Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie

Released in 2015 and adapting Masamune Shirow's property, this feature runs about 100 minutes. Kazuya Nomura directed, with Kazuchika Kise serving as general director and character designer, Tow Ubukata writing the screenplay, and Cornelius composing the score. The film ties directly into Ghost in the Shell: Arise, reusing the same crew and largely the same voice performers, and it also circulated under the alternate name The Rising. It opened in Japan in June 2015 before reaching the United States and the United Kingdom that October.

Set after the events of Arise, the story turns on the killing of Japan's Prime Minister, an act the public frames as the most significant since the war. A special operations team headed by Major Kusanagi digs into the true motive behind the murder, aided along the way by the slain leader's son, Osamu Fujimoto. Woven through the film is the Major's own beginning: her parents had worked on keeping prosthetic bodies from decaying into obsolete relics that could no longer upgrade after their owner died. With her mother pregnant at the time, the unborn Motoko was placed into a prosthetic body, echoing her incarnation from the earlier films rather than the small child of a plane crash seen in Stand Alone Complex.

Production I.G unveiled the project in September 2014, pitching it as a further evolution of the series. A short teaser followed in January 2015, showing a redesigned Major who more closely resembled her look in the older films. The voice ensemble carried across from Arise, with Maaya Sakamoto voicing the Major in Japanese and Elizabeth Maxwell taking the role in English, alongside returning performers for Batou, Togusa, Aramaki, and the rest of the unit.