Ghost in the Shell - The Laughing man review !

Ghost in the Shell - Laughing Man - Stand Alone Complex

How many titles does an anime need these days ? Well three it seems.

Anyway, Ghost in the Shell (or GITS) was Mangle Videos next big thing way back in 1996ish, just when Anime was starting to go bad.

It was written by the bloke that did Appleseed, before he went completly out of his tree and decided to only draw porn for the rest of his life. (see galgrease)

Mangle video loved it because :

• The main character is a hot lesbian cyborg
• There is graphic voilence every now and then.
• The word Cyber is used in every sentence.
• They desperately need another Akira

Anyways, after the film there was a TV series - Stand alone complex, so this was the movie edit of that. Its very long.

I watched the dub of it - YES THE DUB, take that anime purists. Mainly because I need my hands free to do other things while watching. (hur hur). Not that i read subtitles with my hands, that would be mad unless you had a braille TV which hasnt been invented, because it would be stupid. But you cant iron and read subtitles at the same time, unless you want to singe your pubes. Apart from the voice actors struggling to pronounce japanese names its fine.

So Laughing man isnt that old, and a lot of the stuff which uses to seem rad isnt so rad these days, maybe because wireless internet is part of real life these days. Still there are a lot of cool things like the landmates out of Appleseed, and nice ideas like hacking peoples cyber eyes.

Of course if you could do this you would hack your bosses eyes so he thinks he sees you at work, but he might be hacking your eyes so you think he's at work so it would get confusing.

The laughing man's plot is confusing too, everybody double cross's their cyber doubles, but there is action every 20 minutes thanks to its episodic roots.

Its kind of like BBC's Spooks but they dont spend every episode in a London
Station, and instead of interspersing violence with tedious love affairs, they stare into space and talk a lot of cyber babble.

Overall : Good