Ghost in the Shell

Released in Japan on November 18, 1995, the film adapts Shirow's manga under Oshii's direction, its Japanese title Kokaku Kidotai translating as Mobile Armoured Riot Police. Trimming the story to eighty-two minutes, the movie drops the manga's subplots to fix on the Puppet Master case alone, and it carries the material with a graver, more atmospheric tone than the comic. A sequel, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, followed in 2004.

The film opens with Major Motoko Kusanagi observing a meeting in New Port City, then killing a foreign diplomat and slipping away under thermoptic camouflage. Section 9, led by Daisuke Aramaki, takes up the case of a shadowy hacker called the Puppet Master, who has been ghost-hacking minds, including a minister's interpreter. Tracing the trail, Kusanagi and her team corner a garbageman who has been manipulated into hacking a wife and daughter that never existed, his memories of them entirely fabricated. He and another captured man both prove to be brainwashed puppets rather than the criminal himself.

The mystery deepens when a fully robotic female body assembles itself without authorization at Megatech, flees, and is struck by a truck. Section 9 finds the shell holds a ghost despite having no brain cells, and it identifies itself as the Puppet Master, a program born of Project 2501 that achieved sentience and now seeks political asylum. Section 6, which secretly created it, moves to seize and destroy it, sparking a chase. Kusanagi corners the body at an abandoned building, battling a Fuchikoma walker tank before Batou saves her. She dives into the Puppet Master's ghost, and it proposes merging with her to create a new single entity capable of reproduction and death, the two experiences it lacks. As Section 6 snipers open fire and destroy both bodies, Kusanagi's brain survives. She wakes in a child-sized shell as a fusion of the two minds, no longer purely Kusanagi nor the Puppet Master, and looks out over the city musing that the net is vast and infinite.

The film earned praise as one of the first anime works to blend computer and cel animation almost seamlessly, and it helped anime cross over to audiences beyond the usual fan base in North America. Its classical-styled score centers on a haunting choral piece, a wedding song meant to drive off evil, sung in an archaic form of Japanese laced with Bulgarian harmony after composer Kenji Kawai could not find Bulgarian singers. The movie's cascading opening-credit code, actually staff names rendered as numbers, is widely credited as inspiration for the famous Matrix source code. Set in a city built as a mix of Asian cultures with Chinese signage dominant, the film became a cult classic abroad even as its domestic ticket sales lagged, which is why the sequel promoted its subtitle Innocence to the main title. Its influence eventually reached Hollywood through the 2017 live-action adaptation starring Scarlett Johansson.