This year sees the live-action remake, starring Scarlett Johansson, of the 1995 Japanese anime classic Ghost in the Shell; as a curtain-raiser, the original is getting a small release, just a couple of years after it last reappeared in UK cinemas. It really is one of the most futuristic and strange movies imaginable and its status as animation, occupying its own exotically precise universe, means that it has arguably aged better than live-action movies like Blade Runner or Total Recall.
Ghost in the Shell is set in 2029, which now doesn’t seem so far away, at a time when digital intercommunication networks owned by international corporations have almost – but not quite – abolished the distinction between national states. A malign hacker called the Puppet Master, an AI entity, is roaming cyberspace, occupying human beings; ranged against him is a law-enforcement cyborg in female form that may have residual human feelings and thoughts: a ghost in the shell.
It is a dizzying film, a real evolutionary leap in the dark that anticipated our dependence on digital connection and our tendency to cede our identity and presence to the web. There is violence, alienation, kinky tech-porn here: it is sometimes bafflingly opaque, but always bristling with ideas.
