Anime dreams: the strange but familiar world of a Japanese TV cartoon.

• Author: Sandberg, Anders

A woman with purple hair stands on the edge of a skyscraper's roof, watching the green-lit cityscape beneath her. She jumps--not quite flying, not quite falling--while coolly preparing her equipment for a political assassination.

Sound familiar? It's the opening scene of the animated Japanese film Ghost in the Shell (1995), but you don't have to know the movie to recognize it. It's been recycled everywhere from music videos to The Matrix.

Ghost in the Shell was based on Masamune Shirow's comic book by the same name. The film, in turn, has spawned the TV series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, which debuted in Japan in 2003 and may soon be available to Americans on the Cartoon Network. Between its dystopian politics and its postmodern take on identity, the cartoon engages issues far more interesting than those you'll find on most live-action shows.

A futuristic police procedural, Stand Alone Complex centers around Section 9, a secretive intelligence agency dealing with high-tech crime. The main character is Major Kusanagi, an elite ex-soldier whose body has been entirely replaced by robotics. Only her brain is natural, and sometimes she wonders a bout that too.

The criminal stories are often simple, but that's almost beside the point. The real question isn't who the culprit is but why the culprit did it: The series depicts intricate infighting within the government, with the intelligence agencies jockeying with the police and the military while the Department of Health uses other departments as tools for its own schemes.

In the cyberpunk novels and films of the 1980s, the future was usually run by megacorporations that had taken over all the functions of government. Ghost in the Shell takes a slightly different road. Rather than vanishing, the government becomes symbiotic with the corporations: a corporate state.

Such corporatism, of course, is hardly alien to Japan--or to Europe and America, for that matter. The show merely pushes the idea further. Corruption in a company spills over to the government and vice versa; trade secrecy and national security combine to eliminate transparency. Unlike many science fiction dystopias, this one seems uncomfortably realistic.

The show's other projections may feel more surreal. One of Shirow's favorite themes is advanced technology's effect on individuality. In his future world, the handheld wireless has given way to an implanted wireless that eventually encompasses the whole brain. With that...