original text linked
to Sister Widow's "Ghost in the Shell", making "cyberpunk" a trend once again.
Everyone is worshipping the two theatrical animations of Mamoru Oshii, and by the way, they despise Hollywood. So what is the essence of Oshii Mamoru version? In fact, the answer lies in the ending song of the movie, which is the title song of the original animation ▼
Puppet Ballad 01
Cyberpunk Cyberpunk, a compound word. Cyber is cybernetics, cybernetics, which means networking. Punk, punk, rock and roll is one of the earliest genres, radical, rebellious and anti-traditional.
Elements that often appear in cyberpunk works:
hacking, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, urban sprawl and slums, large tech/biochemical enterprises, genetic engineering...
This concept is the most important concept in "Neuromancer" created by William Gibson in 1984. First, the 1982 Ridley Scott-directed "Blade Runner" provided the earliest visual setting.
Oshii Mamoru's 1995 "Ghost in the Shell" theatrical version took this style to the extreme.
The movie version of Sister Widow was sprayed by many fans as only Shell (shell) and no Ghost (soul), which is actually quite helpless. A commercial film with a cyberpunk soul like the original Attack in the Shell or Blade Runner is basically doomed to fail at the box office.
The reason? Let's take a look at the two "MVs" in the theatrical version that condense the essence of cyberpunk aesthetics.
Kawai Kenz's theme song "Puppet Ballad" for "Ghost in the Shell" has injected soul into this work.
The puppet ballad is a ballad used by Shinto priests for priestess. The Japanese lyrics are simple and elegant. The Chinese translation below is also very expressive.
If I dance, Liren is also intoxicated.
If I dance, the bright moon also chimes.
God descended on the wedding night, the dawn broke and the tiger thrushed.
This song is an antique singing style, with Western-style harmony and strong drum beats. The electronic music in the second half creates a sense of the future, which is in line with the aesthetics of modern people. The whole puppet ballad is eerie, sad, and religious. It is the end of the world, and it is also a new life. It sounds shocking.
There are 6 versions of Puppet Ballads: "Bad 01", "Bad 02"... arranged in order. Every time it appears in the animation, there is a different picture theme. Oshii Mamoru's long and restrained shots, coupled with Kawai's Japanese-inspired music, is a purely Eastern aesthetic that is frankly difficult for Westerners to imitate.
"Yao 01" appeared in the opening subtitles of the theatrical version. Its theme is Making of Cyborg, which is the embodiment of the "cyborg" branch of cyberpunk culture. The opening of the animation completely presents the whole process of the heroine Motoko being created.
The setting of the intubation at the back of the neck directly affects the Japanese-style island accent of "The Matrix"
. The ethereal harmony is
matched with such a bizarre artificial human screen. The
audience is quickly drawn into this different dimension
. The following shot was learned by "Westworld" go ▼
The whole process of the birth of an artificial man, the movie version can be said to have restored the
classic scenes that basically should have been there, like this ▼
In addition, all the Staff subtitles in the entire title are interspersed in this way ▼
Obviously, this is the green screen prototype of "The Matrix"
Finally , the title ends with the big eyes opened by Motoko▼
Many people don't like the appearance of Suzi in the 95 theatrical version, except that the image is too manly, and the eyes that have been in a weird and wide-open state make people feel creepy and lack the real feeling of a living person. In fact, this is exactly what the director wanted to express. Motoko is an artificial person whose whole body has been modified except for the brain, walking on the borderline between machines and humans. On the one hand, she has super strong fighting power. These martial arts are what Hollywood is best at, and the restoration is so addicting to fans.
However, those literary dramas, the Americans are powerless. Motoko's confusion and depression left her expressionless from beginning to end. In addition to performing tasks, she is thinking about the meaning of existence. Mamoru Oshii's depiction of Motoko is too oriental. She is either silent and still, just like freehand Chinese painting, she can only feel its charm▼
Or it is to state your own philosophical thinking in large sections ▼
A person's unique appearance, physical characteristics, and memory of life are the fundamental reasons for being different from others and becoming a completely independent individual, then for a prosthetic person, the memory can be stored externally, and the body can be copied at any time. "What's the point of this concept?
While thinking about these questions, I also have to ask for a blog and get rid of the book bag▼
Thinking about the tangled relationship between robots, artificial humans and humans has always been the motif of cyberpunk works. "Westworld" also likes to drop philosophy and literary book bags like the theatrical version of "Battling in the Shell" ▼
But Westworld is a 10-hour show, and only a handful of characters occasionally drop their bags. And in the shell, everyone will memorize a pile of Bibles, Rousseau, Schopenhauer.
Such obscure lines and boring characters are actually not in line with the aesthetic taste of American audiences. So Mila, the widowed sister in the movie version, presents the classic routine of American heroes. Although she is as capable and capable as Motoko in the Japanese version, she doesn't need such a dozing personality.
It's not that there are no such sultry characters and subtle atmosphere in Western works. After all, "Ghost in the Shell" was also greatly influenced by "Blade Runner". The most classic scene in "Blade Runner", at the end of the film, Harrison Ford chases and kills the android. A line that the android spoke in the rain before he died was so beautiful that the world cried ghosts ▼
Like teardrops disappearing in the rain, he is a poet! But the price of such art was a fiasco at the box office, losing to "ET Alien", which was released at the same time. It wasn't until many years later that it was hailed as comparable to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Speaking of the "cyber" part, let's talk about punk.
No matter what cyberpunk work, there is an essential element, which is the perpetual rain, the slums full of crowds, smoke and strange oriental symbols, in stark contrast to the hyperspread modern metropolis.
The prototype of this kind of city is Hong Kong in the 1990s. On one side is a dense high-rise building like a forest▼
On one side is the Kowloon Walled City made of prefabricated slabs and concrete. This completely vertical illegal city has formed its unique slum aesthetic ▼
Next door to the Kowloon Walled City is Kai Tak Airport. Before the Hong Kong Chek Lap Kok International Airport was put into use, it was the only civil airport in Hong Kong. For the residents in the Kowloon Walled City, it was really flying over the head, because the plane was only more than 40 meters away from the roof of the Walled City ▼
The contrast between the slums and the metropolis, presented in the cyberpunk works, becomes like this
Blade Runner (1982) ▼
Ghost in the Shell▼
In the 95 theatrical version of "Battling in the Shell", "Bad 02" fully presents this "ghost city" based on the Kowloon Walled City.
Direct video with traffic ▼
Puppet Ballad 02
was a plane from Kai Tak Airport at the beginning, lowly pressing over the dilapidated residential building, the water bus slowly shuttling between the messy signboards, the river full of filth...
The whole song flows in a long, oppressive shot, a slow beat that Hollywood blockbusters can't handle.
The slums must also be accompanied by rain, so that there is a bright yellow in this gray and dark tone▼
You may not understand why the director is piling up these shots. However, these ultra-realistic hand-painted pictures not only create a sense of immersive substitution, but also give people a suffocating beauty. Makoto Shinkai, a Japanese animation director who has been on fire in recent years, also likes this ultra-realistic hand-painted style. It's just that Makoto Shinkai likes the crystal clear light, which is completely different from the dark and depressing tones of cyberpunk.
But no matter what, this realistic style will give people the ultimate beauty in animation. Once it is shot with a camera, it will immediately lose its aura and become an ordinary lens.
Hollywood movies will not use the same way of scenery movies to portray the hearts of characters like animation. In fact, this part of the animated version is to experience human society from the perspective of Motoko. Like a god watching all beings, mortals in the market ▼
She also saw a woman who looked exactly like her ▼
Different appearances, subconscious voices, when these things have substitutes, where is "I"?
In the movie version, Sister Widow has similar thoughts. Am I a human or a machine? But the way Hollywood Popcorn solves this philosophical problem is simple and crude. Just stuff her with a biological mother, an adoptive mother, and a lover, family and love, to perfectly mend human nature.
Finally, the vulgar value of "emotion is the most beautiful part of human nature" is obtained. The widow sister is no longer confused, and is thriving in the cause of justice against terrorism. Of course, this kind of treatment can satisfy most people who eat melons, which is in line with universal values.
But how can such values be called punk?
So how does the original version handle this? The final boss of the 95 theatrical version is called the puppet master, which was originally just a piece of hacker code used to invade the electronic brain. However, the puppet master actually cultivated self-consciousness in the sea of information and formed self-consciousness. He claimed to be a living being.
Human laughed. But it is a piece of code that can store itself, and it is too embarrassing to call itself a living body?
At this time, the puppet master explained his cognition of the essence of life and gave the human a thunderous blow▼
Life is a node in a flood of information. Memory, that is, a unique way of gathering information, is the fundamental symbol that distinguishes independent individuals. Emotions are just a form of expression.
What's more, the puppet master not only has self-awareness, but also dies and reproduces offspring. Strict self-replication cannot promote the evolution of life. Individuals die and reproduce offspring. Genetic variation is the driving force behind the flowering and fruiting of the tree of life and the birth of all things.
In fact, a similar theory also appeared in "Westworld". The old man said: The driving force of species evolution is that DNA self-replication produces "mistakes". The
puppet master knows this very well, and even actively throws himself into the net when humans are chasing him. The real purpose is to get close to Mozi and "fit" with her , in order to achieve a perfect life form, he actively "begged death", hoping to reproduce offspring.
But the most tangled question for Motoko, how can I ensure that I am still me?
As a result, her long-standing entanglement was clarified by this intelligent body born on the Internet.
"There is no guarantee, human beings themselves are changing," he said. The "ego" of wanting to keep yourself is always limiting you.
So far, Motoko's entanglement is gone. Next, it can be said that it is a confession of "love" between two super-intelligent entities that are not human, and that are not machines.
It is confirmed that all true love comes from understanding and recognition.
At the end of the animation, unlike the movie, the heroine returns to human nature and lives for maternal love and love. Instead, Mozi completely broke free from the shackles of the body, merged with a network intelligence body, and uploaded himself to the infinite network space.
Such a non-mainstream ending that mocks universal values, how could Hollywood dare to shoot it?
After all, human beings are too narcissistic. Just like the white-haired aunt complained in the theatrical version of "Battling in the Shell 2" in 2004▼
This aunt shocked the protagonist and the audience within 2 minutes of appearing. Because her views are so outrageous. She believes that humans create humanoid robots, just like raising children. Because children are also inherently different from real human beings, but have a human form of existence. So she said that raising children, like building humanoid robots, is actually to satisfy the ancient dream of creating artificial humans. Even girls like to play with dolls, this is the mentality. This terrifying point of view frightened the protagonist.
It's a pity that in the movie version, all her wise lines have been harmonized, only the charm of her lighting a cigarette and a cup of cigarette butts are retained.
And in this second animated theatrical version, the last set of shots makes people shudder. Adults hold children, children hold dolls▼
The picture finally freezes on the doll's face with wide eyes.
As if I heard the cry of a robot,
I am life, but I don't want to be human!
Finally put a cover of "Puppet Ballad"
"Puppet Ballad 01" cover
View more about Ghost in the Shell reviews
