Ghost in The Shell has become a legendary property in the anime world. With its original anime movie hitting theaters in 1995, the franchise has garnered television series, movies, comics, live-action films, and more. In a recent rare interview, the creator of the series, Masamune Shirow, talked about the inspirations for the futuristic world and what other anime helped to forge Major Motoko Kusanagi’s journey.
In the recent interview, Masamune Shirow discussed the inspirations for Ghost in The Shell, “In the winter of 1970, an idle observation computer game called “Life Game”, or a type of automatic drawing art, was introduced to the world. Later, inspired by this, I created the framework of the story worldview in the early 1980s (“story worldview” refers to the Masamune Shirow world that continued from BLACK MAGIC and ORION. (There are many works that have not yet been published.) In 1985, he published a manga called Appleseed, and with the help of various connections, he was able to begin publishing overseas, mainly in English-speaking countries. In this work, the story already includes various full-body armored cyborgs, partially mechanized people, wide-area surveillance networks by artificial satellites and public security, people with mechanically enhanced brains, two-way simultaneous communication, digital and analog methods. hacking, etc. have appeared, and these are not elements that were started from Ghost in the Shell.”
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Ghost in The Shell’s Origin
Shirow then expanded upon the creation of the now legendary anime franchise, “It’s about going back in time from Appleseed and seeing what things were like 100 years ago, so I had some idea of what it would be like. However, to this day, I have never submitted anything to a magazine in order to become a manga artist, nor have I ever worked as an assistant to a manga artist, nor have I received any medals or crowns in this field. It’s obvious now, but back then, from the perspective of the publishing world, doujinshi didn’t exist, so there was no flow from doujinshi to magazines. Given the situation, I couldn’t just suddenly turn it into a magazine, so I created two short stories and delivered them to Mr. Y at his request. It’s a lighter version of Ghost in the Shell, with some of the charm elements (female protagonist, mecha, etc.) removed and a bit more subdued. The design for Ghost in the Shell had been completed before that short story, and since it coincided with the production of other works at the time (referring to ORION), he brazenly said, “It would be difficult to serialize it in a weekly magazine.” I also asked for it. sorry. These were GUN DANCING and PILE UP, which were published in the extra edition of Young Magazine Pirated Edition. We had prepared several projects that had the same story and worldview for Ghost in the Shell, but we submitted the one that takes place in Japan and is set in a similar time period as The Ghost in the Shell. (The Ghost in the Shell was the original title of Ghost in the Shell). This is because I thought it would be more versatile and compatible with other projects I had.”
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