Wired Magazine

The three titans of Japanese animation are all about to unleash monster new films.

By Charles C. Mann

The story has become Hollywood legend: In the mid-1990s, veteran producer Joel Silver met with two brothers. A little-known writer-director team, they were pitching an idea that Silver just couldn't wrap his head around. Finally they showed him Ghost in the Shell, a 1995 full-length Japanese cartoon by Mamoru Oshii. "We want to make a live-action version of this," they said. Ghost was like no cartoon Silver had ever seen. Rather than the family-friendly fare conjured up by the word animation, it was a violent tale about a futuristic world where people are so entangled with computers that nobody knows who is human and what is real. Quickly grasping its appeal, Silver gave the brothers the thumbs-up to produce a movie about a futuristic world where people are so entangled with computers that nobody knows who is human and what is real. The brothers were named Wachowski; their movie was called The Matrix.

Silver wasn't the only American to be riveted by Oshii's darkly complex vision. Released on video in 1996, Ghost in the Shell reached number one on the Billboard chart, selling a quarter-million copies - the kind of performance usually associated with $100 million Hollywood pictures about blowing things up, not with animated Japanese movies, known as anime, whose budgets are barely big enough to cover Robert Downey Jr.'s rehab bills. .......

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