The Movie:

One of those rare anime features that even people not into anime know about, Ghost In The Shell is widely considered one of the best of its kind, and for a very good reason. A remarkably high concept Blade Runner inspired slice of cyberpunk sci-fi, it's exciting, tense, stylish and even pretty thought provoking.

Set in the future of 2029, the film takes place in a world that has established massive worldwide information networks and where cyborgs are almost completely indistinguishable from humans. Wreaking havoc on this network is a sort of cyber-terrorist who is known only as The Puppet Master. His trick? To install, through the network, false memories into people who are then coerced into acting on his behalf. The Puppet Master exists entirely in the network at first, but soon makes it clear that he wants a body of his own.

In charge of keeping the network secure is a security group called Section Nine. One of their finest agents is Major Motoko Kusanagi, a woman who is almost entirely cyborg with only the 'ghost' (or conciousness) of her human life still intact and serving as her last real link to biological life. The Puppet Master takes an interest in Motoko, as she's not only incredibly intelligent but she's pretty much a perfect physical specimen. Motoko and her partners are soon involved in retrieving a stolen cyborg body that links back to the Puppet Master, but does Motoko actually want to stop him or is there more to this than that?

Originally made in 1995, this revamped Ghost In The Shell 2.0 is basically the same movie, albeit with newly recorded sound and spruced up graphics. A whole lot of fancy CGI has been cut into the film, to give it a more updated look and feel. Admittedly some of the graphics in the original version weren't quite as impressive as they could have been, and while this sort of revisionist history can understandably annoy purists (the original version is included here as well), the effect here is a good one. Yes, the new CGI bits do sometimes clash with the more traditional animated sequences sometimes but you can't help but admit that they look fantastic regardless. The newly revamped soundtrack also packs an appropriately heavy wallop as well, all of which goes a long way towards making this version of the film more modern.

Technical alterations aside, the film holds up really well. It's an exciting picture with an interesting story that blends its high concept philosophical ideas (in which the film explores what it actually means to live rather than simply exist) with some excellent action and suspense. The opening sequence in which Motoko singlehandedly takes down a group of gun toting opponents lets us know what we're in for and at only eighty-five minutes in length the film moves along at a very quick pace. The storyline ins dense and well thought out, allowing for some interesting moments of character development to occur very naturally alongside the action set pieces, putting all of the sex and violence in the film into a rather fitting context and adding some substance to the style. As Motoko goes about her duties and tries to bring in the Puppet Master, she's forced to consider her own existence and her own humanity, or lack thereof. As she wrestles with the morality of the conflict she's involved in, and tries to rationalize what is real and what has been programmed to seem real, the plot takes some interesting twists and turns and it makes for rather riveting viewing.

Video:

The AVC encoded 1080p 1.78.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer on this Blu-ray disc is pretty impressive, even if it isn't quite perfect. First off, some of the transitions between the CGI footage and the traditional animation is awkward and even a bit jarring - that's not a fault of the transfer specifically, but you can't help but notice it. Some of the traditional animated sequences are a little soft looking and show just a tiny bit of what looks like color bleeding. There's also some minor banding present in some scenes. With that out of the way, the good by far outweighs the bad here. There's a wonderful sense of depth and dimensionality to the picture that goes a long way towards accentuating this film on Blu-ray in a way that it couldn't hit on DVD. Colors are stronger in every way while black levels have a nice, rich, inkiness to them. The animation is a bit rough in spots compared to the CGI bits, but it's all presented nicely on this disc in what is, in summary, a very strong transfer of some somewhat inconsistent source material.