Reviewed by Mike Belfance

As if you needed another person to tell you about how great "Ghost in the Shell" is...meh...WHY NOT!? "GITS" is a collaborative effort between Redwampa and Spencer Crabb, and is (lightly) based on the anime of the same name. It features some of the community's best voice actors, is incredibly directed and animated and, to put it simply, just ROCKS from beginning to end. Next to "Final Fantasy: The Ultimate Epic" and "Redux", this is the greatest movie to come out of one of the best years in 3dmm's history- 2003.

GITS storyline follows the story of a female android named Motoko as she attempts to stop an evil organization from creating a new breed of killer robots. It sounds like your basic sci-fi action stuff, but it really is interesting, thanks in part to some real character development (which is rare in action movies). There are also some underlying issues that can really make you think if you stop gaping at the animation long enough to consider them. It's kind of annoying when a message or moral is thrown right in front of your face over and over again in a movie, as if the director, through his movie, was preverbially waving his arms and screaming "Look, look! This is my movie's moral! I put it right in front of you so you don't have to think about it!" - thankfully this movie doesn't do that.

The animation is....just...wow. There's no other way to say it. I mean...damn! This is as good as you can get 3dmm to look without the expansion pack. Camera movements are flawless, hand made character animations are fluid and believable, action scenes are crazy looking, this is as good as you can get default 3dmm to look without seriously hurting yourself. Any weak spots in animation are so brief you could miss them completely by blinking. The animation in the fight scene that takes place in the sewers is kind of below the high quality of the rest of the movie's animation, but it's still not bad by any means. And besides, that's a 20 second scene in a movie that (from what I remember) will take you over an hour to watch.

As I said in the beginning of this review, this movie is just REALLY well directed. By "well-directed", I don't mean "the camera moves a lot". Too often people mistake countless zoom and panning effects as "good directing" in 3dmm. The truth is, not all scenes need camera movement. Some times a still camera works the best. This movie's directors know this, and because of that, you'll realize that the camera's movements (or lack thereof) always go with the pacing of the scene. Leisurely dialogue scenes are, for the most part, a collection of still shots, while during action scenes, the "camera" is all over the place. The directors also know how to set up a seriously tense scene. The scene where the evil android escapes from it's test tube, and one of the soldiers starts searching the lab for it is done so perfectly, that if a "jump moment" were to happen, it might have been the single jump moment to actually work in 3dmm. Sadly, the directors miss the opportunity, though they make up for it with one of the best escape scenes ever animated in the program.

Sound is great, and the music chosen is flawless. I especially liked the use of System Shock 2's soundtrack. All of the music fit perfectly, and was usually very well-timed with what was going on on-screen. Voice acting was well-done by everyone involved. It was a little hard to get used to a guy playing Motoko at first, but Jaymond does a good job with the acting part, even though his girl voice did sound kinda butch at times, which made some lines a little hard to take seriously. This movie also follows the rule that every villian MUST have a distinctly evil-sounding british accent.

There's so little to say about this movie that someone else hasn't already gone over. It's just one of the greatest 3dmm movies of all time, and yes, I will go on strike if it doesn't win anything at the 3dmm.com awards. It has some minor problems, but I really don't think they add up enough to take any points away from the final score. I give it a perfect 100% (commence with the discussion about how such a thing is not possible), and recommend that everyone who hasn't already seen it crawl out of the hole in the ground on Mars that they've been living in and download it immediately.

100%