Science Saru's new Ghost in the Shell anime, which premiered on Prime Video on 7 July, marks a deliberate break from the franchise's tradition of reinvention. Rather than reinterpreting Masamune Shirow's original manga, director Mokochan and character designer Shuhei Handa told Polygon at Anime Expo that they set out to adapt it "one-to-one", treating the source material as a blueprint rather than mere inspiration. This matters because, across 37 years of films and series, every previous version — from Mamoru Oshii's 1995 film to Stand Alone Complex and SAC_2045 — had developed its own distinct style and interpretation.

The result is a visual identity that returns to the colourful, neo-1980s feel of Shirow's pages rather than the realistic designs of earlier adaptations, with a livelier, funnier Major Motoko Kusanagi that restores the manga's comedy. The team relied on traditional hand-drawn techniques over cutting-edge tools, focused on capturing natural human movement, and deliberately preserved visual noise and imperfections to add character. Mokochan said rereading the manga struck him with how accurately it anticipated technologies such as AI, and with Shirow's neutral attitude towards them — a restraint the production adopted as a guiding principle, resolving from the outset "not to add anything new".