Yep: the second season of Ghost in the Shell begins airing tonight on Cartoon Network at 12:30am Eastern. It begins with a terrorist hijacking. It ends with a homage to the original film.
It’s the understated start of a really great run in a solid adult anime series: a seemingly simple action episode that sows the seeds for a much deeper plot to come. I hope they’ve left the original soundtrack, including the full opening, intact (the intro is a techno-opera bit sung in Russian, Japanese, and English if they leave it in) and kept censorship to a minimum, but even if not, this season features some of the best one-off anime episodes in any series I’ve seen (the second episode is a masterful diversion from the usual fare) as well as an intricate and confusing ongoing political storyline, about, of all things, the timely subject of immigrants, as well as musings about the nature of revolution, identity, and all the things GiTS is all about. And unlike past outings, the characters here are deeper and more developed: even the stony-faced Pazu gets a second look. The action is tight, the animation is top-notch, the soundtrack is stellar.
I should also point out that there are two openings: the first three episodes have a placeholder intro while the rest of the series has the full intro that I like much better. It’s the one with the TV sets and the eleven guys sitting on a hill.
I saw the first four episodes of this a little while ago (Hurray for DVDs! Especially since I can’t get CN over here…).
Yoko Kanno does indeed still soundtrack, and while the opening has changed, both season openings were voiced by Origa, who is Russian if I’m not mistaken.
The first episode is slow through most of it, but the homage to the first movie at the end is more than worth it. Already there’s hints towards the thread through this season, unless I’m totally mistaken, though like the first season you won’t see a storyline ep until episode 4 (What’re the tags this season? Last was Stand-Alone and Complex, this one is something and Dual, I think, too lazy to check right now).
The second and third episodes are quite interesting as well, the second reminds me of Perfect Blue (and as Apos says, quite differnt fromt eh usual fare), and the third is just completely cut off from the first two. But the forth is my favorite so far, probably because it’s when we start to see the real threads of political intrigue.
And a nit-pick, I didn’t think there was any Japanese in the music. I have all three soundtracks (OST 1 & 2, and Be Human), and all the music appears to be in English, Russian and Latin. Or maybe it’s Italian. But I’m pretty sure none of it is Japanese. Meh. It’s good, and GitS is one of the few shows whose music I can listen to outside the context of the show.
Yep. Expect to learn a lot more about the curious phenomenon known as the Particularist Eleven (or Individual Eleven, or whatever they translated it as) as well as the new Cabinet.