Ghost in the Shell

Mamoru Oshii’s adaptation leaves out the comedy and the rebellious streak of Masamune Shirow’s manga. Character designer Hiroyuki Okiura deliberately aged Kusanagi so the face on screen matches her mental age, not the younger one readers knew. The city is invented; its material is not. Art director Hiromasa Ogura built the colour palette from his own Hong Kong photographs; location scout Haruhiko Higami shot the Kowloon Walled City before its demolition. Ogura stepped from an air conditioned shop into the humid night, his lens fogged, and the film’s hazy signage came from that accident. In Kenji Kawai’s opening piece the choir sings a wedding song in ancient Japanese set to Bulgarian folk harmonies. The British half of the co-production is real: Manga Entertainment’s founder Andy Frain is an executive producer. The 2008 version, Ghost in the Shell 2.0, is not the same film: passages rebuilt in 3D computer graphics, dialogue re-recorded, the Puppet Master’s voice passed from Iemasa Kayumi to Yoshiko Sakakibara. To hear the credited voice, find an older copy. A good fit if you know going in that the action is sparse and the wordless city passage in the middle moves the plot not a step. Not for you if you want a plain answer about what the Puppet Master is; that stays inside the argument.