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IGN Otaku Update! is IGN India’s original column series exclusively dedicated to covering the burgeoning animanga fandom and market in India and beyond.Helixes Inc. provided access to Mokochan and Shuhei Handa for this interview
Ghost in the Shell has been part of the cultural conversation since Masamune Shirow’s manga first ran in Kodansha’s Young Magazine in 1989. Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 film turned it into a genre-defining piece of cyberpunk, and the franchise has since spread across multiple anime, a Hollywood live-action version starring Scarlett Johansson and video games — each one inheriting the job of measuring up to what came before
Science Saru’s new television series, simply titled The Ghost in the Shell, is the newest entry in that legacy. Directed by Mokochan in his directorial debut, with Shuhei Handa as character designer and executive animation director, the ten-episode show follows Motoko Kusanagi and Section 9 through a 2029 Japan where cybernetic enhancement has blurred the line between human and machine. I reviewed the first two episodes, calling them one of the most faithful adaptations the franchise has received, closely recreating Shirow’s manga with no reworks for a new audience. In this edition of IGN Otaku Update!, I spoke with Mokochan and Handa to understand how deliberate this faithfulness actually was, and what it took to pull off.
Building Kusanagi
Kusanagi goes through a large number of costume changes over the course of the show (around 48 as the creators revealed at Annecy Festival a couple of weeks ago), and Handa spoke about what handling these many designs actually looked like day to day. Understandably, he didn’t design most of it alone. “It was tough. As for the costume designs, let’s see… how many was it? More than half of them, I asked the sub-character designer to handle. I’m not really that knowledgeable about clothing, so I asked Takahata to take charge of that part. They would draw the designs, and then I’d go through and review them. I made adjustments, like giving the silhouettes more of an 1980s feel, and that’s how we handled it.”
Handa has designed for very different studios before this, including Trigger’s more exaggerated house style and the tone of Spriggan. Is there a personal signature that survives across those projects, or if he switches entirely depending on what a show calls for? His answer pointed to the brief he was working from rather than a stylistic instinct of his own. “By the time I was approached about the project, it had already been decided that the anime would be based completely on the original manga. So I approached the character designs using the original manga’s art style as my foundation.”
No Difference Between Flesh and Machine
Kusanagi’s brain is the only organic part left in a body that’s almost entirely prosthetic, and a designer could easily justify treating her differently from a fully human character on the page because of that. I asked Handa how he decides which parts of someone like that still need to look like real flesh. He said he doesn’t really separate the two. “I don’t really think about it that much. I’d say I just end up drawing her the same way I normally would a human character. I don’t really think about it that much. Even if it’s a human or an android.”
Mokochan extended that same idea to the show’s machines as well. “We just treat a character as a character. We don’t really make a distinction based on whether they’re mechanical or flesh-and-blood when we’re drawing them. The Fuchikoma are the same. They’re machines, sure, but to us they’re still characters. I think… maybe it’s because, with anime and manga, you’re not really trying to draw things the way you would in a figure drawing. It’s more about expressing the impression something gives than reproducing it exactly. Ultimately, what we’re trying to put into the drawing is the impression of that character. That’s the mindset we work with.”
First Time Directing
Mokochan storyboarded under Masaaki Yuasa, the acclaimed director behind titles like The Tatami Galaxy and Devilman Crybaby, for years before this show, and The Ghost in the Shell is his first time directing. But what is the actual difference feels like between storyboarding someone else’s vision and being the person others now storyboard for?
He pointed straight to the pressure of the job rather than any newfound creative freedom. “As a director, there are far fewer opportunities for someone above you to tell you, ‘This is how I want you to do it,’ compared with when you’re working as a storyboard artist. And I had to make all the decisions. That was the biggest difference and biggest
Hand-Drawn by Necessity
A show built around cyborgs, robotics, and constant machinery would be an easy candidate for heavy 3D animation, but Science Saru animated The Ghost in the Shell mostly by hand
I asked Mokochan where protecting that hand-drawn, analog quality mattered most, especially in places where going digital would have been the easier route. His answer tied the choice directly to the manga’s central theme instead of a technical preference. “One of the major themes of the original is the mystery of what it means to be human. So, when making the anime, we thought about what form of expression would best suit that theme. We felt that having real people physically move their hands and create the work with the human body was the form of expression that best matched the theme. That’s why creating the animation through hand-drawn animation was something very important for our anime this time.”
Shirow Lettering
One detail from the manga that carries directly into the anime is its background signage: Shirow filled his panels with invented scrawl standing in for lettering on signs, a script that looks almost like Arabic, or to my eye something closer to Dhivehi, than actual Japanese lettering. Science Saru recreated something similar for the show, also making it a point that no GenAI was used in its creation
Explaining that, Mokochan traced it back to Shirow’s own workflow. “I felt it was one of the elements that make up Shirow’s world. So… it was more that we deliberately left it in just as it was. It was, first and foremost, a labour-saving measure in the manga. Whether that also makes it some kind of labour-saving device in animation is a different matter… If anything, it was harder. Things like the barcodes on the foreheads too.”
Handa was even more direct about the amount of effort actually involved on the anime’s side. “Those kinds of things in the manga were already there as one of the elements that make up Shirow Masamune’s original world. It’s not so much that we deliberately chose to do it that way ourselves, we simply applied it as it was. Since we’re making this based on the manga, it feels like we just reflected it directly. If anything, applying it was actually pretty difficult. So it wasn’t just because it was a labour-saving measure.” He gave it its own name in the process: “I’d say it was an important element in expressing Shirow’s world… ‘Shirow lettering,’ I guess you could call it?”
No Easter Eggs
With as many past versions of Ghost in the Shell as there are, from Oshii’s film to its sequels and spinoffs, it would be reasonable to expect at least a few visual nods to that history tucked into the new show. I asked Mokochan directly, and he said that wasn’t the goal at all. “There were an enormous number of reference materials, references, and sources of inspiration, but this time we didn’t particularly set out to include easter eggs just for the sake of homage or respect. Above all, what we were doing was engaging directly, one-to-one, with Shirow Masamune’s original manga.”
For Newcomers
Given how dense this franchise’s history is, I asked what they’d tell someone coming in without having seen or read any Ghost in the Shell before. Handa said the show was built with exactly that viewer in mind. “For people seeing it for the first time… We’ve made it so that you can watch it even if you don’t know anything. I’d like you to watch it without knowing anything beforehand. At least, that’s the kind of series we intended to make.”
Mokochan agreed, and added a specific reason newcomers might get something extra out of it. “You can absolutely enjoy it even so. Another thing that might be interesting is the feeling of the era. For someone who doesn’t know anything about it, we’ve made this by staying faithful to the imagination of the original manga as it was when it was created in 1989. I think one of the things people might enjoy is seeing the difference between that imagination and today’s, along with experiencing the feeling of that era.”
Rayan Sayyed is the deputy editor for IGN India who writes and speaks on pop culture, spanning from games, anime, manga to films and everything in between. You can reach out to him at rayan_sayyed@ign.com, or find him on Twitter/X @rayanaver and Instagram @rayansayyed
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