Derik Badman's Journal

Watched the Ghost in the Shell anime this week as it was the movie of the day on Mubi on Sunday. It holds up really well, I think, both visually and narratively. You definitely have to spend time really following the dialog to get what's going on: while the action of scenes is always very clear and stylish, the underpinning logic of the plot is heavily reliant on a few conversations. One really fascinating part, I didn't remember, is a long interlude about one third of the way into the film, that runs through a variety of city scenes, barely featuring the protagonist at all (we see her once looking out from a boat (iirc) and seeing herself through a window), mostly just buildings and people going about their business, with a background of music that is... sounds like some kind of Japanese religious music, small drums, chanting/singing. It's really great and also really extraneous. In a live action film, doing some shots of the city (with none of the actors) would be fairly simple, but in animation they had to draw all the backgrounds and animate the people in the scenes, and it would be a lot of work for what is essentially a long pause.