Ghost in the Shell Opening Parodies / GitS Pose

About

Ghost in the Shell Opening Parodies (Japanese: 攻殻OPパロ) refer to a series of parody videos for the opening movie of a Japanese TV anime series Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GIG.^[1] In particular, the cool shot in the movie is given a nickname “GitS Pose” (攻殻立ち, Kokaku Dachi; lit. “GitS Standing Pose”) by fans and it’s a popular subject for fan works by Japanese amatuer illustrators.

Origin

The anime Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GIG was originally aired 26 episodes on a PPV channel from January 2004 to January 2005. But it finally reached to large audiences by terrestrial channels’ broadcasting from April to September of 2005. The song for the opening, “rise”, was written by Japanese composer Yoko Kanno^[2] who is also famous for her works in many anine/game franchises such as "Tank!" in Cowboy Bebop and "Interstellar Flight" in Macross Frontier. Meanwhile, the scene that later became to earn popularity appears at 0:57-0:58 in the movie, where members of Public Security Section 9 are standing out in a row against white background and each of them is looking in different directions.

Spread

There are several earliest instances of parodies for this opening movie. One is a flash movie reproducing it by Shift-JIS arts that was posted to 2channel‘s /aa/ (Shift-JIS arts) board in January 2005.^[3] The other is a MAD video of Black Lagoon^[4] uploaded to YouTube in 2006.^[5] But, substantial increase in popularity of this series started after several MAD or hand-drawn animated videos featuring _The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, THE iDOLM@STER and Akagi^[6] made smash hits on the Japanese video sharing service Nico Nico Douga in late 2007 and 2008.^[7]

【ニコニコ動画】【MAD】涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱×攻殻機動隊S.A.C 2nd GIG OP 【ニコニコ動画】【手描きジョジョ】攻/殻/2ndO/Pでジョジョ3部
Left: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya | Right: Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure

In addition, that black-and-white themed cool shot caught a much attention among Japanese internet users since creators of those popular parody videos featured that posing by their own hand-drawn illustrations. Along with increasing of the popularity, that pose became to be dubbed “GitS Pose” and also became to a popular subject in the Japanese illustrators community pixiv in late 2008.^[8]