Tomorrow Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie is on the big screen, and I will definitely be in the theater to see it! When we hit the weekend, another wacky Simon Pegg comedy comes along: Man Up. All about mistaken identity, blind dates, and taking chances, this British/French film came out last May in Europe and is being released Friday in the US. Sadly, I didn’t see anything interesting that was made in the US this week.
The trailer for Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie is out, and the film will be in US theaters on November 10th, 11th, and 16th. This is the franchise that first brought Cyberpunk to the big screen in 1995, and along with Akira introduced American audiences to Japanese Anime. Meanwhile, the live action version of Ghost in the Shell, The Movie starring Scarlett Johansson has been pushed back to a March 2017 release, and is currently having its script rewritten.
The latest chapter in the groundbreaking Cyberpunk Anime series is Ghost in the Shell: Arise, the story of how the various members of Public Security Section 9 got together and became a team. If you have signed up with Funimation you can stream it from their site, if you don’t have an account with them you can pick up the discs at your favorite Anime supply store. This first showed in theaters in Japan as four feature length films, when they reformatted it into a television series they called it Ghost in the Shell: Arise – Alternative Architecture and added two additional episodes to transition it into the 2015 version of Ghost in the Shell: The Movie.
The first two episodes of Haphead go live on their web site tonight, right after they show the entire first season at the Royal Theatre in Toronto tonight. It is a cyberpunk tale about a new haptic peripheral which makes videogames so immersive that people learn skills just by playing them (yes, that is pretty much their tag line). Thanks to Cory Doctorow for the heads up on this one.
Ghost In The Shell is always at the forefront of Cyberpunk, and the latest Anime incarnation is no slacker. For those needing more GITS before the live action film comes out, the teaser trailer from the animated feature film GITS 2015! Thanks to Otaku USA for the heads up on this one.
I can’t imagine anyone who doesn’t appreciate Ghost In The Shell when they meet this unique cyberpunk universe, so instead of ranting about how excellent the series is this time I thought I should just share a few of the recent shorts from GITS: Arise. The first one from The Borderless Project is called Foreseeing 2027, the second is Memory, and the third is Color. There are a few more in this set, all encouraged by Katsuyuki Motohiro, the main director of Psycho-Pass, which owes its existence to the influence of this show.