Animated About Anime

Three big anime releases are coming soon, including Miyazaki's latest. Wired has a nice overview that starts:

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.

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