Mamoru Oshii

• 1. Introduction

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  Mamoru Oshii, a Japanese director famed for philosophical storytelling, turned up in 2025 as a non-player character called "The Pizza Chef" in Death Stranding 2: On The Beach. The game came from Hideo Kojima and his studio, Kojima Productions, and the voice was supplied by Keenan Shimizu. It is a playful turn for a man whose films tend to be slow, dark and strange.

  Behind that cameo lies a career crowded with cancelled projects, quarrels with famous colleagues and ideas that other creators kept borrowing. How does a boy who loved the Bible become a maker of cyborg thrillers? Why did so many of his best ideas fail first and then return years later in disguise? And who stood beside him through all of it?

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• 2. Scripture and Cinema

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  In a 1996 interview with Animerica magazine, Oshii recalled, "I really liked the Bible when I was a little boy." He added that as a student he had once planned to enter a seminary. He never did, but he said he still reads the Bible sometimes. Years later he put it another way: "I'm not a Christian, but I've been reading the Bible since my student days." Biblical references would surface again and again in his films.

  The film La Jetée by Chris Marker fascinated him while he was a student. He also watched European cinema over and over, including work by Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Pierre Melville. Later he would count those directors as influences, together with Jean-Luc Godard, Andrei Tarkovsky and Jerzy Kawalerowicz. His father, a devoted cinephile, shaped his taste as well.

  Oshii graduated from Tokyo Gakugei University in 1976. The following year he joined Tatsunoko Productions, where his first anime job was as a storyboard artist on Ippatsu Kanta-kun. Most of his storyboard work there was for the Time Bokan television series. In 1980 he moved to Studio Pierrot, working under his mentor, Hisayuki Toriumi. It was at Pierrot that a television comedy would put his name in front of the public.

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• 3. Dreams and Cancelled Films

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  Urusei Yatsura, the animated television series, made Oshii's name, and he served on it as both director and storyboard artist. Its success led to two feature films. Urusei Yatsura: Only You, released in 1983, was an original story that kept the spirit of the series. The second, Beautiful Dreamer in 1984, was written by Oshii without consulting the original creator, Takahashi, and it was a sharp break from the series.

  Beautiful Dreamer toyed with a time loop, in which a high-school class lives the same day again and again, and with the blurring of dreams and reality. Critics later compared it to Groundhog Day in 1993 and Dark City in 1998, and it is believed to have influenced both.

  Alongside his Pierrot work, Oshii took independent jobs, and in 1983 he directed Dallos, the first ever OVA. He left Studio Pierrot in 1984. That December he began writing a column in Animage magazine for his next big project, a Lupin the Third film planned for summer 1985.

  The film had been widely advertised with his name attached, but his proposal was so eccentric that producers at Yomiuri TV and Toho objected. They said it "made no sense." Because the project was built around him, it could not go ahead without an approved proposal, and so it was cancelled.

  The ideas did not die. Oshii reused themes from the Lupin film in Angel's Egg, Ghost in the Shell and several Patlabor movies. He said that making Ghost in the Shell let him "finally get over Lupin." Even so, the material kept returning. 009 RE:CYBORG was directed by his student Kenji Kamiyama, after Oshii was first meant to direct it himself, and he took part in the script. It borrowed heavily from his Lupin themes and reused part of the plot.

  The Next Generation Patlabor: Shuto Kessen used the ending he had once imagined for Lupin. Oshii had wanted that ending for the first Patlabor movie, but Izubuchi and others stopped him. His last return came in Lupin the 3rd Part 6, where he wrote two episodes, and the second, "Darwin's Bird," reused elements of the cancelled film.

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• 4. Ghibli Entanglements

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  In 1985, at Studio Deen, Oshii wrote and directed Angel's Egg, a surreal film rich in Biblical symbolism, with character designs by Yoshitaka Amano. One of its producers was Toshio Suzuki, who later founded Studio Ghibli with Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata.

  After the film came out, Miyazaki and Takahata began working with Oshii on his next project, titled Anchor. The collaboration did not last. The trio disagreed over the art, and the film was cancelled at an early planning stage.

  In the early 1990s, Ghibli approached him again, this time to adapt Ken'ichi Sakemi's novel Bokkō. The animator Katsuya Kondo even drew image boards. A conflict between Oshii and Miyazaki ended that project too.

  The bonds survived the failures. Suzuki and Studio Ghibli later helped Oshii produce Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence in 2004. Oshii remains skeptical but respectful toward the films of both Takahata and Miyazaki. He has criticized Miyazaki's attitude toward the people working under him. Yet he says that if both men stopped making films, he would feel "strangely empty" and that "it would be boring."

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• 5. Headgear and the Kerberos Saga

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  Late in the 1980s, Oshii's friend Kazunori Itō invited him to join a group called Headgear as its director. Itō was the screenwriter, Masami Yuki the manga artist, Yutaka Izubuchi the mechanical designer and Akemi Takada the character designer. Together they made the Patlabor television series, OVA and films. Patlabor 2: The Movie won the Mainichi Film Concours prize for best animated film in 1993.

  Production I.G has produced every animated film Oshii has made since Patlabor: The Movie in 1989. Itō wrote five films with him, from The Red Spectacles to Avalon.

  Between Patlabor productions, Oshii tried live action for the first time. The Red Spectacles came out in 1987, Stray Dog: Kerberos Panzer Cops in 1991, and Talking Head in 1992.

  The Red Spectacles also carried his politics. As a young man he took part in the Anpo protests, which opposed the US-Japan Security Treaty. The film follows a former member of a special unit of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police who faces a fascist government. It shares a world with Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, a film Oshii scripted.

  That shared world is the Kerberos saga, which Oshii calls his lifework. He created it in 1986. It is a military science fiction franchise set in an alternate history, and it has spread across many media. The January 1987 radio drama While Waiting for the Red Spectacles began its run of more than twenty years.

  The manga Kerberos Panzer Cop, written by Oshii and drawn by Kamui Fujiwara, ran from 1988 until 1990 in its first part. Jin-Roh arrived in 1999, adapting the manga's first volume and directed by his collaborator Hiroyuki Okiura. It debuted at international festivals, starting in France, and reached Japanese audiences in 2000.

  A sequel, Kerberos Saga Rainy Dogs, was serialized from 2003 and collected in 2005. In 2006 Kerberos Panzer Jäger was broadcast in Japan to mark twenty years of the saga. Later that year Oshii launched the crossover manga Kerberos & Tachiguishi.

  His pen reached beyond Kerberos. He wrote the script for the manga Seraphim 266,613,336 Wings, first drawn by Satoshi Kon. Their artistic differences over the story made the work difficult, and it was never finished. Part one ran in sixteen instalments in Animage, from May 1994 to November 1995. After Kon died in 2010, it was partly reissued as a memorial supplement and in book form.

  Oshii is also credited as co-planner of Blood: The Last Vampire in 2000 and of Blood+. His tie-in novel Blood: The Last Vampire: Night of the Beasts appeared in Japan in October 2000. An English edition followed in North America on the 23rd of November 2005.

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• 6. Ghost in the Shell

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  In 1995 Oshii released Ghost in the Shell in Japan, the United States and Europe. In 1996 it reached the top of the US Billboard video charts, the first anime video ever to do so. The film follows a female cyborg desperate to understand why she exists. Critics received it warmly, and it is widely treated as a masterpiece and a classic of anime.

  Oshii then stepped away from directing for five years to work on other projects. His return was live action, the Japanese-Polish feature Avalon in 2001. It was shown out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival, and in 2002 it won Best Feature Film at the London Sci-Fi Film Festival.

  The long-awaited sequel, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, took four years to make. It centers on Batou, who hunts the source of a series of gruesome murders while struggling with his fading humanity. Reviews were mixed. Even so, Innocence was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2004, the first anime ever chosen and so far the only one.

  That year it also took the Feature Film Award at Animation Kobe, the 25th Nihon SF Taisho Award and the Orient Express Award at the Sitges festival in Catalonia.

  Work on Innocence kept him from joining The Animatrix as one of its directors. Afterward he considered a segment for the anthology Paris, je t'aime and declined it.

  In 2005, Kenta Fukasaku and Oshii discussed a collaboration. Oshii was to write the script for Elle is Burning and advise on its computer graphics, while Fukasaku directed. Oshii finished the script, but the film was shelved, with its large budget among the obstacles.

  The Sky Crawlers in 2008 competed for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and won the Future Film Festival Digital Award there. It also earned the Mainichi prize for best animated film. Afterward Oshii wrote the screenplay for the Production I.G film Musashi: The Dream of the Last Samurai, described as possibly the first anime documentary.

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• 7. Signature Style

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  Oshii describes his own method as the opposite of the Hollywood formula. For him the visuals matter most, the story comes second and the characters come last. His chief motivation, he says, is to "create worlds different from our own."

  His films usually open with an action sequence. After that the pace slows, broken up by a few bursts of fast action. Somewhere in most of his movies sits a montage of about two minutes, with no dialogue, played against music by Kenji Kawai.

  Certain images keep recurring: mirrors and reflections, flocks of birds, and basset hounds. The basset hound is most prominent in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, and it is a major plot point in the live-action Avalon. As of 2009, Oshii lived in Atami, in Shizuoka Prefecture, with a mutt named Daniel.

  He is known for straying far from the works he adapts. The Urusei Yatsura manga was frantic slapstick, and the Ghost in the Shell manga was a friendly dramedy. Oshii made both slower and darker, and in the Ghost in the Shell film he dropped the humor and banter of Masamune Shirow's original. Patlabor 2: The Movie shows the same habit. He set aside the slice-of-life tone of the source and built a political thriller.

  In 2004 the writer Andrez Bergen described Oshii's movies in Japan's Daily Yomiuri as "dark, thought-provoking, minimalist diatribes with an underlying complexity."

  No partner shaped that style more than Kenji Kawai, who composed the music for most of Oshii's work, including ten of his feature films. Oshii has said that Kawai's music is responsible for 50 percent of his films' successes, and that he "can't do anything without" him.

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• 8. Echoes and Late Work

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  The Wachowskis were so taken with Ghost in the Shell that they screened it for the producer Joel Silver, to show him what they wanted The Matrix to be. Several scenes from the anime appear to have been carried straight over. The film was also the chief inspiration for the video game Oni.

  Kenji Kamiyama, who directed the television series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, calls Oshii his mentor. He says he "totally tried to copy" Oshii's style. Oshii is credited with the "story concept" for the series' second season, S.A.C. 2nd GIG, and describes his role as overseeing the whole series and writing each episode's plot.

  James Cameron called Avalon "the most artistic, beautiful and stylish sci-fi film." He also called Ghost in the Shell "the first truly adult animation film to reach a level of literary and visual excellence." Steven Spielberg is among the other directors who have praised Oshii's work.

  The Helghast soldiers of the Killzone video games resemble the Kerberos Panzer Protect Gear that first appeared in The Red Spectacles in 1987. Guerrilla Games, the developer, did not address those observations. Its developers say the design came from World War I gas masks. That does not explain the glowing red or orange eyes the two designs share.

  Oshii himself kept working. In 2009 he wrote and directed the live-action feature Assault Girls, and served as creative director of the Production I.G segment of the Halo Legends anthology. In 2010 he announced an adaptation of Mitsuteru Yokoyama's manga Tetsujin-28, which became a live-action film, '28 1/2'. He received the Winsor McCay Award in 2016.

  Garm Wars: The Last Druid was announced in 2012, and its trailer appeared in September 2014. The film premiered the following month at the 27th Tokyo International Film Festival. A suspense thriller, Tōkyō Mukokuseki Shōjo, followed in July 2015. In March 2017, Toonami began airing his live-action micro-series Sand Whale and Me, and in 2018 an anime adaptation of Chimera Kō was reported to be under way with Oshii directing.

  In June 2019 Oshii announced Vladlove, a comedy series he calls a "girl-meets-girl story" about a vampire. It also breaks from the production committee system common in Japanese anime, because a single investor, the real estate company Ichigo Inc., backs it.

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