There’s no footage of the new project yet, so above is the third promotional video for Science SARU’s 2026 series. If the embed won’t play, it’s also here on YouTube.
Major Motoko Kusanagi is jacking back in. Bandai Namco Filmworks announced on Friday that a new anime project is under way for The Ghost in the Shell, with Science SARU, the studio behind DAN DA DAN and this summer’s ten-episode series, returning to animate it. That is very nearly the whole of the announcement. Nobody has said whether it’s a second season, a film or something more exotic, and there’s no date or platform, only a new visual marking the start of production.
The delivery method was charmingly analogue for a franchise about cyberbrains. The news arrived on flyers handed to visitors at a press preview for “OPEN HOUSE”, an event at Dover Street Market Ginza, the Tokyo fashion emporium, tied to the launch of a “Geeks Rule” clothing line. Somewhere, Section 9 is running a trace on whoever decided a paper handout was the right way to announce the future of cyberpunk.
The 2026 series, which began on 7 July on the late-night “Ka-Anival!!” block shared by Kansai TV and Fuji TV and streamed on Prime Video, went right back to Masamune Shirow’s 1989 manga rather than remixing Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 film or the Stand Alone Complex years. Mokochan, a storyboarder and key animator on DAN DA DAN, made his directorial debut, and the scripts came from Toh Enjoe, the SF novelist behind Self-Reference ENGINE and the gloriously headache-inducing Godzilla Singular Point. Maaya Sakamoto, who voiced the Major in Arise, returned to the role, with Hiroki Yasumoto as Batou and Kazuhiro Yamaji as Aramaki. King Gnu supplied the opening theme, and Production I.G, Oshii’s old shop, sits on the production committee alongside Kodansha.
Where it goes next is guesswork. The first run wrapped up the Puppet Master story, which makes Shirow’s sequel, Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface, the obvious candidate, and one that has never been animated. That book is famously dense, a torrent of early digital art, corporate espionage and margin notes that would make a hard SF footnote enthusiast weep with joy, so whoever adapts it has our sympathy and our admiration in roughly equal measure. There’s also Ghost in the Shell 1.5: Human-Error Processor, a collection of Section 9 cases with the Major off stage, should the studio fancy something more episodic.
Here at SFcrowsnest we’ve followed the Major through more incarnations than a cyborg has spare bodies, from the SAC_2045 years to Hollywood’s live-action detour. The net, as someone once observed, is vast and infinite. So, it seems, is the franchise.
Join the conversation (0)