What might be called the fantasy of the feminine sublime in Ghost in the Shell allows the film to redefine female creativity as the central libidinal, technological and aesthetic drive in twentieth-century visual culture. The Matrix rewrites the history of cinema as the story of FX technologies, and of the fantasies constitutive of, or made possible by, special effects techniques. A careful examination of intermedial processes in Ghost in the Shell reveals that its reinvention of cyberpunk, and of analogue and new media produces a new paradigm for the history of cinema that reinstates animation as the pivotal structural dynamics, unconscious and conceptual architecture of cinema. My analysis also explores the gender fantasies and peculiar transitional imagination generated by special effects in the two films. This article examines the transfers, transformations and fusions between analogue (photographic-based) cinema, photography, 2-D animation, computer animation and digital cinema in two cyberpunk films: Oshii Mamoru's Ghost in the Shell ( Kokaku kidotai, 1995) and Larry and Andy Wachowski's The Matrix (1999). Intermediality designates the interactions, mutual refashioning or remediation, and the conceptual fusions occurring between various media in a given cultural production or between several media elements, forms and techniques in a single medium. Intermediality and special effects (FX) enjoyed a privileged status in the science fiction 'cinema of attractions' in the 1990s. Talking Head takes on an obvious staged form, drawing from both Japanese and Western styles, with most of the action taking place as if in a play. Like Oshii’s other live action films before Avalon (The Red Spectacles and Stray Dog: Kerberos Panzer Cops, which are discussed briefly in chapter 7), the style of Talking Head is very different from that of his animated films. Although the film sometimes is billed as a mix of live action and anime, the animation does not occupy very much screen time (and only a very small bit of animation at the beginning is in what has come to be accepted as the anime style). Said Oshii, “I was so upset that I asked Bandai if I could direct something else, and they said ‘Do whatever you want.’”1 With Bandai’s blessing, Oshii directed Talking Head (1992), his personal meditation on the art and industry of film and animation. Oshii had been working on another anime project for Bandai between the two Patlabor films, but the company suddenly canceled it. Specifically, he worked closely with the company Bandai, whose various subsidiaries produce video games, toys, and animation. Although Oshii’s reputationas a visionary director continued to grow through the early 1990s, he was still unmistakably a part of the commercial anime industry.
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