Japan for the Uninvited

Mamuro Oshii’s futuristic ‘Kokaku Kidotai’ (‘Ghost in the Shell’, 1995) has helped anime and manga to cross into the US mainstream.

Kusanagi, a robot with a human brain, leads a covert operations team in a hi-tech chase with ‘The Puppet Master’, a master cyber criminal who is hacking into people’s minds.

Breaking new ground, it was one of the first animated films to blend traditional cel animation with CGI.

It’s also another Japanese anime to which ‘The Matrix’ trilogy owes an enormous debt – from directly “borrowed” shots to ideas about “ghost hacking” and the relationship between perception and reality.

• IMDb: Kokaku kidotai (1995)
• Matrix and Ghost in the Shell
  Scene-by-scene comparison between the two films