(Mamoru Oshii, 1995, Japan, 83 minutes)

Ahead of the upcoming three-day run of Mamoru Oshii's The Red Spectacles, we are thrilled to bring Oshii’s iconic animated masterpiece Ghost in the Shell back to the big screen! Based on the equally provocative manga of the same name (the original Ghost in the Shell manga consists of three core volumes created by Masamune Shirow, if you want to dive deeper into the lore of GitS), Oshii’s 1995 adaptation became a major blueprint for cyberpunk-themed media to come, with its groundbreaking integration of traditional animation and realistic CGI, and its metaphysical sci-fi themes. The film also makes deliberate use of the futuristic city as a living, breathing protagonist—towering megastructures juxtaposed with antiquated, gritty Neo-Asian cityscapes evoke an eerie devotion to capitalist ideology, a cyberpunk aesthetic Oshii later coined as “Chinese Gothic.” Following Major Motoko Kusanagi, field commander of Public Security Section 9, in her investigation of the hacker known as “The Puppet Master,” Ghost in the Shell interrogates the blurring line between human and machine.

In Japanese with English subtitles.