1.Prologue
In my previous article, I wrote about Otomo Katsuhiro’s seminal anime Akira. Prior to the film’s American release, it is said that both Steven Spielberg and George Lucas said that the film was unmarketable.
The Hollywood sci-fi futurescape at the time included films like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, George Miller’s The Road Warrior, and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. All of these films depict a dystopian future—some even take place against the backdrop of a neon cityscape—and are now considered classics. Yet why did Spielberg and Lucas both believe the film would not appeal to American audiences? My guess is that they didn’t think the anime aesthetic would work.
Akira ended up becoming the masterpiece that would elevate anime from children’s entertainment to art. Spielberg would learn his lesson, and in 2008 his production company Dreamworks bought the rights to develop a live-action version of Shirow Masamune’s manga Ghost in the Shell. By the time the movie finally made its way into theaters in 2017, it seemed Spielberg had become a bona fide anime fan. His 2018 film Ready Player One features cameos by many different anime and game characters—including Kaneda’s iconic red motorcycle.
In this article I’ll be writing about Oshii Mamoru, who made his international breakthrough with Ghost in the Shell.
2.Oshii Mamoru's Studio-Hopping Rise to the Top
Oshii Mamoru was born in Tokyo in 1951. He was a model grade school student, receiving the highest marks in every subject except for physical education. Things took a turn when he failed his middle school entrance exams, and in high school he would skip school and focus his energy on student activism instead. His truancy got so bad that during the summer of his senior year, his father staged an intervention and placed Oshii under house arrest.
Oshii went on to attend Tokyo Gakugei University, where he became obsessed with watching and shooting his own movies. He became especially enamored with European filmmakers, including Jean-Luc Godard, Frederico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Chris Marker, and Andrei Tarkovsky. This influence would later drive Oshii to become one of anime’s best known auteurs.
As he approached graduation, Oshii applied for jobs related to TV and video, but was rejected by his top choices, including TV Man Union and Pia. He ended up working a number of different media-related jobs for a year before he joined Tatsunoko Production in 1977. There, he began drawing storyboards for some of the studio’s best-known anime, including the sci-fi gag anime Time Bokan and Yatterman. For the latter, he would make his debut as an animation director.
In 1979, Oshii transferred to Pierrot, an animation studio founded by former members of Tatsunoko Production and Mushi Production. There he would serve as the chief director for the TV anime adaptation of Urusei Yatsura, which would earn him the nickname “the ratings man". Between ‘83 and ’84, he directed two Urusei Yatsura feature-length movies, with the second seeing him indulge in his more auteurist tendencies—integrating a time loop element into the story and dealing with themes like dreams and reality.
In the early 80s he would switch studios again and join Studio Deen, where he directed Angel’s Egg, a surrealistic art film that features a sparse plot and very little spoken dialogue. (The British author and anime expert Helen McCarthy called it “an early master piece of symbolic film-making...its surreal beauty and slow pace created a Zen-like atmosphere, unlike any other anime.") The OVA (original video anime) was released by Tokuma Shoten, with Suzuki Toshio producing. Oshii would then begin work on a new project along with Miyazaki Hayao and Takahata Isao, but the three would almost immediately encounter insurmountable creative differences, and the project would be canceled.
In the late 80s, Oshii joined the anime production team Headgear and served as director for the Patlabor series. Set in a futuristic Tokyo, the series depicts robots being used not just for police or military purposes, but also working industrial and municipal jobs. It was produced in the midst of the bubble economy, when the Japanese people believed that technological innovation would help solve social and environmental problems. Patlabor is also notable for being an early example of what the Japanese call “media mix".
Oshii made his international breakthrough with the 1995 cyberpunk anime Ghost in the Shell. Based on a manga of the same name by Shirow Masamune, it centers on Major Motoko Kusanagi, an augmented cybernetic human serving as a field commander of a fictional anti-cybercrime law enforcement division of the Japanese National Public Safety Commission. Due to advances in neurobiology and cybernetics, she has the ability to seamlessly interact with devices, machines, and networks, allowing her to “train" in any task and acquire language fluency in an instant. Sound familiar?
While Akira was nearly all hand-drawn, Ghost in the Shell was made using a mix of hand-drawn animation and CGI. While the animation is undoubtedly cool, the themes are advanced and philosophical. While concepts like networks and digital devices have become commonplace, some of the technical concepts of the anime were too much for viewers who weren’t sci-fi fans or computer geeks. That being said, the video became the first Japanese film to top the Billboard video sales chart. And several years later, the Wachowskis would basically make a live-action version of the concept at the core of Ghost in the Shell with the sci-fi masterpiece The Matrix.
In 2004, Oshii would direct an even more philosophical sequel, Innocence, produced by Suzuki Toshio. It became the first Japanese anime film to be in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2007, he released the live-action anthology Shin-Onna Tachiguishi Retsuden, which was shown at the Berlin International Film Festival. Then in 2008, he directed the animated feature The Sky Crawlers, which was in competition at the Venice International Film Festival. Oshii is the only Japanese director of animation to have shown films at each of the world’s three most prestigious film festivals.
●Oshii Mamoru Picks
3.Hollywood’s Live-Action Ghost in the Shell
The live-action Ghost in the Shell was many years in the making, but it finally arrived in 2017 to poor reviews and poor box office performance. Most everybody agreed that it paled in comparison to Oshii’s animated film, and was all style and no substance.
Even before the film opened in theaters, it was clear the controversy surrounding the casting of Scarlett Johansson (as Major Kusanagi Motoko had damaged the film’s reputation—at least in the eyes of critics and the Asian-American community.
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Diversity has become a rallying call in Hollywood in recent years, and more and more viewers are pushing for Asian actors to play Asian roles in films (as opposed to, say, Emma Stone playing a half-Asian character in Aloha). Historically, Asian characters have either been turned white (Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One in Doctor Strange) or played by white actors (Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s). This practice is known as white-washing.
So when Johansson’s casting was announced, the internet exploded, saying that an Asian actor or a Japanese actor should have been cast in the role. The interesting thing was that—as if often the case—it was not Japanese people who were outraged, but Asian-Americans and white liberal Americans with an obsession with being politically correct. The film ended up being a flop. And while you could blame director Rupert Sanders, or argue that the story was more suited for animation to begin with, it’s clear that the bad press hurt the film more than anything.
In Japan, on the other hand, Ghost in the Shell drew 170,000 moviegoers and made 273 million yen on opening weekend, coming in third at the box office. Oshii himself praised the film for bringing a tangible presence to its characters that hadn’t been possible in the animated version. Of Johansson, he said, “Her physical presence is amazing. Ghost in the Shell is all about physicality. This film wouldn’t have been possible without her."
On many occasions over the recent years, Oshii has decried the current state of Japanese animation as being more concerned with making products than art. Oshii himself has focused more on live-action films over the past decade. But other than his most ardent admirers—mostly in Europe but also elsewhere—that body of work has been decisively less well-received than his animation.
4.Epilogue
Oshii is of the same generation as Miyazaki Hayao, and the two are frequently compared. As I mentioned earlier in this article, they once tried to work together but couldn’t get past their creative differences.
The biggest difference between them is that Miyazaki makes films that appeal to all audiences, while Oshii intentionally makes films that don’t appeal to everyone. To put it another way, Miyazaki’s films contain some kind of universal element, whereas Oshii is only concerned with exploring what interests him. A critic put it perfectly when he said, “A hundred out of a hundred people will watch a Miyazaki film once. One out of hundred people will watch an Oshii film a hundred times."
Oshii has pondered this question himself—why do his films inspire diehard fans that want to see his work over and over again? “If you asked me what my films are about, I’d say a little more than half of it is about some fetish. Without that, you wouldn’t get people wanting to watch it two or three times."
He’s also phrased it this way: “Animation is all about giving shape to your conception of the ideal. It’s all a reflection of your personal tastes. If you asked an artist to draw a woman, they’d only be able to draw their ideal woman. When it came to Kusanagi Motoko’s physical body in Ghost in the Shell, I really butted heads with my animator. But in the end it had to be my vision." (It seems he cares deeply about the character’s physical characteristics, but was not really concerned with ethnicity.)
Looking back at Oshii’s career, what sticks out is that while he came up in the studio system, he never stayed at one company for too long—something that indicates he’s more about achieving his vision than working as a team. After all, he is an auteur who has publicly stated how his preconceptions and fetishes form the essence of his work.
Akira was a groundbreaking film that helped bring anime to a wider audience than ever before. But Ghost in the Shell and Oshii’s subsequent works have made anime increasingly inaccessible—giving it back to the otaku and the geeks.
