How many episodes of Bebop did you get through? I didn't make it past 2 or 3.

I list the number of episodes I watch in each blurb, but thirteen.

or is it because it's cyberpunk, and i like cyberpunk, so that means i like anything that's cyberpunk

let me tell you—if there's one thing i hate, it's when a show takes an idea that i love, but then completely botches the execution

Why do you watch anime if you hate it? Doesn't make sense. What little free time you have as an adult should be spent doing the things you love.

For me, it's your mother.

i AM doing what i love

i love hating things, and i especially love hating things that other people enjoy and gloating about how much smarter i am for it

duh

Sounds like a bitter way to pass the time.

that's what's so great about it

But verb, did you at leaat enjoy the lobster episode of bepop?

Worst part of GitS imo is that it just... ends. Feels like it's missing the last act of the story.

GITS 1995 is actually like only the third best entry in the franchise, after Stand Alone Complex and the original manga

oshii completely changed motoko's personality and turned the whole thing into an extraordinarily serious affair. it was still smart & well structured but lacked the levity of shirow's & kamiyama's works

Besides it being absolutely beautiful it raises questions about AI and what exactly differentiates the living from the manufactured. It's a thinking man's anime and I just figured you'd like that it wasn't just the run of the mill fight the bad guys storyline.

First of all, with the exception of Pokémon, I should note that this is the first anime I've ever actually sat down and watched, several years ago, before I even started watching a bunch of anime. I was thoroughly disgusted and I haven't seen it since, but I'm open for rewatching it. These are my current thoughts in greater detail.

It's not enough for a movie to take a complex philosophical theme and explore it. That alone isn't impressive. It has to thoroughly explore it, and it has to do it well, and that's where the movie fails for me. The fact that it made an attempt, though, was what prevented me from giving it a 1/10. It just wasn't a good enough attempt.

Ghost in the Shell is different from other anime I've tried thus far in that it's driven more by the concepts it's trying to explore rather than the plot itself. Some of my favorite movies of all time do the same thing. What a soul is, whether a cyborg is truly human, what gender means—these are good questions to ask. Great questions, even. I have my own personal yet detailed answers for each and every one of them, and the movie actually does a pretty good job in allowing you to form your own conclusions, rather than spoonfeeding you some ready-made perspective from the director.

But it almost does TOO good a job of allowing that.

When it actually comes to exploring these themes in an intelligent and engaging manner, this is where the movie really fails. It gently wades cautiously above the surface of these questions, delving no deeper than that, and offers no satisfactory closure for any of the questions that it poses. It'll ask, but then it'll refuse to offer anything for the viewer to actually think about beyond a surface level—yet it has the gall to have this pretentious air about it, as though the film thinks it's making a more profound statement than it is. And that's where I start hating it.

I'm sorry, you're not a philosopher if you just write down a question like "WHAT IS A SOUL" on a piece of paper and just leave it hanging. That's not deep, and you're not deep for pondering it. You're not even deep for having an answer. So don't act like you are—it's insufferable. It's like I'm reading an incomplete page from some angsty teenager's diary. And I'm cool with angst—I'm quite angsty myself—but angst + ineptitude + hubris is a pretty bad combination, and I should know a lot about that.

If vapid theme exploration, over-reliance on letting the audience interpret shit for themselves (lazy writing), and an infuriatingly pretentious atmosphere were the only issues I had with the film, I would've only given it a 5/10. At worst. But alas, there are plenty of other things that I had a problem with, too, because there are other things that I look for when it comes to watching movies. And these are what sent me over the edge from simple dislike to sheer contempt.

The Major's design is absolutely repugnant and the amount of fanservice was approaching softcore porn levels.

There is ABSOLUTELY NO PURPOSE for her to be naked during the action scenes WHATSOEVER—beyond being an eye-pleaser for the assumed male audience—and it's extremely difficult for me not to feel INCREDIBLY INSULTED as a male audience member when the STUDIO apparently thinks I'm just too fucking stupid to enjoy, appreciate, and/or hold my attention for an otherwise high-concept movie if there's not a fucking naked-ass woman every other goddamn scene. You may not personally consider this that big of a deal, but for me, it completely undermines not only the film, but what the film is attempting to communicate. It exacerbates the issue I have with the conveyance of the film's messages, because maybe, if they didn't spend so much time worrying about shoving a pair of tits in my face, they could've spent more time developing these interesting philosophical themes. But that's too hard. That's for smart people. We gotta cater to the pubescent twelve-year-old boys in our audience who are only watching this to get their rocks off.

but who cares about respectful portrayals of women in media except for stupid ESS JAY DUBYUH feminazis, amirite

Apparently the manga is even worse, and contains a couple of superfluous sex scenes that have absolutely no bearing on the rest of the story. They really knew their pathetic, shit-eating, scumfuck, misogynistic audience, didn't they? What a fucking joke. At least those scenes were absent in the film, though, on the same token, I'm sure there's some pitiful loser out there who probably thinks worthless sex would add a LOT to the movie (Azumarill, perhaps).

The music wasn't great, the artstyle is as generic and underwhelming as anime gets, the "cinematography" was overwrought and self-indulgent, and like pretty much every other anime I've seen so far, the characters sucked ass and I just didn't care about any of them. The animation was above average, but I'm not the kind of person who's impressed by good animation. It's a fucking cartoon—it SHOULD be well-animated. Good animation cannot raise my score; it can only go down if the animation happens to be bad, because I expect good animation from an animated cartoon. Just like I don't give people credit for knowing how to dress themselves or wipe their asses.

I know someone is going to tell me to watch Standalone Complex, too, and my preemptive response is this: Fuck off, I have no interest in diving into this franchise any further. I'll watch the film again, once more, but I'm not going any further. The movie just wasn't good enough for me to care about anything else in the franchise at all. It's pure shit, and I'm pretty convinced that the majority of people who like this movie only like it for the nude scenes while claiming that the film is a lot more sophisticated than that. That's the impression I get from most anime fans about everything, but it definitely applies here.

It also doesn't help that older films than Ghost in the Shell have already essentially "done it" years before, and often in more compelling ways—Akira, Perfect Blue—and the cyberpunk aesthetic has been done far better by pretty much every other cyberpunk film I can think of. Even the cheesy ones. In fact, the Terminator, a very similar film in concept, was able to have nude scenes featuring Arnold, but they were TASTEFULLY filmed and in a way that didn't completely undermine the deeper themes of the story (it did have a stupid and unnecessary yet relatively tame sex scene, though). And of course, there are countless modern films out there that totally blow GitS out of the water when exploring similar themes.

And that's what I mean when I say I hate it when movies take a bunch of good ideas, but then fuck them up. That's why my initial review was so short—it really is a complete waste of time.

Man, fuck this movie. Anyone who thinks it's deep needs to read a couple books, anyone who thought it was sexy needs to find some porn, and anyone who thought it was good needs to watch a movie. Any movie. If this movie blows your mind, please watch any other movie in existence. You will have your mind blown several times.

tbh if you've seen one "AI ponders humanity" story you've seen them all. I can't think of any recent examples that stand out as exceptions. Maybe Ex Machina? But that was almost a parody of the entire concept. It's really only successful when used as a counterpoint to some other theme, and the anthropomorphic interpretation of artificial intelligence is almost as lowbrow as it gets in sci-fi.