Ghost in the Shell

Ghost in the Shell (1995) is Mamoru Oshii's landmark anime, available to watch online on iFILM. This cyberpunk film draws on Masamune Shirow's manga.

The year is 2029. Cybernetics has advanced so far that people swap flesh for machine parts and jack their minds straight into the net, which leaves the brain itself open to hacking. Major Motoko Kusanagi, an almost fully synthetic agent of the secretive Section 9, is chasing a hacker known only as the Puppet Master. The closer she gets, the more one question gnaws at her: where does her own identity end, when her body and memories were assembled in a lab?

Oshii turned an action premise into a slow, philosophical meditation on the soul inside a machine. Long takes of the rain-soaked megacity, neon bleeding into puddles, all set to Kenji Kawai's score, gave science fiction an image the Wachowskis' Matrix and countless games would later borrow. The film long ago outgrew its genre and ranks among the defining sci-fi works of the 1990s. Stream Ghost in the Shell (1995) online on iFILM.