So I Saw Ghost In The Shell Arise (Part 1) Last Night

[-dicht.ThanksFrost-]

So I was scrolling through netflix and I found GITS arise (part one). To my surprise I decided to give it a shot. I don't really like newer animes so this was a first for me in years since Your Lie In April. Keep in mind that I only saw the 1995 GITS movie and S.A.C + its movies. So I am not familiar with the manga at all. All I have to say it, I was fairly disappointed

 

Starting off with the story, it this sort of mind freak concept with memories. Something that was tackled often in the GITS universe. I don't want to spoil much, for your viewing curiosity but all I have to say is that its a pretty dated concept that was executed quite well. I did most certainly enjoy the narrative.

 

The sound was pretty standard, and so was the animation (technical) pretty high budget and very sharp.

 

Now onto the bad stuff. As someone who is aspiring to be an artist, I have been deeply analyzing various animated works. Its something I have been doing for years even before I decided to switch over to this path. All I have to say is that I dont believe that the producers and directors of this show did not capture the true astethic that made the series so fantastic..

 

Now I said that the animation on a techincal level is good. But on an artistic and design level its horrid. It does not capture the mixture of industrialization and futurism as well as the 1995 and S.A.C did. In both of those series you really got a mix of everything, the colors were very bland in a sense to convery this cyberpunk-esque scenery. But arise takes a different approach, it attempts to make its cities and its sceneries more futuristic and clean. It does not have that dirty, grimy look to it like the original had. The design is very clean and colorful something that does not match the atmosphere at all with the GITS franchise.

 

The best way I can interpret this is through images.

 

 

 

Gits was always a industrial world covering a wide mind network. Look at the images above. On one hand we got a very dirty scene and on the other side look how clean it is, bright shiny and colorful. To me it completely detracts from what the original did so well. By mixing those colors into a olive drab and really defining the cyberpunk scene.

 

There is also character design. Now for the most part in this series, most of the characters are introduced. So I wont touch on them too much, although this is personal opinion i think this is the least cool interpretation of bato I have seen so far.

 

I cant speak for many of the characters themselves, and how they were constructed so I wont say much here. But I can talk about Mokoto since she was the main, and we learn a lot about her.

 

Starting off with the character (Spoilers Incoming)

 

Mokoto in Arise was said to be born of an accident she was retrieved by her pregant mother and then cybernetic at birth, in the other series she was a child who got into a plane crash and then rehabilitated into cybernetics.. This ruins a few things for the character, first of all it eliminates the extensial crysis, the fact that Mokoto was once human allowed her to reflect on her past as a human being and ash those memories fade away like most childhood memories do it makes her question her existence as a individual. This was a huge part in the GITS series, and it was butchered in arise. Treading the line between cyborg and human in terms of sentient existence was a huge part of the series, and was executed flawlessly with Mokoto because she herself was both human and cybernetic to the point where she has mastered both. She mastered her motor skills as a human and as a cyborg leaving only to her mind, this transition left a lot of leg room for Mokoto's development as a character but this is scrapped when you are a cyborg at birth.Also in ever iteration of GITS, Mokoto is a world class, wizard hacker and she get hacked herself? What the hell? Idk

 

Mokoto is completely different from her past iterations. She is not that super strong woman with a devil's tongue anymore. Mokoto was always the super solider character type. But she was portrayed as a beautiful and bad ! woman, she had loads of Gravitas and was snarky. You can say she was a thief, very agile, extremely cunning and charismatic. In arise shes this typical tomboy, wannabe. Its so cringe worthy, there were moments where I was exception Mokoto to roast someone or say something smartassish and she doesn't she just walks away and waves her hand. Mokoto in arise is like a little girl, even looking in her room tere were pictures, plants, furniture and stuff. That completely defeats the purpose of the empty dark room in the 1995 series! It was to show the diminishing of her humanity, that's just thrown out of the window. Basically Mokoto in arise is a typical tomboy, she puts her foot in first, she springs into action with sheer force and kicks !, nothing we have never seen before amirite?

 

Remember the S.A.C Scene where Mokoto goes to a party and basically seduces a guy into sex, but it wasant really sex she just knocks him out with that cyberbrain restraint. As she slowly aroused the man with her raspy voice and just when its about to go down BAM, she hacks his cyberbrain knocks him out into a dream state and takes his intel for the mission. I wanted more of this. If the Arise Mokoto was in this scenario she would of just knocked the guy out and taken the intel gg k thnx bai. It just makes the scenes in the end unoriginal and bland and not like GITS at all.

 

This even ruined her character design. Mokoto lacks sex appeal in GITS. The only instance where I advocate sex appeal. Because it was a part of Mokoto's character, shes a cybernetic being the “perfect” vision of humanity in addition it gave the impression that she would just rely on her looks only to let her adversaries suffer the consequence for making such a assumptions. You can't spell Mokoto without Curves and holy crap does arise have no curves. Like I said before, shes the tomboy interpretation of Mokoto, she looks like a cyberpunk tomboy and personally other than the red velvet clothing was simply uninspired imho. 

 

Even the opening was meh. It was like a a tiki, future elevator song? What happened to the yelling oriental people that sounded so dope, it was new, it was never done in that fashion, it defined the series. And now its not there,

 

To conclude Arise strays away too much from its original predecessors It removes so much in order to freshen the series while simultaneously removing important elements that made the original GITS so memorable and unique in exchange for present anime mediocrity.