Shirow’s part. When Hitomi shouts that she was “born” in Tartarus, she’s speaking figuratively. She’s a bioroid, a living machine, and Tartarus was where the bioroids were created. This humanoid race, “born” in a laboratory and raised in a utopia where no one needed to struggle for anything, looks back to another dystopian classic, Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World.
Brave New World, like George Orwell’s 1984, commented on the present by putting a mask on it and calling it the future. Both books critiqued the micro-managed life of the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin. Huxley, however, took matters farther, by painting a society that bio-engineered its offspring (thus freeing its inhabitants to indulge in casual sex) and believed religiously in buying things and in soma, a drug that wasn’t much more than a low-level opiate (this was before Huxley himself began experimenting with LSD). Ultimately, the heroes of the book break away from the society, having been inspired by someone (known in Huxley’s book as the Savage) from the outside.
In Appleseed, as in Brave New World, society has decided to commit to a structured peace after a disastrous war. In Olympus, however, the battle isn’t over yet. Terrorists try to disrupt the well-ordered society from within and without. The police try to cope with the terrorism, serving the state without knowing the entire picture. In the end, a partnership is formed between Deunan, Briareos, and Calon, not just because they were fellow police but because they understand the larger drama unfolding around them.
Of all the anime in this book, this one has probably gone through more changes between the first and second editions than any other. Where there had been one film based on Masamune Shirow’s manga Appleseed, there are now three—and the two newer films are not only very different from each other, but are landmark CG anime as far removed from the original two-dimensional cel animated Appleseed as Appleseed was from Mary Poppins. Ghost in the Shell, meanwhile, gave rise to a remix, a theatrical sequel, a made-for-cable film, and a two-season TV series. In short, it became a franchise. Along the way, it too made new use of computer animation, acting out Shirow’s search for answers on the nature of society, humanity, and life itself.
Beginning again at the beginning, we’ll walk again through the manga of Shirow and the anime of Mamoru Oshii, with new contributions from Prada, the Yellow Magic Orchestra, and the Cyborg Manifesto, and a side-trip to the Uncanny Valley—all new locations to this edition. A lot can happen in a decade.
Though I Walk through the Valley
Anime was still in its postwar infancy in 1970, and computer-generated (CG) animation was non-existent when robotics scientist Masahiro Mori published his thesis on the Uncanny Valley. At a glance, it seemed that anime and robotics might never meet except at an Astro Boy film festival, but by the twenty-first century the two would be permanently linked.
Mori had his subjects look at a continuum, from human-looking dolls, including toys and bunraku puppets, to actual human beings. He noted a paradox: the more realistic a doll looked, the more it was acceptable to humans—up to a point. Ultimately the design reached a point where the resemblance of machine to man stopped being amusing or interesting and could only be described as “creepy”; in Mori’s model, the gradually ascending line of human acceptance of humanoid robots took a sudden dive when the robot resembled an animated corpse: very human looking but lifeless, bringing about a sense of uneasiness. This sudden plunge in attitude was what Mori called the Uncanny Valley (Bukimi no Tani), and, even though in 1970 Mori arrived at this conclusion by showing pictures to monkeys and then noted whether they looked at the picture or looked away, the years since Mori, and especially the past decade, have verified the Valley’s reality.
It’s hard to locate the precise boundaries of the Valley, but one knows it when one sees it. Early examples of computer animation stayed true to the cartoon roots and didn’t try to get too realistic. The few human characters in such Pixar films as Toy Story and Finding Nemo were not intended to be any more realistic than the toys, insects, or other non-human characters. One film that conspicuously failed when it tried to cross the Valley was The Polar Express; its entire cast of human characters seemed off-putting, with reviews referring to the CG animation as “cold” and “lifeless.”
Japanese animators also tried to bring out computer-animated humans who looked real, also with mixed success. The 2001 release, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, received mixed critical reaction but failed to make back the cost of production. There were still too many variables in the design and animation of CG characters, from skin and hair to gestures and facial expressions. The best that studios could do still couldn’t get across the Valley. This latter problem solved itself by 2003 as both the hardware and software of computer animation evolved.
It took a different but related art form—computer games—to work across the barrier. Games such as Final Fantasy X-2, released in 2003 for the PlayStation 2, created by Square Enix Studio, and directed by Motomu Toriyama, were able to go the distance and create human-looking images that didn’t put off viewers.
The following year saw the release of the first new Appleseed feature film since 1988. Directed by Shinji Aramaki, best known as a mecha designer for a variety of anime for television including the original Bubblegum Crisis, this Appleseed brought the world created by Shirow into three dimensions while retaining many of the conventions of cel animation.
By 2007, a second feature, Appleseed Ex Machina, took a further leap across the Uncanny Valley. Ironically, Aramaki, again as director, was able to achieve a sense of realism that wasn’t off-putting, this time by shrinking the eyes to proportions closer to an adult human face. This made it possible for Deunan to express, through motion capture, a variety of subtle facial expressions.
The story by Kiyoto Takeuchi forces her to jump through a number of emotional hoops. Recall that the human Deunan and the cyborg Briareos were lovers as well as partners before Briareos ended up in a cyborg body. Olympus has decided to create a new bioroid based on Briareos’s DNA. Of course, the resulting bioroid, Tereus, ends up looking like Deunan’s old flame. This kind of conflict has been anticipated in a number of science fiction manga, especially in the work of Moto Hagio. The emotional conflict thus anchors the movie in traditional anime plotting (in which emotion plays an important part) and keeps it from being just a wall-to-wall action movie. The main gimmick of the plot is a twenty-first century twist: a social network device that is more than it seems.
Even having a well-established name doesn’t rescue filmmakers from the practical aspects of making a movie. Movies need publicity, which these days can be about making the movie and not about the movie itself. Appleseed Ex Machina was able to draw attention by having two of Deunan’s outfits in the movie designed by the fashion house Prada. Similarly, the first remake of Appleseed had an eclectic score that included music by Ryuichi Sakamoto, leader of the influential electronic-music trio Yellow Magic Orchestra and winner of an Oscar for scoring The Last Emperor.
The New Testament: Ghost in the Shell
Ghost in the Shell, released in 1995, is an amazing visual achievement in a medium based on amazing visuals. Animated by Mamoru Oshii and based on a heavily footnoted manga, this feature film will inevitably confuse its first-time viewers, dealing as it does with the Byzantine round of backstabbings and powerplays that characterize Japanese politics in the future, both domestically and internationally. The politics of New Port City are the solution but also part of the problem. Instead of terrorists, we’re dealing with diplomats and politicians as the bad guys.
There was a hint of this in Appleseed, but the apple had blossomed and borne fruit by the ’90s. With the bursting of the economic bubble, Japanese politicians of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party had trouble finding anyone left to run the ship of state—especially after reports began surfacing of financial sweetheart deals between assorted politicians and business interests. Nobody seemed to be clean of the stain, and the tendency of those already in power to continue to rely on the old boy network to get things done only assured that nothing would get done. Skepticism turned to cynicism, and popular mistrust of the government may have hastened the activities of those who claimed to offer an alternative way, including the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult and other “new religions.”
The action in Ghost in the Shell centers on Section Nine of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This is a wide-ranging group, dealing with covert operatives from America, deposed dictators from the Third World, and—in the opening sequence—attempts by another country to convince a computer programmer to defect.3 Growing out of this governmental gamesmanship—and not by anyone’s design—is a piece of software that has taken several names. Its creators refer to it as Project 2501, and intelligence agents call it the Puppeteer. Whatever its intended name, it has, like other software in other sci-fi works, acquired enough information to become sentient. It’s being chased by Major Motoko Kusanagi of Section Nine. It’s also chasing her at the same time, in part to seek political asylum to protect itself from its creators. The question for Major Kusanagi is: what does she do with it once she’s got it?
The Major, it seems, is going through something of an identity crisis. She’s ninety-five percent artificial, with a cybernetic body that superficially makes her indistinguishable from ordinary mortals. There is a wonderful sequence in the movie, with Major Kusanagi riding a boat down one of the canals of New Port City. She passes a glass-fronted coffee shop, and seated on the other side of the glass is herself. It’s really someone else who happens to have the same make and model of cybernetic body, but this wordless encounter, backed up by Kenji Kawai’s haunting score, brings the whole question of identity and humanity into sharp focus.
She is, in spite of heightened strength and abilities, an ordinary mortal, asking the same old questions mortals have asked since the dawn of time: Who am I? Is there a reason why I’m here? What happens after I die?
Ancient Japan offered answers to all of the above in the animistic belief—transferred to Shinto—that spirits abound in the world, and aren’t limited to living things. A mountain may have a spirit, or a piece of wood carved into an arch, or even a locomotive.4 Japan has also spent centuries coming to terms with machines that seem human. Karakuri ningyo—clockwork wooden dolls that resembled people—were first built in the Tokugawa period. Such dolls would “bow” their heads while carrying cups of tea on a tray. Lifting a cup from the tray would stop the doll until the cup was replaced. A legend in the twelfth-century Konjaku Monogatari tells of a farmer who used a similar doll in the ninth century to water his crops. When the spirit and the clockwork doll intersect, there can be problems, as will be seen in the chapter on Key the Metal Idol.
The real problem here, though, is that the machine is no longer obviously just a machine. Is the Puppeteer sentient, or merely a program designed to seem sentient? And how much of herself can Major Kusanagi trade in for mechanical enhancements and still be human?
The Major finds out by going through a cyborg version of sex, birth, death, and rebirth—merging with the Puppeteer and being transplanted into a new cybernetic body after her old one is almost destroyed. Brought back to life as a young girl, she tells a colleague that she is now neither Major Kusanagi nor the Puppeteer, and that she is off to seek other offspring of this union, born into the World Wide Web itself.
But the Major’s dilemma isn’t a purely mechanical question. The manga contains elaborate discussions of karma, and one sequence re-affirms that, regardless of enhancements, Major Motoko Kusanagi is still human at the core. In this sequence, the Puppeteer announces that it will “cast off all restrictions and shells, and shift to a higher-level system.” It then appears to be transfigured up to Heaven, in the wake of an angel, of which we catch but a brief glimpse. At this moment, Shirow draws a very tight close-up of Major Kusanagi’s face, and we see (for the only time in the entire series) the pop-culture proof of her humanity: the tears in her eyes.
The look of Ghost in the Shell is surprising when one remembers that it is essentially traditional cel animation. There are alternatives, though, including a 2008 “remix” of the movie, titled Ghost in the Shell 2.0, that adds 3D CG versions of some scenes. It is a little jarring at first, but after a while the viewer accepts the move between two very different animation technologies. The surprise is perhaps that, as recently as 2008, more scenes weren’t redone in the new style.
In the meanwhile, the first real sequel to Ghost in the Shell appeared in 2004. Subtitled Innocence, it extended the technology of animation while keeping the story connected to the original film and therefore to Shirow’s original manga.
The story happens after the original movie. Major Motoko Kusanagi is nowhere to be found, but Section 9 is still searching for her because of what she may know about the Puppetmaster. Bato, meanwhile, is the star of this film, as he investigates a series of murders committed by cyborgs who were supposed to be sexual playthings. At the autopsy of the movie’s first victim, director Oshii and screenwriter Shirow slip in an in-joke: the autopsy is being conducted by a cyborg medical examiner, who says she wants to be called Haraway. As in Donna Haraway, a philosopher whose 1991 “Cyborg Manifesto” is a fascinating post-feminist look at the role of women in society. If there is a single statement in the Manifesto that sums it up, it is this: “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.”
As Bato investigates the murders, following a version of the script laid out in a manga episode by Shirow, he finds that the sexual cyborgs are actually frauds. Instead of machines with manufactured “ghosts” (a mental consciousness that makes them seem human), the cyborgs simply make multiple crude copies of the mental activity of kidnapped young women to make the cyborgs seem sophisticated. Bato gets too close to the truth and is about to be overwhelmed by a small army of the cyborgs when the Major (whose reappearance we in the audience had been expecting) rides to the rescue. Not literally; she’s downloaded.
After Innocence, the first season of a TV anime based on Shirow’s dystopian vision aired in Japan. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex once again has Major Kusanagi in a shell and part of Section 9, tackling covert and ticklish matters for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In this season, the main plot thread revolves around a terrorist hacker known as The Laughing Man (although ultimately The Laughing Man turns out to be a diversion covering up criminality by major corporations). This gave series director Kenji Kamiyama the ability to explore a different aspect of Japan: the growing cyber-life of the twenty-first century. He also had the chance to look back at Shirow’s manga and find comic relief in the tachikoma, small personal tanks that get together for long rambling conversations.
The second season, telling a completely different string of stories, appeared in 2004 under the name 2nd GIG. This time, Japan is dealing with the aftermath of a regional war, a crush of refugees, a terrorist group called Individual Eleven, and some loose nuclear weapons (see the chapter on war in anime). In both TV series, the modernist abstract music written for the films by Kenji Kawai is replaced by the distinctive melodic score of Yoko Kanno (see the chapter on idol singers).
And in 2006 the Stand Alone Complex group did a made-for-cable-TV movie, Solid State Society. The plot was a mash-up of several Shirow elements, from the Puppetmaster to bureaucratic corruption and a senior citizens’ center used as a front. It was later released on DVD with two OAVs: “The Laughing Man” and “Individual Eleven.”
And this isn’t all that Shirow and company have done. He developed the concept for the anime series Ghost Hound, while the Production I.G. crew under Kenji Kamiyama moved from Japan’s techno near-future to its magical past with the 2007 TV series Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit. Based on a series of fantasy novels by Nahoko Uehashi, the lead character, a woman warrior named Balsa whose favored weapon is a spear, is clearly a human ancestor of Major Kusanagi.
After the first movie, or even the second, the next Masamune Shirow project could have been predicted, up to a point. No longer. Having gotten away from cyber-reality to Japanese spirits, Shirow has become officially unpredictable. And that’s how it should be.
1. The film’s mecha unit was supervised by Hideaki Anno, one year after The Wings of Honnêamise; Gainax was one of several studios that worked on the anime.
2. Again, this is nothing new. Recall Jupiter, the central computer in the shonen ai OAV Ai no Kusabi, or Evangelion’s Magi.
3. In the manga the other side tempted the Secretary of Commerce; the anime script by Kazunori Ito introduces Project 2501 from the very beginning.
4. Frederik L. Schodt, Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics, and the Coming Robotopia (New York: Kodansha International, 1988), 196. Note that in one of the stories of the Don Dracula manga by Dr. Osamu Tezuka, a locomotive was possessed by a spirit that had to be exorcised.