Japanese animation, also known as anime, has a rich diversity of shows and movies, all belonging to different genres and showcasing unique art styles. I will be examining three different anime, Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell, and Satoshi Kon’s Paprika. Each of these films were made a decade apart, with Akira being released in 1989, Ghost in the Shell in 1996, and Paprika in 2006. Although these films all belong to the sci-fi genre, what I will be focusing on is how they’ve designed their characters. I argue that their designs reflect not just the director’s vision of the post-human body but how that view is informed by the decade in which their film was made. 

The paper will be divided into three parts. From each film, I will be analyzing how one of their key character’s bodies has been transformed, augmented, and fractured. Throughout the paper, I will emphasize how the concept of the human body has evolved over the course of each decade’s technological and cultural developments. In Akira, the main antagonist Tetsuo’s transformation into a bloated, fleshy monstrosity mirrors the mass consumerism that was happening in pre-bubble economy Japan.  When Tetsuo sheds his body and dissipates into the universe, he unfetters himself from human desires, which are tied to his body, and transcends humanity through giving up his physical form. In the following section covering Ghost in the Shell, I will be dissecting the cyborg protagonist Motoko Kusanagi’s physical makeup. I posit that her uploading part of her consciousness to the Net at the end of the film reflects the early development of the internet that was happening in the 90s. The internet provided individuals the, at the time, new, unique opportunity to also create a unique persona separate from themselves online. Lastly, I will be focusing on the titular character, Paprika. After Chiba lets go of her at the end of the film, Paprika continues to exist as an individual all to her own. This exemplifies the notion of a complete division of the body. The advancement of the internet in the mid 2000s further blurred the line between reality and the dreamscape, or netscape, and Paprika’s ending exemplifies this.