20 Best Anime TV Series Of All Time

18. Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex

There's always a risk when taking an iconic movie and transferring it to television - often it loses the scope and ambition of the original thanks to a reduced budget and the challenge of telling a story over a much shorter running time.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is one of the exceptions to the rule - it takes the universe familiar from the movies and focuses on detailed world-building and fleshing out (if you'll pardon the pun) the cyborg characters and adding a great deal of context to what we know about this version of the future.

On an episode by episode basis, Stand Alone Complex is as much a crime drama as it is science fiction, blending the two genres and making the most of the distinct political and militaristic world in which it is set.