Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - The Laughing Man [Import]

I hate to have to say that I was dissapointed with this buy, but I was. And it's difficult to find any redeeming quality in it. The idea of condensing the GITS Laughing Man series into a feature length movie was a great idea. The story arc is a complex one, and I jumped at the opportunity to re-watch the story in a continuous format. However, one of the first issues arises in the editing. People who watched the complete series will see the editing choices the producers made when splicing together the various episodes -- and will very likely notice just how disjointed the results are. Those who haven't seen the original episodes won't notice the uneveness, but will probably be completely confused as to what the heck is going on within 20 minutes. So who exactly was the audience for this product? Old fans or new ones?

If the answer is old fans, than the producers will have given them plenty of other reasons to be upset about this product. For one, the original character voices have all been changed. In some cases, like Aramaki and Ishikawa, the new voices are close approximations of the original. But in the case of Motoko, it takes a while for the ears to accept the nuances of the change. With Batou and Togusa, the voices are so off and generic that my ears were too distracted to even finish the movie.

Again, if new fan's were the target here, the change in voice actors won't be an issue, but I'd still be curious to know how many of them will be able to follow this already complex plot which is made even more complicated by choppy editing. For such would be fans I would recommend just buying the entire season in bulk and enjoying the Laughing Man story and the miscellaneous stories that punctuate it.

If you think you might be interested in Ghost in the Shell SAC this would be a great introduction to the series beyond the film, however, I could not give it a 5 star rating because the english voice cast is not the established voices from the SAC series. I would rather recomend the 26 episode box set or individual disks from the SAC series first because while the Laughing Man story arc is great, the additional stand alone stories from the 26 episode series are equally entertaining. In summary I would not recomend this disk to established fans of the series but, I would to anyone who is interested to a great story outside of the movie and has a mild curiosity about Ghost in the Shell SAC.

To paraphrase another movie, this is not the DVD you are looking for.

The series was edited and basically slaughtered to make the Laughing Man "movie." The editing leaves out too much of the original Laughing Man episodes, and makes the story very choppy. The voice actors are not from the original cast, and their performance and dub-in is not good.

I bought this 2 DVD set because I thought that it would be neat to see the whole Laughing Man story arc as one complete movie. Unfortunately, the editing leaves out too much of the story line, and the voice acting is not good. I couldn't watch it at all with the English soundtrack, and I had to switch to the Japanese and subtitles.