@babychoochoo said:
@turambar: You've never actually mentioned why you don't think it holds up? I re-watched it again probably a month or two ago. I think it holds up perfectly no matter which way you slice it, thematically or stylistically. Ex Machina and SOMA were two of the most popular things in their respective entertainment mediums last year and they covered many of the same themes covered in GitS.
Stylistically speaking, none of the designs of anything within it seem dated either. They're all very grounded in a very realistic future. It's not wacky or some idealistic, pie-in-the-sky type future based entirely off what people wanted the future to be like at the time it was created like the Jetsons or something. Even when you talk production values, I would argue it still easily shits all over most modern anime both in terms of visuals and sound. You could argue it's not as flashy as some modern anime, but the sheer fluidity of the animation is rarely seen outside of other anime movies. If you do see animation of this quality these days, it's typically reserved for an action scene after which they go right back to "talking heads" and all that other bullshit. To be fair, I understand they have to spread out that budget on TV so it's unrealistic to expect any show to look as good as movie all the time, but my point still stands: GitS, as a whole, can still compete with the best of the best.
If you don't think it holds up, that's fine. I disagree.
Clearly.
I rewatched it about three or four years back, so here are the clearest impressions.
You don't need to beat your chest over production value and animation style. That's never been important to me. Hell, I think Zeta Gundam still holds up damn well in some ways.
Yes, GiTS has style coming out of every pore. Yes it has good cinematography. Yes, it has good sound design. However, all of that is secondary to one major flaw: as a movie, its pacing was simply poor, and the plot often times hard to engage with as a result. For example, the transition from the Kusanagi tank fight to long technobable filled dialogues was jarring, and took a lot out of both experiences.
What SAC has over the first movie isn't its flashiness. It's the fact that it brings you a similar experience in much more segmented doses. It has the high tension and violence as well as the low energy dialogue, but by separating them into individual episodes that revolve almost entirely around these those separate thematic goals, it makes it much easier for the viewer to digest in general.
To give a clearer example, despite having watched the first GiTS movie far more recently than SAC, I can't tell you the first thing about its overall plot. I remember the tank fight, but the philosophical revelations that is standard for anything GiTS is completely lost on me. Who even was the antagonist? All that is over written by a whole bunch of action scenes by which I mean two. I have clearer memories of the overall plot of Innocence, and that should be saying something.
By comparison, I still remember SAC quite well despite it having been over a decade now because its individual parts don't wrestle with each other for my attention, and instead give each other room.
You know, after writing all this, maybe it isn't that GiTS the movie doesn't hold up. Maybe it just wasn't that good to begin with.
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