Ghost In The Shell: The Remake God Intended!

After several prior takes on the manga, someone finally made a story-accurate anime of Masamune Shirow’s Ghost In The Shell. Originally printed in 1989, it took a few years for the first anime which was Mamoru Oshii’s which helped keep the whole cyberpunk trend running into the 90s, and there are at least three different editions of the film. This went on to a sequel, video games, OVAS, TV shows, and a forgettable American live-action movie. Out of all of them, this new 2026 TV anime is the only one that follows the plot and the style of the original one-volume manga which was more colorful, funnier, and finally some gratuitous 90s fan service. Oshii’s adaptation took the original manga and removed anything lively and presented it with a dark dystopian future like all post-Blade Runner cyberpunk films. Writer Toh EnJoe who might’ve played fast and loose with the original lore shown in Godzilla: Singular Point, but here he knew the source material and applied it to the script while still telling this from the point of view of futurists in the 90s. Ride Your Wave director Mokochan managed to put together an anime that captures the bright imagery of the initial manga and presents it as something that was just recently conceived. The TV series doesn’t take much any cues from the prior GITS anime productions and sticks to Shirow’s original vision, and Science Saru was the incredible studio behind it.

The one thing that this series borrows from another GITS title is that the story takes place in 2029 like the original motion picture. In this fictional future, the world is populated with regular humans, cyborgs, plus AI units in prosthetic bodies called shells, and the term used for a person’s mind/soul is a ghost. The line between the genuinely born humans and completely artificial lifeforms has gotten seriously blurred, and this has opened a new type of cybercrime where people with a ghost can be hacked and forced into acts of terrorism.

In Tokyo, female security agent Motoko Kusinagi helps start up a new task force called Section 9 to handle this new advanced brand of security. Along with her partner Batou and the rookie Togusa, Motoko is promoted to Major under the leadership of the elder Chief Aramaki who plans to use Section 9 to weed out traitors and insurrections within their own government. All this is going on while a rogue AI called the Puppet Master is pitting forces against each other to preserve its programming and achieve its own autonomy.

The new GITS anime series encompasses the entire original manga story whereas the first movie was the only other production to adapt the manga and not create its own interpretation such as in Stand-Alone Complex. There’s a similar opening narration crawl about what the world of 2029 is like and goes all the way to the final line about how the net is vast. The character designs look like they’re ripped right from manga page with everyone’s profile looking as cartoonish as the original did and not as aesthetically particular as what Ooshi had in mind for the ‘95 movie which is due to Science Saru’s incredible production.

Comparing this GITS anime with the others isn’t too difficult. Ooshi’s movie was deeply philosophical with expressionless characters and not a lot of distinction between the characters which can work if you’re trying to get all cerebral that the Wachowskis vacuumed all that when they were first churning out The Matrix. Stand-Alone Complex had an episodic approach to its storytelling and took itself too seriously. GITS: Arise was a pseudo-prequel OVA that had Motoko being a brash young officer who still had ownership over her prosthetic body, so it wasn’t owned by the government, and it gets lost in its own story resolving a criminal conspiracy.

The new anime painstakingly takes every frame and little nugget of dialogue from the manga and animates it with quick moving action. It doesn’t get bogged down in technobabble and political intrigue such as both of Ooshi’s GITS movies and doesn’t stray away from the main cast with one-shot characters having an entire episode dedicated to them and being non-sequential to the overall plot. The main take of the Puppet Master doesn’t really affect anything until the last two episodes, and then there’s a lengthy epilogue to the event that none of the other adaptions. We get to learn more about the reborn Motoko and why all these extra factions were out to get the Puppet Master in the first place.

This series has gained acceptance from new fans and die-hard old school anime purists. Some of the dialogue does go by at lightning speed making it a little hard to keep up with some of the context getting lost upon first watch. Fortunately, the story is all on point with little pointless filler material. If you still have a battered paperback of the original manga, you can put it back in the vault because this anime is the fresh standard that hopefully future cyberpunk anime will be measured by.