The Live-Action Gantz

What is it about live action film adaptations that are just so inferior to their original counterpart? Without even including anything directed by Uwe Boll, I bet you can easily name five bad live action films that were adapted from either a video game, a book, an anime, or the like. It’s not difficult, is it? I can personally name five films simply from the last few years: Hitman, Dragonball: Evolution, The Last Airbender, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and A Series of Unfortunate Events. Now, I bet you can’t do the same for good live action film adaptations, can you? Off the top of my head now, I can give small kudos to films like Harry Potter, the original Resident Evil, and the original Spiderman. The point is that quality live action adaptations are far and scarce, while terrible ones are a dime a dozen.

But what happens when you make a live action adaptation of something that was already bad? Will it be better than the original, or will it suck even more? This was the question I had when hearing about the new live action Gantz.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

When creating a sequel there’s a few key things that you need to keep in mind. First, you want your sequel to have all the things that made the original great, yet on a grander scale; you want a better story, better special effects, better action, better everything! But you don’t want it to be the same, or else it’ll become bland and predictable, meaning that you’ll want to strive to do something different, breaking the status quo. You want it to remain true to the original and not break continuity so that it may truly be a sequel and not just a random movie with the same characters. However, if it were as easy as these last few sentences make it then we wouldn’t have this “bad sequel” pandemic we have now. Lastly, you’ll be needing to drop in your little dash of Chemical X to provide the cherry; add that secret ingredient and your sequel will be a masterpiece. Unfortunately, only a select group of writers accepted into the most secret circle of the Illuminati at birth know of this most important puzzle piece, and even they need to earn it. Others stumble upon it through sheer dumb luck. The secret of good sequel-making may be a mystery forever.

Despite this lack of knowledge, however, we are still somehow blessed to experience good sequels every once in a while, and on the rarest occasion we get one that even surpasses the original, such as The Empire Strikes Back, Aliens, and Terminator 2. Well, one more we can add onto that list is Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence.

Ghost in the Shell

A question posed throughout all of human history, one possibly more insightful and more relevant than the meaning of life, deals with that of humanity. What makes a human being? Is it our body? Our intellect? Our consciousness? What makes man any different from a machine performing functions? Could a machine be more human than a human? The list goes on and on, and there’s still no definitive answer to the question— but it certainly gets us to think, doesn’t it? In 1995, an anime readdressed this question using cyborgs.

Science fiction often asks this question, among many other issues and questions it address, and popularly roots from the writings of Isaac Asimov. Ghost in the Shell, produced by Production I. G. in 1995, premiered, introducing us to the world where the line between human and machine is no longer distinct, and many people have upgraded to cybernetic bodies. We follow Major Motoko Kusanagi, of the security force Section 9, as she and her team track down a dangerous hacker known as the Puppet Master. At the same time, Kusanagi questions her existence as a cyborg and seeks to discover what it means to be truly human. Ghost in the Shell was a breakthrough in animation, blending cel and computer animation, as well as in the international arena, being among the first anime to be shown extensively in North America, and even being an influence for the Wachowski brothers in creating The Matrix. So, what makes it such a great film? Well, lets go over that in what will by my first essay of my Ghost in the Shell marathon:

Talent Trumps Discrimination: Yoko Kanno

Most of us can agree that music plays a large part in cinema; it creates an atmosphere, emphasizes emotions to the audience, and, most importantly, invests the audience into the story. The same holds true for anime; in fact, music probably plays a larger role in this medium, since only so much can be portrayed by animated visuals as far as atmosphere and emotions go. With such an increased expectation for music in anime, the competition must be fierce, and it must surely be a lot harder for the average composer to get noticed.

Likewise, considering Japan’s reputation of traditional gender roles and scanty attempts at gender equality— Japan ranked 54th of 93 countries in 2008 according to the Gender Empowerment Measure, and 106th of 189 countries for the proportion of women in the House of Representatives, according to a 2009 survey— it would be especially hard for women to become successful in a competitive work force. However, one Yoko Kanno has overcome both these adversities.