Product Details

• Format: Animated, Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English
• Subtitles: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 2
• Rated: Unrated
• Studio: Manga Video
• DVD Release Date: October 2, 2007
• Run Time: 106 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000UR9TM8
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #76,885 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

The OAV Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex--The Laughing Man (2005) consists of footage from the 26-episode Stand Alone Complex TV series (2002), recut to tell the story of a police battle with an über-hacker. Writer-director Kenji Kamiyama oversaw the re-editing and rewrote some of the dialogue for greater clarity. The main arc of the first season of SAC, The Laughing Man is complicated tale of cyber-espionage and government corruption. Major Kusanagi, Batou, Chief Aramaki, and the other officers of Public Security Section 9 must untangle an intricate web of deception to discover a hidden scandal involving a bogus cure for the debilitating disease of "cyberbrain sclerosis." In the original series, this story was interwoven with brief adventures involving the black-market sale of human organs, the growing consciousness of the Tachikoma robots, and Chief Aramaki's colorful past. The Laughing Man, a title borrowed from J.D. Salinger, is interesting enough to stand on its own, but at two hours and forty minutes, it feels very long. Bandai has re-recorded the dialogue with a new cast, which sounds jarring to audiences familiar with the series. The Laughing Man may appeal to viewers who didn't see SAC in its initial release: otaku who know the original may find the reworking feels like a gimmick. (Rated 13 and older: violence, violence against women, grotesque imagery, alcohol and tobacco use) --Charles Solomon

Product Description

GHOST IN THE SHELL SAC LAUGHING MAN - DVD Movie

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great story with just one flaw for hard core SAC fans, October 8, 2007

By 

M. Sewell - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - The Laughing Man (DVD)

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.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Go For the Whole Season, November 6, 2008

By 

Ahmad Jordan "Ahmad Jordan" (Bufalo, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - The Laughing Man (DVD)

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.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Pass on it, get the episodes instead, January 26, 2008

By 

Brian C. Miller (Everett, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - The Laughing Man (DVD)

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.