Name: How Not To Adapt A Movie
Uploaded: 2026-03-13T17:18:16.000Z
Duration: 7 min 24 s
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The anime Ghost in The Shell from 1995 and the Live action Ghost in the Shell from earlier this year are not the same movie.

Adverbs of manner

They're both adapted from the same universe originally created in the manga by Masamune Shirao, but

they pull from different parts of that universe.

Unfortunately, the popularity of the 1995 anime feature seems to have convinced someone that it was a good idea to graft images and sequences from that movie ont completely different story.

Don't get me wrong, I like homages as much as the next guy, but

the ones in Ghost in the Shell 2017 don't really do it any favors.

The evocative colors and sharp contrasts of the anime are replaced by drab dark palettes that are often hard to make out.

Sure, animation is more likely to have crisper lines of contrast, but

the live action movie not only fails to recreate the beauty of its predecessor, it fails to the purpose of that beauty.

Okay, for me, the one on the left draws my attention to the bed.

It's the brightest part of an otherwise pretty uniformly colored frame.

If you blur it out like this, you can see that there is virtually no contrast between the interior walls of the apartment and the cityscape through the window.

It makes for a bland bluish composition that doesn't ask you for any further consideration.

Well, the immediately recognizable difference is the light source.

Instead of coming from the bed, the light from the window.

And it's blown out so much that it creates this frame within a frame effect that shrouds the apartment and leaves the major in silhouette.

There's great contrast here, but the purpose of the contrast is more important.

It's almost as if the major shape is cut out of the city itself.

In a video I made a couple years ago, I spoke about how the 1995 anime explores the relationship between city and person.

It uses a futuristic, pluralistic, dynamic Hong Kong to interrogate what it means to build a personal identity in the age of cyborgs.

It does this by visually framing characters in relation to the city around them, and

by giving us time to contemplate the space where the story takes place, most notably in a 3 1/2 minute meditative sequence that allows us to simply look at the city.

It's funny that the live action movie adds 20 more minutes of runtime, but

can't find any time for something like this.

In fact, for all the cool visuals it boasts, there is really no city at all in this movie.

Just a digital canvas to show off cyberpunkish effects.

The way Ghost in the Shell 2017 wants us to see city is in these elaborate soaring shots that move and glide through the holographic buildings.

But actual people don't see the city that way.

One of the things that 2017 helped me to realize is that every shot in the montage from the anime is from the perspective of human beings.

The camera is placed only where people could actually stand or sit or gaze out of a window.

In fact, you can learn a lot about what makes the anime so great by watching the live action Ghost in the Shell.

Let's take a look at this sequence, for example, one of my favorite from the original.

In the anime, we get to spend three or four minutes with this guy and his co worker.

As they work and chat, he explains that his estranged wife won't let him see his daughter.

So he's hacking into her mind to find out why she's doing this.

He even shows his colleague a picture of his daughter.

But when she practices that thing, it is painful, right?

You don't see these guys doing their job.

You don't get any conversation in 14 seconds.

Their minds are hacked and they become zombies after this.

They stage the iconic fight scene from the anime in the water in front of the city.

It's virtually a shot for shot remake with a few differences.

Like these beautiful signs versus these beige buildings.

Or this red shirt as a point of focus versus this beige overcoat.

A brief moment like that can add so much.

But Ghost in the shell 2017 never has time for them.

Finally, we get to the tragic moment when the garbage man learns that he's been fooled.

That all his memories of his daughter are fake, implanted by a hacker.

The live action version shoots this in a weird glass box with a man We've spent 14 seconds with cutting all over the place.

The anime takes this moment largely in one shot.

The garbage man in the harsh overexposed light of the truth.

the cop brings out the man's photograph and asks him what he sees.

If this is all a lie in the anime we get this tragic little arc, one that echoes the larger themes of the film and it's sequenced brilliantly.

Following this is the scuba diving scene where Major ruminates on her own identity, and

following that is the montage I mentioned before where we get to ruminate where the ideas from both scenes compound and reverberate across the city.

In the live action movie, the character is a throwaway, the scene is disconnected, the scuba diving scene is isolated as well elsewhere in the movie, and

any time for us to dwell on these ideas is non existent.

The worst part about it is that the story Ghost in the Shell 2017 wants to tell is actually really good.

It's from a part of the TV series, the standalone Complex, and

it features the revolutionary Kuze, here played by Michael Pitt, whose backstory is tragic and whose ideology is profound.

We don't get to explore any of that because 2017 is busy trying to accommodate two stories.

There are interesting things about both, but we get nothing but the surface level of either.

Those who adapt works of art should be given the creative license to make the story work for them, but

you can't just mine the source material for parts.

Adaptations and remakes don't require strict adherence or obedience or even necessarily respect, just an understanding of what made the original so powerful in the first place.

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How Not To Adapt A Movie

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