Hong Kong Locations in Ghost in the Shell | Hacker News Reader

Hong Kong Locations in Ghost in the Shell

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142 pointskeiferski45 comments

The article doesn't mention Kowloon Walled City (though one of the comments does), a more specific inspiration for some shots, which is why the shot they have of the person walking through an alley looks like it's an enclosed space. See the picture of the alley in the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City).

It does mention Kowloon:

> [...] in nearly every other respect both the imagery and soulful mood depicted in the film mirror reality very closely – especially when contrasting the modern skyscrapers of Central with some of the older neighbourhoods in Sheung Wan and Kowloon.

The Kowloon District is much bigger than the (former) Kowloon Walled City.

Oshii is just way too good at that sort of scene. A similar one from Patlabor 2 also always gives me chills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dmlwhaEEgE

Very similar, indeed. In a good way.

It also has very real dialogue: https://taskandpurpose.com/culture/realistic-aerial-combat-m...

Somewhat tangential but this recalls some recent articles about preservation of HK's neon signage/neon signage industry

https://hongkongfp.com/2023/04/16/its-disappearing-very-fast...

Does ghost in the shell still hold up as a movie?

I think it’s at least as good as Blade Runner. Definitely worth a watch.

That would depend on what you mean, but I'm pretty sure the answer is yes in any regard.

From an artistic perspective it is still beautiful and might be even more beautiful than some modern more digital animated movies. From a science fiction perspective it is still as fictional as it was upon release. I don't believe we are any closer to cyber brains and thus not any closer to showing how ridiculous the interpretation in the movie would be to some real world equivalent.

I like the conversation the major has where she mentions if the augmented humans had to give back all their enhancements there wouldn’t be much left over. I know many people who take adderall and vyvanse as a performance enhancing drug without an rx. If they had to stop they wouldn’t be much of anything.

I don't think it's comparable. Cybernetic parts replace biological parts wholesale. The Major is mostly cyborg. The only biological part left is parts of her brain and brain stem.

Unless adderall and vyvanse has some unknown side effect that damages the brain, when you stop taking you just return to your baseline self.

It's relevant. Drug abuse permanently affects the brain, rehabilitation never returns most to their previous baseline.

> when you stop taking you just return to your baseline self.

Since I learned that you could use pick axes for digging I would give up digging holes using shovels way earlier than before I realized pick axes are a thing.

That sounds much more like that recent Cyberpunk 2077 anime with the cyber-psychosis problem when using too many body enhancements.

The 1995 'original' is very good. The atmosphere of some scenes with nothing but landscape views and music are really striking in a hypnotic way. The overall quality of the drawings is incredible and the storyline is both interesting and getting more relevant.

Ghost in the Shell is a franchise with many different movies, like Star Wars.

the 95 movie is good but the 2002-2005 Stand Alone Complex TV series is much better. more exciting, more coherent, and closer to the original manga.

Is that available for streaming in the US?

Amazon Prime Video has it: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/0RQUV6NO3USQLW767X5M3...

It's free on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHil4Y4r3Wk

Not in my zone of the international DRM prison system.

AFAIK Sac is not a sequel nor a closer adaptation, but an alternative timeline.

I grew up with the original movie that I watched at the cinema and never developed a strong attachment to Sac for that reason, it is good, but IMO it's not better than Oshii's version, on the contrary it lacks the poetics and the dreamlike aspects of the 1995 work.

p.s. Oshii also directed "Urusei Yatsura Onrī Yū?" which is IMO the best Urusei Yatsura movie even though it doesn't closely follow the manga, exactly because of Oshii talent with the dreamy stuff.

I like SAC (and to a lesser extent SAC:2) as much as the Movie, but they are very different. They are some of the best cyberpunk in any medium.

I think the manga, while decent, is inferior to both.

Edit: and yes, they are all separate universes.

Agree. My impression is that the anime movies are more about the philosophy of “self”, while SAC is more about sociology and politics. I like SAC slightly more than the movies, but it was the first Ghost in the Shell movie that transcended the manga to a masterpiece.

Patlabor 2 is another absolutely amazing Oshii film. Really overlooked compared to some of his others IMO.

I don't remember much Only you, but aren't you talking about Beautiful Dreamer (which I would say is the best Urusei Yatsuta movie)?

you're right of course, beautiful dreamer is the best urusei yatsura movie :)

From a direction and production values point of view though, the 1995 movie is head and shoulders above the TV series. If I could only watch one, I would choose the 1995 movie hands down.

it's all personal preference, but "head and shoulders" is excessive.

I prefer the directing in Stand Alone Complex. the 95 movie moves slower, and glosses over a ton of complexity because movies have less time to work with than shows.

but it's kind of the same directing in either case, because the 1995 movie's director, Mamoru Oshii, worked on Stand Alone Complex as well.

the 95 movie does have some advantages in the consistency of its production values, because TV shows have to churn out a lot more content. but this fight scene is imo better than anything in the movie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZb-43E6clQ

also, again, it's a franchise. Stand Alone Complex is not the TV series, it's one of the series.

> it's all personal preference, but "head and shoulders" is excessive.

It's hard to beat Mamoru Oshii trademark style of direction. The TV series ... felt like a TV series. It was competent but no different from any other anime.

When it comes to production values there is no comparison, one is a movie with a fairly high budget running for about 2 hours, the other is a TV series stretch out over 26 episodes.

The level of graphical fidelity of the 1995 movie's animation blew my mind back in the 90s when I first saw it on DVD. Add to that Kenji Kawai's haunting soundtrack ...

You can find out in approximately 2 hours.

Yeah but the dialog sure is a bit bookish and dry, talking a lot about weird theory.

I mean it's cool and all that they throw Deleuze and Guattari references at you (especially in stand alone complex), but unfortunately we have wised up to how much that stuff was fashionable nonsense since then...

I think the reason that it's so philosophical, and the reason that it mentions Deleuze and Guattari specifically, is due to their emphasis on "the virtual," and in the context of Ghost in the Shell, this "virtual" is explored conceptually, especially as it relates to systems of control, such as cybernetics.

Edit:

> Like Kant, Deleuze considers traditional notions of space and time as unifying forms imposed by the subject. He, therefore, concludes that pure difference is non-spatiotemporal; it is an idea, what Deleuze calls "the virtual". (The coinage refers to Proust's definition of what is constant in both the past and the present: "real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.") While Deleuze's virtual ideas superficially resemble Plato's forms and Kant's ideas of pure reason, they are not originals or models, nor do they transcend possible experience; instead they are the conditions of actual experience, the internal difference in itself. "The concept they [the conditions] form is identical to its object." A Deleuzean idea or concept of difference is therefore not a wraith-like abstraction of an experienced thing, it is a real system of differential relations that creates actual spaces, times, and sensations.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze

> Cybernetics: a reactionary pseudoscience that appeared in the U.S.A. after World War II and also spread through other capitalist countries. Cybernetics clearly reflects one of the basic features of the bourgeois worldview—its inhumanity, striving to transform workers into an extension of the machine, into a tool of production, and an instrument of war. At the same time, for cybernetics an imperialistic utopia is characteristic—replacing living, thinking man, fighting for his interests, by a machine, both in industry and in war. The instigators of a new world war use cybernetics in their dirty, practical affairs.[1][2]

[1] "Cybernetics" in the Short Philosophical Dictionary, 1954

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics_in_the_Soviet_Unio...

Deleuze falling out of fashion doesn't mean it's non-sense.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/04/30/say-stupid-sh...

By Félix Guattari, describing the process of writing Anti-Oedipus

"You can explain everything away. I explain myself away. But to whom? You know … The question of the other. The other and time. I’m home kind of fucking around. Listening to my own words. Redundancy. Peepee poopoo. Things are so fucking weird! […]

Have to be accountable. Yield to arguments. What I feel like is just fucking around. Publish this diary for example. Say stupid shit. Barf out the fucking-around-o-maniacal schizo flow. Barter whatever for whoever wants to read it. Now that I’m turning into a salable name I can find an editor for sure […] Work the feed-back; write right into the real. But not just the professional readers’ real, “Quinzaine polemical” style. The close, hostile real. People around. Fuck shit up. The stakes greater than the oeuvre or they don’t attain it […]"

It's 100% fashionable nonsense.

Now do that with Deleuze.

I always felt like it had a bit too much "otaku" type of flavor to the writing...not that I dislike the movie, but I would agree, it doesn't really flow as well as it should. The strengths are the visuals and the conceptual elements, I think.

I think the voice acting in the English dub is partially to blame, as well some inexplicably clunky script changes. I had a look at a translation of the original script and imagined it being performed in a peppier way than we hear and it doesn't seem nearly so dull and longwinded. The Matrix had a bunch of philosophical "weird theory" dialogue too but it managed to sell it well, at least in the first film. I think there's room for a new and improved dub.

The Major in particular stands out as a bad performance. She honestly sounds like they got the TikTok AI voice to read the script. Maybe that affect-less voice was a deliberate choice to underscore her diminished humanity, but in any case I don't think it works well. It's especially jarring during her highly reflective and emotionally charged monologue on the boat. She's meant to be mentally human, not HAL 9000. It impinges directly on the themes of the film.

The artwork/old anime is unmatched imo compared to today's work (less detail).

The 1995 is very good and I'll watch it again every few years.

I walked out of the 2017 Scarlett Johansson remake. And a big reason I did so was that it lacked the atmosphere of the earlier film, what is known as Ma

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_(negative_space)

Yes. Watch it with subtitles on and Japanese audio; the subtitle translation flows much better than the English voiceover dub IMO

A similar blog post from 2009 exists: https://ghostlightning.wordpress.com/2009/01/10/gits-hkg/

If I'm not mistaken, the 2nd half of Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence actually occurs in (a very different) Hong Kong.

As a local living here I'd like to say Hong Kong is becoming Ghost in the Shell

Needs 2011 tag

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