‘The Ghost in the Shell’ series review: Science SARU’s sprightly cyberpunk adaptation gives Shirow’s ghost a freshly minted shell
The Ghost in the Shell anime review: Science SARU’s manga-faithful reboot gives Masamune Shirow’s seminal cyberpunk blueprint a timely system update, preserving its unruly intelligence while sharpening its suspicions about consciousness as a commodity
Science SARU’s manga-faithful reboot gives Masamune Shirow’s seminal cyberpunk blueprint a timely system update, preserving its unruly intelligence while sharpening its suspicions about consciousness as a commodity
Published - September 14, 2026 06:32 pm IST
A still from ‘The Ghost in the Shell’ | Photo Credit: Prime Video
We have spent the better part of four decades catching up with The Ghost in the Shell. With our current AI-saturated, post-capitalist dystopia steadily graduating from speculative fiction into lived experience, the seminal cyberpunk series couldn’t have picked a more felicitous moment to return. Masamune Shirow’s 1989 manga had the prescience to make technological upheaval feel almost mundane, imagining a future where cyberisation has become so commonplace that even the most radical alterations to the human body barely register as remarkable. Mamoru Oshii’s subsequent Production I.G. film distilled that premise from Shirow’s famously information-clotted pages into a severe, hypnotically cerebral landmark, leaving its fingerprints all over The Matrix and Cyberpunk 2077. Science SARU now circles back to Shirow, brushing aside some of the franchise’s accumulated solemnity to recover the manga’s perversity and unruly imagination. For a story about technology trespassing into the definition of a person, this is indeed a remarkably well-timed homecoming.
For newcomers, Shirow’s world can take some acclimatisation. Set in 2029, Ghost in the Shell imagines a society where cyberbrains, prosthetic bodies and direct neural access to the network have become everyday realities, leaving even memory vulnerable to digital tampering. The “ghost” is the consciousness inhabiting the “shell”. This means physical bodies are replaceable and minds are increasingly malleable. This is where Section 9 enters the picture, a government black-ops unit run by the unflappable Chief Aramaki and fronted in the field by the iconic Major Motoko Kusanagi. There is plenty to absorb and the terminology takes some getting used to, although cyberpunk veterans will recognise the terrain and soon find their bearings.
Any adaptation of The Ghost in the Shell ultimately has to get Kusanagi right, because the franchise’s entire identity is wired through her. Voiced by Maaya Sakamoto, the Major is Shirow’s formidable full-body cyborg and Section 9’s field commander, a woman whose cyberbrain gives her almost preternatural command of both networks and violence. Science SARU’s interpretation restores the manga’s impish Kusanagi after Oshii’s film sublimated her into something colder and more metaphysical. She wisecracks, flirts and trades barbs with her colleagues, but almost always carries her prodigious competence with a proprietary cool. All that confidence and personality gives the series room to make her funny, petulant, reckless and unusually alive, which makes moments when her certainty begins to fray considerably more consequential.
A still from ‘The Ghost in the Shell’ | Photo Credit: Prime Video
Kusanagi also benefits from the odd little republic of specialists orbiting her. Batou is the heavily augmented bruiser of the unit, his prosthetic eyes and hulking frame matched by an exasperated loyalty toward his commander. Togusa remains the conspicuously human variable in Section 9, a former detective whose relative lack of cyberisation gives him a stubborn attachment to old-fashioned police work. Ishikawa supplies the unit’s intelligence and cyberwarfare expertise, Saito its sharpshooting, while Chief Aramaki provides the political cunning that keeps Section 9 operational. What makes the ensemble click is the sheer familiarity of their interactions. These people feel like colleagues with accumulated habits, grudges, frictions, personal quirks and professional loyalties.
The Fuchikoma are where the series starts making a meal out of its politics of personhood. These cute AI spider-tanks can think for themselves and develop distinct little personalities, yet Section 9 still treats them as little more than disposable military tech. Science SARU gives that dissonance plenty of room to breathe, letting the Fuchikoma chatter away in chirpy anime-girl voices while their deaths are tallied as equipment losses. The joke acquires real bite when the Fuchikoma develop something perilously close to class consciousness, flirting with collective action as they begin to recognise that being manufactured property does rather complicate the business of dying for your employer. The series gets plenty of mileage from this proto-unionisation, turning the gag into a pointed little satire of disposable labour.
