Ask John: Why Don’t Masamune Shirow Anime Feature Shirow Girls?

Question:
One of my favorite manga artists is Masamune Shirow. The females he draws are gorgeous. They almost hurt my eyes they are so good looking. Why is it that all of the anime derived from his stories are plain and unattractive? The only one who is close to his style is Agahali of Landlock. Deunan, Sybil, Leona, and Motoko are all homely in their anime incarnations. He puts such detail into his manga. Can’t he be bothered to draw females for anime with his name on it?

Answer:
I’m sure that there are expert Shirow fans capable of providing a more detailed and accurate answer than I can, but in the absence of such a fan, I’ll provide my best guess. As is typical of most Japanese manga artists, Shirow generally doesn’t work in the animation industry very much. He draws manga and illustrations, and mostly leaves animation to animators. Masamune Shirow is also quite famous for his inability to work on a schedule or meet deadlines. Shirow is a notorious perfectionist known for spending extended periods of time on single works, and shelving works to come back to them sometimes years later. With manga, which is basically a one-man production, it’s possible to work around an unreliable schedule. Animation, though, is the combined result of the work of dozens of people that must be completed on strict deadlines, which makes involving deadline challenged artists like Masamune Shirow difficult. Furthermore, the very intricacy and detail that Masamune Shirow characters are famous for may be what makes them unsuitable for animation. With the time and budget limitations of Japanese animation production, it’s nearly impossible to accurately and faithfully recreate Shirow’s complex character designs.

Masamune Shirow himself directed the first anime adaptation of his manga work, Black Magic M-66. But Shirow did not create the animation character designs for the Black Magic M-66 animation. Masamune Shirow’s next contribution to an anime production was with original character designs for Landlock, which were then re-drawn by the animation character designer. Shirow was not directly involved in the anime production for the Appleseed anime OAV, either of the two Tank Police Dominion anime series, or the Ghost in the Shell movie. In 1999 he provided character and mecha designs for the Gundress anime movie, but sadly that film suffered under such tremendous time and budget limitations that it was never even completed. Gundress was released to Japanese theaters in little more than a workprint format, and was released in a very limited edition Japanese DVD that included the original theatrical release and a slightly more complete, but still not “finished” home video version. Shirow’s next participation in an anime based on his work came with the Ghost in the Shell TV series, for which he wrote episode scenarios, but didn’t provide artwork.

So, to one degree or another, all of the anime productions based on art by Masamune Shirow have been either a step removed from Shirow’s original character designs, or were, in the case of Gundress and Landlock, under funded productions that couldn’t do justice to the character designs he provided. In effect, we’ve never seen an anime that faithfully reproduces Masamune Shirow’s character designs because there has never been an anime production that’s tried to faithfully reproduce typical Masamune Shirow character designs. We may someday see “true” Masamune Shiow girls in anime motion, but for now I can only recommend that you appreciate Shirow’s illustrations and the anime based on his work each unto itself, not feeling disappointed in one because it doesn’t adequately represent the other.