Cartoon brings concepts to life - August 18, 2006

If you're a carmaker and you have a new, cool car concept that needs promot-ing, then product placement in a movie is one of the best ways to get the word out. Lexus did it in Tom Cruise's Minority Report, Audi had Will Smith in the fu-turistic flick I, Robot and Angelina Jolie piloted a Land Rover in Tomb Raider. Now Nissan has taken product placement to the next dimension by doing a deal with Japanese anime movie house, Production I.G.

In what is being billed as a revolutionary collaboration, Nissan has two of its concept cars featured heavily in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - Solid State Society, a big-budget animated movie due for release in Japan later this year. Ghost in the Shell is about the special tactical unit of the Japanese police force. The crack police team drive animated versions of the Nissan Sport Con-cept, revealed at the 2005 New York motor show and the Infiniti Kuraza, shown at the 2005 Detroit motor show.

Ghost in the Shell is an anime series based on the graphic novel of the same title by Shirow Masamune. The first movie was released in 1995 and reached the top of the Billboard US video chart the following year. The sequel, Innocence, was the first Japanese animated film nominated for the prestigious Palme D'Or award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Production I.G. also produced the animation sequence in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Vol. 1 movie. Shiro Nakamura, Nissan's senior vice president and creative officer, said: "Japanese animation is being taken more seriously as art and the concept cars in this film are rendered with particularly high quality."