Purple Magazine
— F/W 2007 issue 8
Mamoru Oshii
photography by CHIKASHI SUZUKI
styling by MICHIKO KITAMURA
After ten years of working as a film director and scriptwriter, in 1995 Mamoru Oshii directed the masterpiece Ghost in the Shell — an animated film that achieved international cult status and revealed the artistic possibility of this type of Japanese cinematography to the western world. With that film he brought animation to the level of art – with its cyborgs as self-questioning automatons in the midst of a dark psychological and meditative cyber-punk landscape. He also inspired the Hollywood science-fiction community — the Wachowsky brothers openly admit to Oshii’s direct influence in the conception of the original Matrix (1999). In 2004, Oshii presented Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocenceat the Cannes Film Festival.
Oshii’s artistic vision is dark and clearly political but nevertheless poetic. He is one of the rare radical artists who’s not afraid to address the evolution of Japanese society: its obsession with technology, its environmental blindness, and its suffocating political structures. He is unique in raising Japanese animation to the highest level of artistic speculation.
