Review for Ghost In The Shell Arise: Borders Parts 3 & 4

Introduction

When Manga Entertainment released Ghost in the Shell: Arise – Borders 1 &2 last year, I found myself disappointed by a Ghost in the Shell release for the first time, although it was a toss-up as to why. For that first instalment, Manga Entertainment authored their own discs, and it looked as if they had sourced their own subtitle translation instead of using Funimation’s, and it was not to put too fine a point upon it, abysmal, reading more like a transliteration than a translation. But then there was Tow Ubakata’s scripts, which I really felt dumbed down the Ghost in the Shell story, making Arise something of a Michael Bay take on the franchise. It’s taken its sweet time in getting here, but we finally have Borders 3 & 4, the conclusion of Arise to enjoy or lament as the case may be. In the intervening months, several things have changed, not least the ownership of Manga Entertainment, which means that for the second half of Arise, we get DVDs and Blu-rays that use the US source material rather than be authored locally, so now I get to see what the subtitles are really like.


It also turns out that Borders 3 & 4 isn’t the end of the story after all. After the theatrical release of the OVAs, they got re-edited into a television broadcast series called Ghost in the Shell Arise: Alternative Architecture, splitting each movie into two episodes. And to that run, two more, original episodes were added making a ten episode series. At the time of writing, that show has been licensed by Funimation, but no word has yet come from Manga. On top of that, Arise has itself spun off an animated feature film, most recently seen at Scotland Loves Anime. I needn’t mention at this point the Scarlett Johansson live action feature is closer to production than any anime adaptation in years. Despite my disdain, it seems Arise has breathed new life into the franchise. Maybe this OVA collection will restore my faith following that faltering start.


Ghost in the Shell: Arise is a new take on the Ghost in the Shell story, ostensibly a prequel, even though in a narrative continuity all its own. It’s set in 2027, two years before the setting of the movie. It comprises 4 separate hour-long episodes, what would have previously been termed OVAs, but they got released theatrically so are technically movies. They’re directed by Kazuchika Kise, who’s also worked as an animator on both Ghost in the Shell movies, and Stand Alone Complex. The screenplays come from Tow Ubukata, writer and screenwriter of Mardock Scramble, and creator of Le Chevalier D’Eon. Manga Entertainment bring us the ‘concluding’ two instalments of Ghost in the Shell: Arise in this 2-disc collection, one episode per DVD. Yes, this time I’m reviewing the DVDs, not the Blu-rays.


Border 3: Ghost Tears
An explosion at a dam that unleashed a torrent of water might just be an industrial accident, but when it claims the life of a passer-by, that warrants investigation. When the victim turns out to be a fellow detective of Togusa, he’s got reason to be dogged in his pursuit of the case, especially when diplomatic concerns stop him from going directly to the company running the dam. Meanwhile, a wave of terrorist bombings has Major Kusanagi and her team called in by Section 9 to take down the suspected Qhardi terrorists. While the takedown is easy, she does get back-hacked by one of the terrorists and infected with a cybervirus. Fortunately her boyfriend is a cybernetics engineer named Akira Hose. But while her team of Batou, Saito, Paz, Ishikawa and Borma is solid, it isn’t solid enough to earn the trust of Aramaki, which makes working for Section 9 frosty. He tells her that to earn his trust, she needs to take an outsider into the group. Enter Togusa, whose investigation has led him to the Mermaid’s Legs prosthesis company, where Akira Hose works.


Border 4: Ghost Stands Alone
It may be approaching Christmas, but it certainly isn’t the season of goodwill, not when a foreign company has just bought a whole load of water rights. So while the corporate PR celebration goes on inside, there’s a major protest outside, and it’s a prime target for terrorists too. Section 9 has bought in the Major’s team again to work surveillance, and while Aramaki wages the turf war with the other security services, Section 9 is searching the protestors for Qhardi infiltrators. But when the terrorist attack eventually comes, it’s from the most unlikely of sources, the security services themselves. It’s the ultimate in ghost hacks, simultaneously hacking and controlling dozens of people. The hacker known as Firestarter is back, and it’s up to the Major to stop them. But the trail leads in unexpected directions.

Picture

Ghost in the Shell Arise gets a 1.78:1 anamorphic NTSC transfer on these DVDs, sourced from Madman Entertainment in Australia, who it appears simply took the Funimation discs and stripped out their logos and trailers. It’s as solid a presentation as you would expect for an anime, clear and sharp throughout, with good colour reproduction, and progressively coded animation. It’s a strong transfer, light on compression, but with the usual digital banding that you get on anime DVDs. The animation too is top-notch, fluid and vibrant, excelling in the action sequences, imaginative with the world and mecha design, and consistent with the character designs. What you might feel about those re-imagined character designs is a personal matter of course. I for one am not best pleased with the direction they took the characters, with the Major looking too much like a teenage boy, Saito like a punk, Paz nondescript, Togusa chubby, and Aramaki too young in a show set just a couple of years prior to the movie and the Stand Alone Complex series. Of course you have to remember that Arise is its own continuity.

Sound

You have the choice between Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround English and Japanese with optional translated subtitles and a signs only track. From the moment that the helicopters pass by overhead, you know you’re in Ghost in the Shell territory, and the action lives up to that opening audio salvo. However the show has been recast for the prequel, in both the English and Japanese versions, and I have to admit that the altered character designs coupled with the different cast didn’t sit well with me. And with the likes of Crispin Freeman and Richard Epcar absent from the English cast as well, that was an uneasiness that persisted across both language versions. However the dialogue is clear and the actors do give decent performances, so anyone not quite as attuned to Ghost in the Shell past will have no problem with this prequel. I still don’t like the music to Arise, but at least in this release the subtitles are better, easier to read, and they feel like a genuine translation, although it becomes clear that Funimation uses different terminology to the Bandai Stand Alone Complex discs. Yes, ‘domination’ is used again, and no, I don’t know what it means in this show’s context.

Extras

You get 2 discs in an Amaray case, one on a central hinged panel, and the sleeve is reversible. The discs present their contents with static menus, and there are plenty of extras on both discs.

Border 3

Inside the World of Ghost in the Shell Part 1 lasts 32:50, and the US voice cast is interviewed about the show, with meaningful conversations about their understandings of the Ghost in the Shell universe. This may be part 1, but I haven’t yet found Part 2.


Logicoma Heart lasts 2:27, and is this disc’s cute think tank animated short.

Ghost in the Shell: Arise – Episode [.JP] lasts 3:04 and is an advert for the show’s website, and a Japanese internet infrastructure company.

You get 0:49 of Blu-ray and DVD spots, a 2:04 Promotional Video, a 0:17 Commercial, a 1:08 theatrical trailer, and the textless credits. There’s also a Memory of GR – Making of Anime piece that runs to 3:54 that is a photo slideshow/camera advert.

Border 4

The cute think tank animation here is Logicoma Root, which last 2:05, and is the only one of these which is actually funny.


You get 0:48 of Blu-ray and DVD Spots, a 1:44 Promotional Video, a Ghost in the Shell New Movie Teaser (don’t get excited, it’s just two pages of text on screen for 14 seconds), the theatrical trailer (1:08), the textless opening and the US trailer.

Of interest might be the Border:Less Project, offering 5 short films, Color (3:40), Foreseeing 2027 (3:28), Working High (3:02), Memory (8:31), and Yuki Will Never Forget Kenji (10:10). Four are live action, one is an AMV of sorts, but I have to say my enthusiasm for these short films was dimmed by my reaction to the show itself.

Conclusion

Well, the subtitling this time made it a far more agreeable experience, and at no point was I compelled to skip back to try and parse a sentence that confuddled me the first time. I did have to skip back at one point in Border 4 because I fell asleep, which is a whole other problem. If one thing was made clear by having legible subtitles, it’s that the scripts for Arise really are lacklustre, and Tow Ubukata has in effect dumbed the Ghost in the Shell franchise down. This is Ghost in the Shell for the Michael Bay generation, full of big bangs, astounding action, great visuals, but when it comes to narrative, it’s all surface detail. There’s none of the depth, thoughtfulness or philosophy of Stand Alone Complex, let alone the Oshii movies. When JJ Abrams rebooted Star Trek, the tagline was “This isn’t your father’s Star Trek”, well this isn’t your big brother’s Ghost in the Shell.


That said, I found Borders 3 & 4 to be better than the first two instalments, if only because the story is edging closer to the Section 9 that we’re familiar with, the team coming together. Indeed for Border 4 the team is all in place, all that’s left is for them to formally become Section 9. But once again, I do feel that these simple stories are stretched to fill their run time, that they could easily be told in 25 minute episodes. Ubukata is fond of his exposition dumps, with five minute sequences of characters standing or sitting around (except Saito who is always asleep when he isn’t sniping), reeling off reams of technological dialogue at each other, most of which I don’t understand (I never had this problem with Stand Alone Complex), and I suspect that the technobabble is there to just make it feel like Ghost in the Shell without actually meaning anything.


The whole universe seems utterly simplistic now. The villain in Border 3, Ghost Tears is launching terrorist attacks using exploding prosthetics. In a world where people are cyberized, the first thing they’ll want to know is what their prostheses are made of, carbon fibre, titanium. You think gelignite would ring a few alarm bells. These aren’t the sort of things you take on trust. Also it is ridiculously simple to hack a person in the Arise universe, and everyone is doing it. It isn’t just to confuse the senses, or to plant a meme as happened with The Laughing Man. These hackers are taking full control of people, getting them to commit murder and suicide. Who would want to be cyberized in a world where self determination is so fleeting a concept? The Arise universe is simply unrealistic. The Major is a super A class hacker, so when Batou teases her, it’s understandable that she hacks him and gets him to punch himself in the face. But you’d think he’d update his firewall after the first time.


And I kept spotting echoes of Stand Alone Complex. Togusa investigating a colleague’s murder was how the Laughing Man case got started. The Major’s relationship with Akira Hose has echoes of Hideo Kuze about it; especially how it ends (all that’s missing is an apple). Togusa gets hacked again, the way he did in Solid State Society, and the villain in these two OVAs is wholly reminiscent of Kazundo Gohda, albeit with a face that has even less chance of blending in for an Intelligence Agent. There are other strong visual echoes, including a scene that is very reminiscent of Stand Alone Complex’s second episode, Testation. Ubukata keeps repeating himself as well, as yet again in these episodes, twice in fact, Major Kusanagi winds up the subject of her own investigation.


It seems a persistent trend in modern entertainment, the remake. Just today I saw articles about rebooting Men in Black, and a movie version of Baywatch. It’s not so much the creators as it is the executives that want to milk the franchise cash cows to death, merely going through the motions of remaking a story without ever understanding what made that show great in the first place. Walk into your multiplex, turn on your TV, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that originality and creativity are dead. The original Ghost in the Shell was a philosophical meditation on the nature of the soul, of identity. True, Stand Alone Complex was a remake, but Kenji Kamiyama put a brilliant spin on it, turning the story into a cyberpunk police procedural. I don’t know what Arise is meant to be, but it has no soul. It’s even been moe-fied to a certain extent to cater for the modern audience demographic. The Major pouts. The Major isn’t meant to pout! And when Togusa did the comedy anime character thing of running in place when he has to really be somewhere else, but has to finish his current conversation first, I swore a blue streak at the TV screen.


Ghost in the Shell: Arise is a pale shadow of what Ghost in the Shell used to be. But hey, it’s got kick-ass action!