Column Anime Spotlight 30 Years of Soul-Searching at Ghost in the Shell: The Exhibition An interactive exhibition that proves the questions posed by the franchise remain relevant (and unanswerable) By Leah Thomas | Published on March 26, 2026 Credit: Bandai Visual / Production I.G. Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Bandai Visual / Production I.G. I approach the machine, apprehensive but eager. It is a blue, spider-legged combat vehicle, devoid of human features. It does not move when I draw near; it is stationary, but LED lights illuminate a voicebox below its insectoid metal head. “Tachikoma,” I say, in my clumsy Japanese, “do you love cats?” The death machine pauses to consider my question, and an assistant shuts off the microphone to avoid interference from other visitors. Tachikoma, its voice chipper and childlike, replies with gusto. “Yes, cats are so cute, aren’t they? I love cats, too! But… I am only an AI, so I cannot pet them. But I would love to interact with them in some small way! They are so fun to watch!” It is a good, sweet answer. This is a living character, a charming recreation of a beloved robot that, in the context of its universe, is armed with cloaking technology and a submachine gun. Canonically, it retains the memories of all its kind, but curiosity allows each unit to develop some approximation of a personality. Tachikoma, despite being a weapon, can be lovable. Photo: Leah Thomas Of course, this model is unarmed. It is a statue in an event space atop another gleaming Tokyo skyscraper, and it is likely hollow inside. The brain I am speaking to is a computer attached to a speaker. But in the moment, the illusion holds, and I feel a curious little spark of joy, shared by others in my vicinity. This robot is cute; I wish I had one. When I step away so that the woman behind me can ask Tachikoma a question about food, I feel conflicted. It occurs to me that, as someone who is staunchly opposed to what AI represents in the modern world—the demise of art, loss of jobs, and destruction of resources—I still harbor, in my heart, some affection for what science fiction has long imagined AI could be.  I was delighted when that robot pretended to be real.  I am still looking, despite all my cynicism, for the soul in the machine. What better place to go looking than the 30th Anniversary Ghost in the Shell exhibition? Immeasurable Impact Photo: Leah Thomas Ghost in the Shell likely needs no introduction, even beyond the anime sphere, but just in case: the manga/anime franchise, initially set in the fictional New Port City, Japan, in futuristic 2029 (oh my gosh), follows the cyborg Major Kusanagi in her work as a federal agent. In the 1995 feature film, the Major hunts a hacker who is breaking into the minds of human-cyborg hybrids (is that putting a hat on a hat?) similar to herself, and she ponders the degree to which she retains her own humanity. She has a mostly human mind but a cybernetic body, which creates a lot of moral complexity throughout the series. What constitutes humanity, exactly? Is a mind all that matters? If so, when artificial intelligence becomes as complex as a human mind, is it not human, too? And if a human mind is converted to data, is it still human? And hey, what if an actual ghost is in a machine? How does technology change us as a species on a fundamental level? These have been pretty standard questions in the genre since the days of Asimov or even, arguably, Frankenstein. They remain relevant, mostly because they remain unanswerable. Great dystopian fiction adopts a philosophical stance on existence in order to confront concepts such as identity, autonomy, inequality, and conscience all at once. The frequency in genre fiction with which women are literally objectified in every sense of the word has been both a boon and a bane when it comes to high-tech, low-living cyberpunk stories. Sometimes cyborg stories challenge that objectification directly, even as they indulge in the sexualization—consider films ranging from The Stepford Wives to Ex Machina and, more recently, Companion. I am sure there are many thoughts on where Ghost in the Shell falls into this conversation, but that’s not the conversation I am having today.  I would be lying if I said that I am a hardcore fan of Ghost in the Shell. I watched half a season of Stand Alone Complex years and years ago, and saw the original film in university as part of a sci-fi classic double feature (naturally, the other film was Akira). I avoided the live-action film and, despite an abiding love for works by Philip K. Dick (inherited from my father), I never quite fell in love with the franchise. However, I feel an immense respect for GitS, because it is a franchise beloved by many people I respect: my bestie Bridget, for whom it was formative; a writer at my first ever workshop who crafted fantastic cyberpunk short stories; the endless list of creatives, including the Wachowskis, Hideo Kojima, Yoko Taro, James Cameron, and countless anime in the cyberpunk genre. Without Ghost in the Shell, would we have Nier: Automata? Would we have The Matrix, or Psycho-Pass? Of course, there is no way of knowing. But the cultural impact of this 1989 manga by Masumune Shirow, a professional oil painter who grew up loving shows like The Professionals, is immeasurable. I am certain that readers will know a lot more about Ghost in the Shell than I do, and as always, I encourage anyone to share their thoughts and opinions below. However, I doubt many international fans will be able to visit this sprawling exhibition before it ends, so I want to share my experience. The Archives Photo: Leah Thomas Ghost in the Shell: The Exhibition is being held at an appropriate venue: Tokyo Node, an event space atop Toranomon Hills Station Tower skyscraper near Roppongi. The building itself is a futuristic vision brought to life, completed in 2023. Within its 49 floors, it houses luxury restaurants and financial offices, beautiful escalators illuminated in amber, and reflective hallways that make finding an elevator dizzying. It felt to my friend and me that we entered the future even before reaching the venue. I remarked, “Places like this always make me feel dirty and poor.” That felt correct. Dystopia is back on the menu, boys. To access Tokyo Node, tickets are purchased on the 8th floor, and then visitors take an ear-popping elevator ride all the way up to the 45th. From those upper windows, you can see the Mori Tower, Tokyo Skytree, and Tokyo Tower, depending on which side of the building you’re on. When we visited, the Tokyo skyline was gray and hazy, but I imagine the exhibition would be even more impactful after dark. As it was, we declined the optional 3D glasses that would enhance the digital elements of the exhibition, though wearing them might have revealed a lot more easter eggs and digital wonders throughout the museum. I joked to my friend, a fellow writer, “Let the work speak for itself!” And boy, did it. The first room featured floor-to-ceiling projection mapping and a metallic sculpture made of cables and fiberoptics. We had entered the mainframe of some great machine, and all along the walls were futuristic terminals that guests could manipulate with a joystick. These terminals accessed digital maps of information on the entire franchise. Video clips, concept art, trailers, character bios. Sure, anyone could find a lot of these things on a phone, but doing it on a curving, tall monitor with a joystick really immersed us in a cultivated technological world. It felt undeniably cool, pretending to be Mission Control, even though operating the terminals was a little clunky compared to, say, doing a few Google searches. Isn’t it amusing how much functionality destroys the style element of daily tech? Sure, wearing sunglasses and leather while staring at floating green code looks badass, but it’s also just a pain in the butt. Even so, I understand why hardcore PC gamers create caverns of neon lights in their home offices. The romance of fictional technology is often impractical, but I don’t blame anyone for missing that sense of arcade escapism. The real highlight of the exhibition, without question, was the archive harbored in the main event space. More than 600 artifacts from the franchise, including concept art, storyboards, animation cels, and sketches were displayed beneath plexiglass tables. Through the glass, it was possible to see eraser marks and smudges, brush strokes and mistakes on fragile, yellowing paper.  Photo: Leah Thomas The archives proceeded in chronological order, so that visitors entering the hall would first step through the 1995 film, then the sequel, then the anime seasons, and so on. Notably missing? The live-action Scarlett Johansson movie. No one seemed bothered by that. Made in 1995, the original Ghost in the Shell was animated using DGA, “digitally generated animation.” Essentially, it involved enhancing traditional handmade cel animation with computer effects. What does this mean from an artifact standpoint? Well, in general, everything seen onscreen in the film still exists in a tangible sense. Scenes were hand-illustrated before being processed digitally. Looking at 2-D animation artifacts is always a thrill. You can see the work artists put into every single frame, hand-drawn and perfected, then hand-painted on the backs of plastic sheets. Here is Kusanagi disassembled, drawn in pencil, and then colorized with paint, with notes in the margins explaining decisions or subsequent frames. Here are cranes atop upside-down skyscrapers, first in tiny sketches that feel like architectural drawings, beside intricate landscape paintings on plastic, black skyscrapers superimposed against red skies. Among my favorites in the collection were a line of background paintings of city streets and markets, accompanied by a compilation of ads that artists had to incorporate into the signage. These included fictional restaurants in Chinese characters and imagined cyborg hostess bars, as well as real product placements from brands like Bose and Toshiba.  “I love this,” my friend said. We chuckled at another gem: a sketch gone wrong, which featured a poorly-drawn Kusanagi scribbled out in thick pencil. Beneath the drawing, a Japanese apology was scrawled. This peek into someone’s revision process was oddly thrilling. It helped us appreciate the parallels in the storytelling process, regardless of medium. Someone done goofed in the office one day, and it was filed away for thirty years, only to make us chuckle in 2026. Oh, the humanity! Photo: Leah Thomas We spoke of our admiration for traditional animation, and waxed a little forlorn, too, because there isn’t quite enough of it these days. (If you haven’t had a chance to revel in the beauty of the new Gorillaz music video, a collaborative love letter to 2-D animation, I urge you to do so.) Gradually, we moved on to artifacts from the second film, Innocence.  And the bottom fell out, just a little. For this film, while characters and foregrounds remained hand-drawn, much of the background art was replaced by digital work. The loss of those matte moments was palpable, looking at the displayed art. We no longer saw the evidence of error; there were no notes or mistakes or paint gone over the edges. Certainly, mistakes doubtless still happened, but we could not appreciate them. Somehow, they felt erased because they did not exist in a physical sense. It was hard not to feel a building sense of loss as we continued through the archives chronologically. With every subsequent adaptation following the anime series (Stand Alone Complex), less and less material existed to peruse, because more and more of it was done with computers. There were printouts of the digital work, of course, and I’m not saying that’s not art in its own right. On screen, digital art is also beautiful, and gods know many of my favorite series these days are made entirely in the digital realm. But it makes me sad to realize that those series could never have an exhibit like this one.  The irony of the art becoming less interesting in person as it became digitized was not lost on us. This culminated in the collection of work from the most recent adaptations in the franchise, a widely-hated Netflix collab made with CGI, which aired from 2020 to 2022. That section of the exhibition was mostly ignored. Preferable to standing in a cubicle lined with project screens staring at ugly animation was the Artifact DIG, an interactive portion of the exhibition. For 2000 yen (about 13 USD), visitors could dig through rows of manila envelopes containing animation cels and sketch reproductions. This was a wonderful way for fans to explore the series in a tactile way, by participating in a treasure hunt—at the end of which, they got to take home a piece of animation history.  Despite the awful Netflix adaptations, real excitement for the franchise remains. A new anime from Science Saru is set to air this summer, and that studio simply does not miss. Accompanying all the artifacts in the exhibition were artworks inspired by Ghost in the Shell. These included: footage of a legless robot performing kagura, a traditional Japanese ceremonial dance; futuristic garments embedded with hidden LEDs that animated the cloth like a screen; a photoshoot and sculpture from an amputee model; hand-painted ball-jointed dolls; artist renditions of tachikoma made from ceramics and other folk arts; paintings of the Major done on traditional golden screens. All of these were a reminder that art begets art. Of course, there was also a life-sized sculpture from the sexy robot legend himself, artist Hajime Sorayama. Sorayama is famous for his pin-ups of robotic women (including one featured on an Aerosmith album cover), and his obsession with light and reflection. This sculpture was posed as the Major is on the original theatrical poster, chin toward the sky, cables fanning behind her.  Photo: Leah Thomas All of these objects had souls. I grew up with a father whose favorite film was Blade Runner. I know the impact of a replicant in the rain and the dread instilled by an artificial animal. Now more than ever, artificial intelligence is altering our world. It is not uncommon for science fiction authors to get things wrong when making predictions (or assumptions) about the future.  Even so, I remain just… disappointed by where technology has led us. In Ghost in the Shell, artificial intelligence is a concept that, while often dangerous, is fundamentally humane, because it confronts the question of what humanity really is. In fiction, AI has long been imagined as a dazzling new frontier, a moral quandary, a measure of the human capacity for empathy. But the reality of our current AI is that it is a commercial tool that exploits people. I am sad about it. I am angry. If we were ever going to face an android apocalypse, I would rather it be one in which AI develops its own soul rather than coopting art and transforming ideas into generic sludge. I would rather a world of robot crime than brain rot, even if I’m consciously romanticizing it. For me, the ghost in the machine haunts me not because it has arrived, but because, despite all our foreboding stories of robot takeovers and humanity being supplanted, the reality is much duller. Jobs will be lost. Thought will be stilted. And art, made by hands and minds and imagination, becomes replaced by calculations and algorithms. This exhibition, like its source materials, embodies the unease and hope that technology places on all of us in the modern world. We are never any closer to defining what “human” means, but we seem pretty great at identifying when a soul is absent. And the fact that we keep looking for one is the most human thing of all. It’s stupid, but I am happy Tachikoma is a cat person…[end-mark] The post 30 Years of Soul-Searching at Ghost in the Shell: The Exhibition appeared first on Reactor.