Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045: Season One (2020)

GitS: SAC_2045: Season One (2020)

Dirs: Shinji Aramaki + Kenji Kamiyama | Eps: 24, approx 25 mins each.

At first glance SAC_2045 seems to have many favourable ingredients in place: it's co-produced by Production I.G; has Kenji Kamiyama onboard as co-director; it features many of the original Japanese and English language voice cast; and continues the Stand Alone Complex continuity.

Alas, in reality the continuation fails to live up to its positives. It's a soulless venture with little to offer beyond its superficial 'on paper' credentials.

Viewers who are relatively new to the franchise, perhaps having advanced from the live-action movie, may understandably surmise that such weak plotting is the norm, but I suspect that many longtime fans will be wondering why the lofty concepts and aspirations of the SAC series have been abandoned and the characters disrespected.

A major failing is the bad CGI, reminiscent of an early PS3 game with plasticky skin and incongruous lighting, exacerbated by the thick black edging lines that artists use to push figures to the fore. Despite being sometimes motion-captured, the movement of characters within the rendered world is often clunky and artificial.

Not only does it look like video game FMV, when the perspective adopts a first-person POV it feels like one, too. Also, car chase scenes are like watching a racing game replay. Weirdly, as it goes on the animation quality sometimes seems to get worse, with the lack of atmosphere and ambience in the surrounding world reducing the believably of the experience even more.

- I said PS3, but in stills it looks more like what SquareSoft could've achieved on PS2 -

The 'dead eyes' of cheap CGI are perpetually present. It could be argued that their eyes ought to be that way, they're cyborgs, after all, but the woeful dead eyes are in Togusa too, the 'natural' member of the team, so it's evidently not a stylistic choice for cyborgs. Rather, it's the CGI's inability to deliver the depth of personality and expressive soulfulness that a more traditional animation style can capture. Only those without 'regular' eyes are spared the indignity.

Another odd production decision was setting a large chunk of the Season in America. As if to ease the location shift the team has a new American member named Standard ("Stan"). He's an annoyance, at best, whose "dude" and "bro" attitude is at odds with the rest of the group. It was no doubt purposeful, and indeed could've been used in a positive way, but mostly it highlights the dumbed-down dialogue and plotting, and the absence of personality in the core members.

Speaking of which, they aren't Public Security Section 9 in America. That group was disbanded. They operate now as mercenaries under the moniker of GHOST, doing what they do best in an economically fragile world wherein money is almost worthless due to an ongoing 'Sustainable War' that was purpose-designed to keep the economy going. Yet again, it's mostly superficial.

There's no mention that Motoko is in a new body, but she's inexplicably younger looking than when we saw her last in Solid State Society (set eleven years prior). Controversial character designer Ilya Kuvshinov either didn't do his homework or didn't care about the timeline.

The story arc, when it finally appears, involves the emergence of a new kind of cyberised human, which prompts the affected governments to assemble a dedicated team to investigate. There's the usual internal bureaucracy to combat, too, coming mostly from a US agent named Smith, who looks and even sounds like Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith from The Matrix Trilogy.

At time of writing only twelve of the promised twenty-four Season One episodes have been released online and there's no indication of when the remainder will appear. The series thus far doesn't use the 'Stand Alone' and 'Complex' variations much. Only one of the twelve (Ep 07: PIE IN THE SKY - First Bank Robbery) could be described as being 'Stand Alone'; it's essentially a solo Batou story. It being (mostly) separate from the larger story arc allowed it to do its own thing, to explore a more personal side, and it's arguably one of the better episodes.

The series picks up a little thereafter, but the watered-down concepts and unshakeable feeling of emptiness in the world remains. I'm with the minority of viewers who feel that Arise wasn't wholly terrible, but I'm with the majority this time: SAC_2045 is a travesty that’s not worthy of the SAC name. It's GitS for the Netflix generation, designed to be watched and then forgotten.

Note: GitS is the only Japanese anime that I choose to watch in anything other than its original language (i.e., I watch it dubbed). As mentioned, it has the original SAC voice cast, which for the English dub means Mary Elizabeth McGlynn as Motoko, Richard Epcar as Batou, William Knight as Aramaki, etc, but I always check the accuracy and validity of what I'm hearing. It turns out that the dialogue in the dub is not the same as that given in the subs - at times the two things even convey a polar opposite viewpoint from each other, which made me wonder if the English dub had an agenda that was more than merely linguistic localisation. Sure enough, alongside the expected colloquial language additions, there are some dodgy political differences, too.

When the remaining twelve episodes have been released, I'll do a follow up post. Hopefully I'll be able to say that things have improved.

- The closing credits look like that, but the rest doesn't -