Koukaku Kidoutai
(Ghost in the Shell)
© 1995 Masasume Shirow / Kodansha Ltd. / Bandai Visual Co., Ltd.
© 1995 Manga Entertainment
Color / Stereo / 82 minutes / Japanese Language / English Subtitles
In a world caught in the grip of information overload, where artificial intelligence is more real than the real thing and cyborg cops spend their lives surfing on an electronic sea of living data, only the Ghost - the indefinable element of human conciousness - exists to determine who is alive and who is purely a creation of the Net.
Major Motoko Kusanagi is an elite officer in the Section 9 security force: a cybernetic agent so heavily modified that little more than her Ghost remains. Along with fellow cyborg Bateau and the mostly human Togusa, Kusanagi is set on the trail of a computer-criminal known as the Puppet Master, a data theif skilled enough to hack into the very minds of his victims. His human marionettes lives out existences that are nothing more than computer-generated fantasy, unwittingly committing their master's crimes while the Ghost-hacker hides in the darkness.
But as Kusanagi digs deeper into the walls of secrecy surrounding the case, it appears that the Puppet Master has a special interest in her alone. And when the Ministry of Foriegn Affairs, shadowy Section 6, enter the scene, Kusanagi becomes tangled in a web of plot and counterplot, and realises that the true identity of her invisible assailant lies at the center of a vast and lethal political conspiracy...
Seamlessly merging traditional cel animation with the latest computer graphic imagery, Ghost in the Shell is a complex and violent cyberspace adventure from Masasume Shirow - creator of Appleseed and New Dominion Tank Police.
Director: Oshii Mamoru
Screenplay: Ito Kazunori
Animation Director: Nishikubo Toshihiko
Character Design: Okiura Hiroyuki
Mechanical Design: Kawamori Shoji, Takekuchi Atsushi
Art Director: Ogura Hiromasu
Music: Kawai Kenji
Produced by: Kodansha
Executive Producers: Miyahara Teruo, Watanabe Shigeru and Andy Frain