Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Review

The television format is what this property needed. Where the film compresses its ideas into ninety minutes of mood, Kamiyama has fifty-two episodes to run them as cases, so the Laughing Man arc can spend its time on corporate liability, a pharmaceutical cover-up and the way a memetic crime reproduces itself through imitators with no connection to the original. The second season is better still, building a refugee crisis with a nuclear component and an antagonist whose reasoning is never waved away.

Motoko is written as a working commander here rather than as a symbol, and the Tachikoma are the rare comic relief that carries the season's actual thesis about individuality. Production I.G renders the technology with restraint, and the character animation is stiffer than the film's while the cinematography is far more confident. Yoko Kanno's score, with Origa on vocals, belongs in the top handful the medium has produced. The standalone episodes vary in quality and a few of them stall the momentum outright. Taken whole it is still the most intelligent long-form science fiction anime has managed.