If one dares to differentiate between a thing and its appearance, what appeared beautiful could turn out to be something horrible and the other way around. One possibility is of course that this is something personal, such as when it is said that “beauty is in the eyes of the viewer” where it is the case that there is no point in judgement at all. You are left in your own little world like an astronaut left behind. Comforting for some possibly…
“Ghost in the shell” (as previously touched upon) is such a set of stories. There are a couple of movies and some series and another movie is apparently on its way. But they are by no way coherent, maybe because of several writers and directors. The success of the two first movies seems to have set the stage, and especially “Innocence” which almost felt like the animated version of Umberto Ecco’s “Name of the rose”. Where Innocence feels like a slow walk of dialogue accompanied by a delicate combination of computerized scenes and traditional drawings, its successors only achieve a vague blur. You do not create any exciting story by reusing esoteric concepts such as Puppeteer and artificial, mechanized brains, but by giving them a role in a narrative. It is the difference between seeing the constituents of a mathematical equation and what it depicts.
