still nothing new sorry 
‘I need a saga, what’s the saga? It Ghost In The Shell SAC’. Ok, I know, I know that was a lame rip off of the Queens Of The Stone Age, but hey aren’t we all lame rip off artist at heart.
Seriously I haven’t liked an anime this much since Cowboy Bebop, and for me that’s a miracle. I mean the whole series has both the art and the substance that most programs seem to lake these days. Don’t get me wrong I really liked both of Ohsii’s GITS films, but I guess I found them a little confusing. I’m pretty daft at the best of times but I find that with all of Ohii’s films you have to watch them twice before you even begin to understand their depth and even then you sometimes feel like his intensions aren’t being fully recognised. I always tend to look at Oshii’s films like that saying by A ZEN KOAN ‘We know the sound of two hands clapping. But what is the sound of one hand clapping?’ I mean is the answer as simple as silence, and the trick or message is that as humans we can’t accept the simplistic and instead try digging deeper to find an answer that we think is more appropriate or is there really a more complex answer?
Like Cowboy Bebop, GITS SAC isn’t afraid to confront society with the issues that have such a great effect on us, but are not openly discussed. Like in Jungle Cruize, the confrontation of the desensitisation of war, while confronting the phycology of this violent desensitisation.
Escape From is one of my favourite episodes confronting the discussion of life, death and immortality. I think its beautiful the way the little girl is the one who teachers the Tachikoma’s about death, and while the girl accepts death and wishes to grieve in an unbelievably informed method it is the A.I. that begins to contemplate the ultimate questions, which they latter faced in Barrage. I guess what I also liked about that episode was the director that created the perfect film. The film that he created was not about profits, but purely art. By detaching himself from the vanity associated with fame he was almost able to create immortality by developing a movie that people willing loved to death (literally).
Really what seems to make this series stand out is the use of the laughing man, he is perfect yet not at the same time. The way I see it they created him just like Holden in Catcher in The Rye. Holden is a pessimistic non-conformist teen, although at the same time he is still acceptable to society through the way that he falls in and out of love more times than he changes his shirt in the book. He constantly rebels against society by hating everything and staying true to his beliefs, but at the same time his inability to stop himself from falling into the trap of love just makes him a part of society. The Laughing Man wants to right the wrongs served within the pharmaceutical industries and expresses his strength in his beliefs through his willingness to die for this cause, although at the same time he is overwhelmed by a naive innocence as he wants the people to act of their own free will, openly admitting their mistakes to the world because that is what they believe is right.
