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The 25 best animated movies of all time – readers' picks

What's the best animated film ever made? We asked Monitor readers to vote for their favorite. Which took the top spot?

22. 'Ghost In The Shell'

  • By Molly Driscoll Staff Writer

This 1995 movie directed by Mamoru Oshii takes place in the future and follows Motoko, a female law enforcement officer who is tasked with finding the Puppet Master, a hacker who is believed to be entering the cyberbrains that people use and which can be connected to networks. Motoko soon finds herself in over her head as she discovers the truth behind the Puppet Master.

In an interview with the A.V. Club, Oshii said he had always been personally interested in computers and other devices. "Technology has a huge influence on Japanese society," he said. "I think it's because before, people tended to think that ideology or religion were the things that actually changed people, but it's been proven that that's not the case. I think nowadays, technology has been proven to be the thing that's actually changing people."

In a 2009 article, Guardian writer Steve Rose discussed how many popular Hollywood films had been influenced by "Ghost," noting how elements that are similar to the film crop up in movies such as "The Matrix" and "Avatar." "The Wachowskis borrowed many of Ghost's key details, including the digital "rain" of green numbers that signifies cyberspace, and the way humans plug themselves in through holes in the backs of their necks," Rose wrote of "Matrix."

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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