Science Saru’s Ghost in the Shell is a Classic Media Adaptation Done Right

Science Saru’s Ghost in the Shell is a Classic Media Adaptation Done Right

A voice is telling me this show rocks. The voice is my Ghost!

Somehow, it’s been more than 30 years since Ghost in the Shell arrived in theaters and opened Americans’ third eye to the wonders of Japanese animation. Sure, Americans had seen plenty of anime since the ancient days of Astro Boy and Speed Racer, but Ghost in the Shell had Roger Ebert’s enthusiastic thumbs-up. Along with Akira, it helped turn westerners on to anime by showcasing the medium’s willingness to explore topics and content that Walt Disney and Don Bluth would never dare. While Pocahontas was singing about the color of the wind to Captain Smith, Major Motoko Kusanagi was contemplating the nature of the human soul in a world where the line between consciousness and computer had ceased to have any real meaning.

Ghost in the Shell launched a minor multimedia empire that included games, more films, and a steady procession of TV shows that offered alternate tellings of Kusanagi’s work in Japan’s highly armed cybercrimes division, Public Security Section 9. By and large, those follow-up works looked to the blockbuster 1995 movie for inspiration and attempted to build on the tone and style it established: by turns thoughtful and violent, densely plotted, but with room for the story (and audiences) to breathe.

What none of those adaptations have done, however, is attempt to capture the overall tone and style of the original original Ghost in the Shell. Not the 1995 film. The 1989 manga series by Masamune Shirow. The hit movie pulled its characters, premise, and narrative beats directly from the manga, but it skipped over entire storylines in transforming the eventful 11-part comic into a two-hour film. It captured memorable comic elements, like the unfortunate garbage collector who slowly realizes his entire life is a lie that was hacked into his brain by people using him for their own ends, but it dropped a ton of major storylines.

The important difference between manga and movie came down to their respective visionaries. The film was very much the work of director Mamoru Oshii, which meant it had a radically different feel from Shirow’s comic.

Oshii made a name for himself in the 1980s and ’90s by taking comedic works like Patlabor and Urusei Yatsura, stripping away the zaniness, and finding the serious existential themes beneath them. And no one doubts that his formula worked: his theatrical take on Urusei Yatsura, Beautiful Dreamer, remains one of the greatest animated works of all time. But in order to work, Beautiful Dreamer largely pushed the goofball cast of Urusei Yatsura to the side, since those chaotic weirdos didn’t really fit the somber tone of the surreal, vaguely horrific reality that devoured their world. Likewise, Ghost in the Shell stripped out the manga’s comedic elements in favor of creating a serious work full of blood, nudity, and mesmerizing soul-searching.

By contrast, the new Amazon series is absolutely devoted to presenting material from the printed page in cartoon form, at least if its first episode is anything to go by. It takes the eventful first chapter of the manga and splashes it across the screen. It retains the quirky jokes and playful expressions of the characters, presenting Kusanagi as—in the words of the brainwashing cyber-mercenary her team has to outwit—a real weirdo, and her team as a group of skilled but decidedly human soldiers for hire... despite all of the non-human hardware they’ve attached to their bodies.

It also does a brilliant job of capturing Shirow’s vibrant color palettes; while the majority of the Ghost in the Shell manga unfolded in standard black-and-white, Shirow was an extremely early adopter of digital media, introducing each chapter with vivid computer-enhanced color pages, created in a world before Photoshop existed. Oshii’s movie defined that universe’s color scheme with dingy browns and polluted greys, but Shirow saw the technologically connected future as a lively space full of saturated colors and brilliant lights. Animation studio Science Saru has even applied the faintest hint of chromatic aberration to the artwork to better embrace the look of Shirow’s painted pages.

It’s not just the look and whimsy of the new cartoon that ties it back to the manga, though. Ghost in the Shell also embraces the breathless density of Shirow’s writing. Where manga traditionally decompresses content and is meant to be read at a brisk page, with readers flipping pages so quickly that the printed images almost take on the quality of animation, Shirow’s work often verged on prose. His massive information dumps weighed down the page, and his characters’ dialogue didn’t mess around with exposition for the reader’s sake. The prime movers in Ghost in the Shell are intelligent, experienced, skilled soldiers and politicians with a high-level grasp of their work and its socio-political implications for the world they inhabit, and they communicate with one another as such. The reader is left to piece together the available information and read between the lines, making books like Ghost in the Shell unusual among mass-market manga publications.

The new streaming series adopts a similar approach, but even more so. While you can take time to soak in the manga and reread some of the more convoluted pages at your own pace, the new cartoon operates at its own speed—a speed dictated by a 20-minute run time. Ghost in the Shell bombards you with information as characters muse over a situation that viewers barely have time to parse through context before the scene has shifted and a new conversation begins. You can’t say that the show doesn’t warn you, though: the first episode opens with a rapid-fire text dump outlining the nature and history of its world’s cybernetic tech that scrolls past almost too fast to read, let alone parse.

And, somehow, it all works. Ghost in the Shell as a franchise has always dealt in big ideas and stylistic futurism in equal quantities, and the pace of this animation gives the stylistic futurism the edge here. But all of the big ideas remain intact, and it invites the viewer to rewatch each episode to pick up on all the little details (or the big concepts) that fly by so quickly that you can easily miss them the first time around.

It also works because it knows that you’re probably familiar with this material already. Even if you haven’t read the manga that it so meticulously recreates, you’ve almost certainly seen Oshii’s film, or Stand Alone Complex, or played one of the video games. Maybe you even saw the Scarlett Johansson movie. (Our sympathies if so.) Ghost in the Shell is big enough and sufficiently established at this point that it’s become part of our pop culture background radiation. Just as Captain America: Civil War didn’t need to explain how Peter Parker became Spider-Man because everyone already knows, Ghost in the Shell doesn’t need to downshift to first gear to explain what a cyborg or a Ghost is to the audience; you already know.

It’s not an origin story! Even though, technically, this first episode is the most explicit origin story ever seen in a Ghost in the Shell adaptation: It frames the Kusanagi team’s efforts as a trial run to establish their own Public Security division... but it is not an origin story in the traditional “here is how all of this works” sense. That part you’re left to figure out on your own.

And, to be fair, the audience needs to connect far fewer dots in 2026 than we did in 1995. The future outlined in Ghost in the Shell hasn’t come to pass, precisely—it’s not 2029 A.D. yet, and people don’t necessarily love machines. But we’re getting there, and a lot of the dialogue hits differently today than it did 30 years ago. For example, when Kusanagi states that leaving security encryption tasks to A.I. is a terrible idea, it carries with it severals years of headlines about people and corporations leaving themselves exposed to liability and failure for trying to rely on large language models and generative A.I. to handle human tasks.

Altogether, it’s a brilliant reinterpretation of a classic book that embraces both the author’s intent from nearly 40 years ago while reframing it all to fit both the breakneck editing and technological realities of the present day. Also, as huge fans of Exact’s Ghost in the Shell shooter for PlayStation, the fact that the sequences shot from the perspective of a Fuchikoma tank almost perfectly capture the essence of that game did not go unnoticed. There’s fan service, and then there’s fan service. Bring on episode two!