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.
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.
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 think the manga, while decent, is inferior to both.
Edit: and yes, they are all separate universes.
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 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 ...