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Masamune Shirow is the Larry Cohen to Mamoru Oshii’s Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick might be more technically proficient but if I want to put on a movie after a long day, I will reach for the problematic, complicated, bizarre, and consistently inconsistent Cohen.
Oshii seems to create by elaborating from a core thematic idea, which produces a consistent & coherent result (and therefore, a result that can be boiled back down to its core idea). In other words, something that only has rewatch value on aesthetic grounds.
Meanwhile, Shirow seems to just want to draw tits, guns, and robots. So, he draws tits, guns and robots. And then, he justifies his drawings with a dense ad-hoc web of footnotes about industrial-scale manufacturing, high-frequency trading, psi research, & comparative theology. In other words, because there is no grand design, every time you revisit a Shirow work you encounter a new corner of the fractalline mess of Shirow’s psyche & interests. Shirow is like if Tetsuo Araki was intererested in women. (Again: it really seems like Shirow is politically problematic along multiple dimensions. It’s a little hard to tell if he writes about sexy bisexual armored riot police because he just likes to draw tits and guns, or if he sees women as objects & is a cryptofascist. And like a lot of manga artists who engage weirdly deeply in shit that’s adjacent to far-right politics — ex., Hellsing’s author — it’s fascinating enough to justify consuming the material but you’re never sure if you want to pirate it just in case…)
