Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045" Interview with Kenji Kamiyama and Shinji Aramaki, Director of "Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 Interview with Kenji Kamiyama and Shinji Aramaki, directors of "Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045

The original anime series "Ghost in the Shell SAC_2045" ("SAC_2045") will be distributed exclusively worldwide on Netflix starting Thursday, April 23, 2020.

It is the first full 3DCG work in the Ghost in the Shell series and has been attracting a great deal of attention even before its distribution, with Kenji Kamiyama, director of the "Ghost in the Shell S.A.C." series, and Shinji Aramaki, who once directed "APPLESEED," also a Shirow Masamune work, serving as double directors. What is the significance of working on a new Ghost in the Shell series at this time?　What is the response to the full 3DCG animation using motion capture?　We asked the two directors about their true intentions.

If war were to be managed by an AI, ...... would be the "subject" of this work.

─ ─ Thank you very much for your time today. First of all, please tell us why you decided to make this film.

Director Shinji Aramaki (Aramaki): Five years ago, when I was invited as a guest to the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival in Hokkaido, I met Mr. Ishikawa, the president of Production I.G., for a long time and said to him, "I have always wanted to make a Ghost in the Shell film using full 3DCG and motion capture. Ghost in the Shell using motion capture in full 3DCG. He made a surprisingly good impression and asked me, "What are you going to do about directing?　Aramaki-kun? I told him that I wanted to work with Director Kamiyama. After that, Director Kamiyama approached me, and we decided to meet once.

───How did you feel when you heard about it, Kamiyama-san?

Director Kenji Kamiyama (Kamiyama): I had been away from "Ghost in the Shell" for a while, and I thought that Ghost in the Shell would be a series that many different directors would be involved in. However, I felt that the subject matter of "Ghost in the Shell" had great potential that it would not be used up no matter how many times it was made, and that it would be a good match for what I wanted to depict. Then Director Aramaki approached me, and I felt the potential of motion capture as well, so I accepted the offer.

───This film was produced in full 3DCG using motion capture, and you felt that this was a possibility, but did you think that it would be a good match for the work?

Aramaki: Director Kamiyama's previous work, "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex," was very realistic in terms of life size and the composition of the city and space, and it was in a style where a detailed drama was created within the realism. I thought that Director Kamiyama would be interested in this. I had done a lot of motion capture myself, but at first it was just action scenes where the actors moved instead of the animators, but gradually I realized that it was also very effective in depicting drama. We were getting a good feeling that we could gather a group of actors with a high level of theatrical ability and work together to create a proper drama. That was one of the technical aspects of the proposal.

Kamiyama: Of course, I saw the potential of motion capture, but on the other hand, from the standpoint of having created "Ghost in the Shell," I felt that "Ghost in the Shell" was not suitable for 3DCG. The reason is that in the case of drawing, if you want a scene like this, you can just draw it, but in the case of 3DCG, you have to create the model from scratch, which is difficult from a cost standpoint. In the case of 3DCG, however, the model must be created from scratch, which is difficult to do from a cost standpoint. With drawing, such problems can be quickly recovered by the skill of the animator, and the "S.A.C." series was created by maximizing the power of the drawing. My first thought was that this would not be possible with 3DCG.

In contrast, motion capture allows us to do things in terms of acting that cannot be done with drawing. However, when it comes to character acting in a realistic setting, it is difficult to make the characters speak without stopping their movements and having them talk to each other. In the case of drawing, it is difficult to make it work without stopping the movement and having the characters talk. Both director Aramaki and I knew that the strengths and weaknesses of both drawing and 3DCG are the exact opposite of each other, and that there are parts that are suited for both, and parts that are not.

So, since this time we were using motion capture as a base, we thought that by strengthening the theatrical part, we would be able to create the parts that might have been lacking in the drawing. At the same time, it would be difficult to create many of the gadgets and sequences in the setting. I had a vague sense of this from the beginning.

─ ─ "Ghost in the Shell" is a work that has been very much ahead of its time in terms of AI and the Internet. What do you think is the most important aspect of "SAC_2045" in terms of storyline and subject matter?

Kamiyama: Whenever I create a work, I always ask myself, "What kind of times are we living in now?　What are the good points?　What are the bad points?　What would be good if it were like this? What is missing? I think about these questions. To put it simply, I think from the standpoint of placing something like Doraemon's secret tools in modern society. I will continue to follow this style in this film and incorporate the worldview of Ghost in the Shell into it to see what I can find. That is what I call the "subject matter" rather than the "theme.

When I think about the current era from this perspective, I wonder what is the same or different between the AI depicted in the world of "Ghost in the Shell" and the AI that has actually been realized today. The first thing that came to my mind when I compared them was that Motoko Kusanagi and her colleagues are warlords, which may be a bit inappropriate to say, but they are warlords. Public Safety Section 9" was mostly about being police officers, but their real job is probably war. I had this image of them, so the idea started from the point that I wanted to portray Motoko and the others as warlords, not just as detectives in Public Security Section 9.

I also wanted to explain what kind of people they are in a way that is not a "reboot" for people who are seeing this series for the first time. At the same time, when I thought about what kind of a society we live in today, I thought, isn't this a time of some kind of world war, although it is very different from what we imagined?　We don't see missiles and bullets flying around, we don't see tanks and battleships, but we are at war, right?　That is why I thought that maybe it is also at the level of a world war. It may be inappropriate, but isn't this the kind of era in which the act of war has become integrated into society as an industry? That is how I came up with the term "Sustainable War.

Also, five years ago, when this project started, people were talking about the "Singularity" (*note) coming in 2045 and AI becoming more and more a part of our daily lives. If this is the case, if we let AI manage warfare, it will be incorporated without our knowledge as the most efficient industry in terms of scrap and build with as few human deaths as possible. That is the "subject" we found this time. By introducing the characters and the world view of Ghost in the Shell, I thought I would be able to find the "theme," and so I assembled this series.

*Note ...... Singularity: technological singularity, the point at which AI surpasses the human brain.

───Is this not an actual war of a fistfighting nature, but is it more like a war in the unseen realm, where AI is involved?

Kamiyama: In our generation, there was the "Cold War," which we understood in words but didn't think of as an actual war. I thought it was more advanced than that.

Aramaki: I was hoping to depict war in a more complex and diversified state.

I was also worried that the times were moving so fast that I might exceed my work.

─ ─ In that sense, I feel that this work is truly visionary, or rather, that the content is in line with the times.

Kamiyama: Actually, while developing the scenario five years ago, I had the feeling that this work might be overtaken by the times. Five years ago, people still didn't think much about China, such as, "We found this in our food," or "A product made in China exploded. Aramaki: I think five years ago, people were still talking about China in a somewhat amusing way, saying things like, "This was in our food," or "A product made in China exploded.

Aramaki: It was a time when things like a high-speed Shinkansen train having an accident were the talk of the town. But when I went overseas for interviews, I found that things had progressed beyond the Tokyo level in places like Shanghai. That was five years ago.

Kamiyama: Shanghai is getting better every year I go there, and I think it is totally different from what is said on TV. On the other hand, I was quite shocked to hear that there are no more Japanese cars on the road in the U.S.

Aramaki: Uber is commonplace, and things like electric kick skaters can be rented right from your smartphone. That is about to end, though.

Kamiyama: In the world of "Ghost in the Shell," Japan was a society that was losing its political structure and was driven by advanced technology and the economy. But as we were making the products, we gradually began to see that Japan was lagging behind the rest of the world and was becoming like an emerging country in decline. Of course, we don't want to admit that, but by including such elements, the content ended up asking the question of how we can and cannot create the society that everyone wants. Society is moving faster than when I was making "S.A.C.," so I was thinking that by the time I developed the scenario and released it to the world, it might have caught up with me.

I also feel that in the Internet age, we are not sharing the same information as we did on TV, whereas to some extent we were all sharing the same information.

Aramaki: We only see customized news that is specific to each of us. This is why we all see things differently, and although we think the world is going in the right direction, in fact, we have completely different attitudes toward it. I wondered if it would be possible to express this in a simple image. I thought it might be possible to show that everyone sees things differently when looking at them subjectively.

In the phase of the original "Ghost in the Shell," even the Internet was not yet real to everyone. By the time of "S.A.C.," the Internet was around, but back then everyone was still on i-mode or something like that. Now that we are in the age of smartphones, I think we are in an age where people cannot empathize with us if we don't portray them in a realistic manner. I have been very careful about how to enhance the portrayal of this world. However, at the same time, I was concerned that the impression would be that the era would be surpassed. In that sense, I want everyone to see it as soon as possible (laughs).

─ ─ I think there are two phases in this work, the first half and the second half. The first half is set in the United States, which has become a war zone, but I felt that the way you depicted Japan in the second half was very prophetic, such as the simultaneous global default and the Tokyo reconstruction plan.

Kamiyama: If you look at it that way, I feel like I "managed to make it in time" (laughs).

Aramaki: The first half of the American version is meant to be an introduction to the world of "Ghost in the Shell" by depicting "Sustainable War" in an easy-to-understand manner, so that even first-time viewers can easily enter the world of "Ghost in the Shell". In the second half of the film, the story gets deeper in Japan.

Director Shinji Aramaki (back) and Director Kenji Kamiyama

The two of us worked together, and although it was not easy at all in terms of workload, it was much easier in terms of feelings.

──What was the division of roles between the two of you?

Aramaki: As has been the case since the last time we worked together on "ULTRAMAN," Director Kamiyama was in charge of leading and organizing the script meetings in the beginning, but when it came to the storyboarding stage, he would make the first episode, but from the next episode, I would do the storyboarding and staging rough drafts. From then on, however, the storyboards and staging rough drafts were done by me. However, that was the only difference between the two, and from that point on, we started looking at everything together. I ask Kamiyama-san to start and cut the motion capture shots, but the two of us work on it together.

Since there are quite a lot of people moving during motion capture filming, there are some areas that are difficult to see. It's better to have two people working together, because then you can check for things you might have missed, and you can also compare notes and come up with ideas. (Laughs) Anyway, we need to look at things together as much as possible, because if two people say different things, the staff will get confused. If there are any problems, we reconcile them on the spot.

Kamiyama: When two people are working together, there is less chance of overlooking something, and even if it is not an oversight, we can still express our opinions. I feel reassured by the fact that we are working together and can catch up with each other, which increases the intensity of the work. It's not easy at all in terms of workload (laughs), but I feel much more comfortable.

───Did you become able to do anything that you couldn't do when you were working on "ULTRAMAN"?

Aramaki: In terms of the technical aspects of CG, we have made progress in terms of variations of mobs and making them hold something in their hands when they don't have anything in their hands.

Kamiyama: It's not so much the technology as it is the part directly related to the budget. Also, in terms of creating a play using motion capture, our skills have improved through the production of "ULTRAMAN," and I think the level of the actors has also improved. In the past, actors had the impression that motion capture meant jumping and leaping and doing acrobatic things, but when I explained during auditions that it was not like that and that they would act throughout a scene just as they would in live action, they were quite surprised. On the other hand, the actors seemed to think it would be interesting to have a dialogue and play the role properly, and they became more positive about the project.

─ ─ What was your impression of each director from your respective perspectives?

Aramaki: To put it simply, he is a person who never gives up (laughs). (Laughs.) Sometimes it's the other way around, but he has a strong concept, so he often says, "This scene has to be this way. I often make proposals like, "If you are going to do it this way, how about this way? I make suggestions like, "If you are going to do it this way, how about this way? The discussions are constructive and interesting. Sometimes we clash, but we have to agree on that before we can move forward. But basically, he is a person who will not yield (laughs). (Laughs.) But he is reasonable, so I often agree with him. But there are also times when I wonder why he would yield on a point (laughs). (laughs) But 80-90% of the time, we agree with each other, and I am glad that we worked on "ULTRAMAN" together.

Kamiyama: Director Aramaki is tenacious, clever, and flexible. I think it is because of these qualities that we have been able to work together. He also helped me in areas that I am not good at, such as the mechanical parts and the science fiction setting.

─ ─ Since this work is in full 3DCG, I think it was easy to bring out the best in the mechanical parts, but on the other hand, I think there must have been some difficulties in the character design. Were there any points you were careful about or struggled with in this area?

Kamiyama: The characters may look deformed, but their body proportions are surprisingly realistic. The length of the legs and the length to the joints are very realistic. However, we took great pains in the modeling part to make sure that the characters would not look ugly if they were made realistic.

Aramaki: The balance of body proportions had to be reworked many times.

Kamiyama: In the case of drawing animation, you can make the legs look longer even if you take an overhead shot, but in the case of 3DCG, if you take an overhead shot, the legs will look shorter. In the case of 3DCG, however, the legs would look shorter if shot from an overhead perspective. This kind of balancing act is an area that has evolved even further from my experience with "ULTRAMAN.

Aramaki: Long arms and legs look good for action, but in fact, they make the character look unsteady and not like a person, which is not very cool. It also comes out in the scene where he stands on his knees and shoots a gun, so I had to be careful about that. We shot about two episodes a month using motion capture, and we were able to get very dense through the repetition of that process, so there was a lot of feedback from that.

Kamiyama: The most important thing that Aramaki-san and I shared from the beginning was that "3DCG is revealed when you get on the train. Human memory is hazy, but there is a great deal of it, and if you do proper modeling, it is immediately obvious that the car's tires and such are not this size. I can't explain it, but they know. In the case of drawing, you can absorb this information through the picture, but this is not the case with 3DCG. That is why I think it was very difficult for the modelers.

Aramaki: You can tell the moment a character stands next to a vehicle, so once he grips the steering wheel, you know the composition is wrong and the model must be wrong, so you send it back to the modeler. I fix it to the nearest centimeter.

Kamiyama: From the modeler's point of view, what we are saying is the same, but it is said by two people at the same time (laughs). The more fanciful something is, the more difficult it is. For example, a chair that looks a bit like science fiction. For example, dive gear, the setting says something like this, but it never hits the neck (laughs). (Laughs.) With drawings, you can shorten the length, but with 3DCG, that's not possible.

─ The character design is by a Russian, Ilya Kubushinov.

Kamiyama: This was partly due to coincidence, but a company called Signal-MD, a Production I.G group company, was working on a movie for which Ilya was the character designer, and although he was busy, I heard that he might be available. I asked him if he was available, and he said he would love to work on it. He had been familiar with "Ghost in the Shell" since his days in Russia, and some of his sketches were based on "Ghost in the Shell," so I think we were very lucky.

At the same time, the women he draws are younger than the original Motoko, and I think it was good that the character design was easy to understand for the audience who saw "Ghost in the Shell" for the first time this time. Otherwise, customers who see "Ghost in the Shell" for the first time would wonder why the character is so depressed (laugh).

With this film, I wanted to make another big jump to the theme I really wanted to depict by lowering the threshold once.

─ ─ In the previous "Ghost in the Shell" series, the usual pattern was for Motoko Kusanagi to dive into the cyber world and engage in a cyber battle, but there are almost no such scenes in this work.

Kamiyama: Neither of us was really aware of that, but yes, that is true. After all, times have changed drastically, and the Internet world has become something that everyone takes for granted, and that may be a major factor. There is no longer a need to visually depict the online world. I think this is due in large part to a change in our awareness as creators.

─ ─ Also, "posthuman" is a new keyword in this work. This post-human existence becomes a kind of mystery or a virtual enemy to be solved in this work, but I also got the impression that it is a kind of fantasy existence.

Kamiyama: In Masamune Shirow's original work, the "puppet master" is mentioned out of the blue, and I think that is also a kind of existence that we honestly don't understand. I don't know if it was by accident or by calculation, but because we went too far with the story, we had to complicate the story to make it more realistic in order to avoid a disconnect between the story and reality. This makes the story more complex and inconvenient.

Aramaki: That's right. The phase changed there, didn't it?

Kamiyama: That is one of the reasons why we dared to lower the threshold for the invention of posthumanity this time. I thought it would be good to make it look like a fantasy, and even if I felt it was detracting from the SF reality of "Ghost in the Shell," I thought that by lowering the threshold once, we could make another big jump to the theme we really wanted to depict. The fact that Motoko and her friends are back to their original warlords at the beginning of the film is one of the ways in which we wanted to lower the threshold.

─ ─ Finally, please tell us about the highlights of the film.

Kamiyama: In terms of the setting, we used the term "sustainable war" to describe a world in which wars continue that are not visible. In this context, we started with a more visually flamboyant depiction of Motoko and her colleagues, who are essentially warlords, something that has not been depicted much in the past. From there, we are digging deeper into the story to create a deeper setting, so I hope that in addition to the enjoyment of a quick glance, viewers will see that we are digging deeper into the story.

Aramaki: That's exactly right, but we were also conscious of the fact that we wanted to make it possible to watch all the episodes at once, so we hope that viewers will be able to see the deeper aspects of the story while still being able to enjoy it all at once as entertainment. I hope that people will watch it as entertainment all at once, while still feeling the deeper aspects of the story. I may be offended if I say this (laughs). (laugh) But I hope that people will be comfortable with the film.

Thank you very much.

Film Information

Netflix Original Anime Series "Ghost in the Shell SAC_2045

<Distribution information

Worldwide exclusive distribution from April 23, 2020 (Thursday) (*Except in mainland China)

<Main Cast

Motoko Kusanagi: Atsuko Tanaka

Daisuke Aramaki: Osamu Saka

Batou: Akio Otsuka

Togusa: Koichi Yamadera

Ishikawa: Yutaka Nakano

Saito: Toru Okawa