Reseñas de la crítica

The heroine is Major, aka Motoko Kusanagi, an artificial life form grappling with questions about her soul, her humanity and the body in which she resides. She is a cybernetic warrior employed by tactical force unit Section 9, cracking down on crimes within "the net." But she can't crack open the reasoning behind her own existence. Her journey illuminates a skill that transgender people must learn in order to survive: reconciling the body and the mind.

Even in its big action set pieces, Oshii manages to sustain a tone of reflection, as if all those pyrotechnics were merely a conduit for the deeper human concerns he, drawing from Masamune Shirow's manga, had in mind... Oshii's original remains a truly visionary sci-fi work impressive not only for its dazzling spectacle, but for the richness of its ideas about identity, humanity and technology.

The most beautiful scenes in GitS involve water, both the rendering of and the Major's movement through it, most memorably when she KOs a two-bit criminal with her thermoptic camouflage turned on—rendering her invisible—becoming visually nothing more than the pressure on his bones or a ripple in the air as the shallow waters around their feet gracefully confirm the martial choreography.

If the concept of robots confronting human emotions seems a bit trite at this point, it's because this anime originated that question in the world of film, and its legacy is present in all sci-fi cinema since—not just in a remake that's been attracting unnecessary and undeserved controversy.

Re-seeing this on the big screen was revelatory. The Major is an anime fanboy wet dream, yet her existential crisis drives the story in ways that agitate rather than arouse. I'd forgotten about the gorgeous passage in which she wanders the rain-slicked city like a Resnais heroine.

Though much pilfered by The Matrix—and just about every other Hollywood science-fiction blockbuster in which minds and bodies roam free from each other in spaces both actual and virtual—Oshii's film retains its power to startle and seduce.

More than manga splatter, animé maestro Mamoru Oshii's cult neo-classic is an indelible spiritual inquiry... Oshii's concerns and style are essentially meditative, as obsessed with the spirituality of objects as Ozu's. Rather than comic-book jazzing, Oshii uses the lustrous animated visuals to plunder the doubts stemming out of creatures born fully developed but grasping for the emotions and memories that make a full sense of self -- the ghost rattling inside the corporeal armor of the shell.

The distinctly cinematic nature of Oshii's poetics comes out most strongly in the elaborate montage sequences that occur at least once in each of his films from Patlabor onwards. These dialogue-free sequences are filled with shots of spaces and characters that, while only tangentially related to the main narrative, encapsulate the overall thematic and aesthetic concerns of the given film, recasting them in an abstract, symbolic key.