I finally got around to watching it, after having it be the number one movie I wanted to watch not only for the design & research impulses but also purely out of personal interest. Considering I have a soft spot for anime movies from that time and loved Akira so much that I more or less based my AI generated movie on its aesthetics and setting, it’s strange that it took me so long, especially considering the thematic relevance for my master’s thesis, not only from a production standpoint, but also because of its themes of a future where cybernetic augmentations and AI are commonplace.
The story
Honestly, I’m a little disappointed. While the themes and concepts were engaging and interesting, I felt like the pacing of the story was a bit strange, but I suspect it has something to do with the movie’s short length of only 82 minutes, 4 of which are end credits and 4 more being reserved for a lengthy title sequence, not to mention the frequent use of long sequential establishing shots that serve to set the mood of the setting.
Some aspects were left unexplained and some political conflicts were only briefly mentioned, but played an important role in the end, which made me feel like i never completely understood the motivations of the parties involved.
The ending, which felt like it happened too early, left me wanting for more, which I guess can be considered a good thing, I definitely want to follow this experience up with the movie’s sequel: ‘Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence’ (2004), though apparently that movie covers a different arc of the original anime. I’ll just have to see for myself.
Production
Because this is not supposed to be a movie review, I want to talk a bit about the production of the film. Aesthetically it was absolutely gorgeous, its carefully selected color palettes were beautiful, the design of the city, its buildings, objects, vehicles and weapons were tasteful and in general the movie was not as hyperfuturistic as I expected, which helped me relate to its world a little better.
The animation over all was great and made use of some 3D animation, but usually in a stylistic way, as navigational systems or computer generated graphics the characters interacted with, so it always felt grounded in the world. Establishing shots and backgrounds were much in line with what I was able to recreate using Midjourney, so that was further good news. The film was also absolutely drowned in glow and glare effects, often washing out the frame quite heavily, though carefully respecting the color palettes. I want to define color palettes of my own for the project and, depending on what direction I want to go in, am considering referencing both Ghost in the Shell (1995) as well as Akira (1988).
Apart from the complex action heavy sequences that I will try to avoid for my project since I assume that AI is not far enough to pull off an actual choreographed performance, I noticed that there were many times where the characters were not animated a lot at all. Specifically sequences that feature heavy dialogue were often a single frame of a character with their mount moving, something very obvious if you think about it, but for some reason it took this movie for me to really notice it.
This honestly fills me with quite a bit of hope, because dialogue where the viewer can directly and closely see the subject is very jarring to look at in photorealistic and even 3D stylised AI movie attempts. Maybe I can emphasise the storytelling and dialogues of the individual characters more in my project, since those are really easy to do from a technical standpoint. However, this also means that I would absolutely not get away with AI generated voices, because of the heavy emphasis on the voice actors’ performance. Maybe a music video is again the best way to go, provided it allows for storytelling via subtitles where the characters’ facial expressions are more important. Then again, that could be hard to pull off technically.
All in all there’s a lot I keep learning from watching these beautiful movies, and a lot to consider when it comes to recreating similar styles using AI, but overall I think the project could turn out very nicely. I’m looking forward to the animation tests in the future.
Links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell#Animated_films
