We made it way more a city of information, stacks on stacks on stacks of it. “We extended Hong Kong and made it bigger and taller and more crazy and dense. Now the production team had to reimagine the city’s future again, substituting in new trajectories for technologies pioneered over the last two decades. Shirow and Oshii each created worlds based on their assumptions about the future, which looked dark, rainy, slightly sinister, and filled with both old tactile machinery and what seemed to be the most logical versions of coming technology.
Roefls, Sanders, and the live-action Ghost in the Shell team made several scouting trips to Hong Kong, trying to both get a feel for the city and understand how it influenced the original anime.
Famously, New Port City was based on Hong Kong instead of Tokyo, both because of the island nation’s mix of old and new and, as Roelfs explains, the filmmakers “didn’t want to confront the audience with a Tokyo that looked so dystopian.” The futuristic mega-city is so packed with soaring buildings and neon electronics that it seems almost skyless and suspended in a twilight hour. The story, about a brigade of mechanically enhanced human cops, is set in 2029 in the fictional Japanese metropolis of New Port City. The original manga, by Masamune Shirow, began its run in 1989, and the anime adaptation, directed by Mamoru Oshii, was released in 1995. So we worked an awful lot to make the anime alive.” “And it got more complex also because the original filmmakers also became part of it, and we had to have their blessing. “Honestly I didn’t know about, and I started realizing what an enormous fan base it had, and Rupert started realizing more and more that we had to do a sort of ode to the original manga,” Roelfs tells Inverse. And yet, Roelfs will openly admit to feeling shocked at the demands of his latest design assignment, director Rupert Sanders’ new live-action adaptation of Ghost in the Shell, the classic anime and manga series. Jan Roelfs, the Oscar-nominated production designer, was no stranger to building the dense and endless cities of an imagined future, having earned one of those Academy Award nods for his work on Gattaca.
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