In ordinary anime, characters would at least blink to create the feeling of "being animated", but in this movie, Motoko's eyes intentionally stayed unblinking many times. Director Mamoru Oshii's intention was to portray her as a "doll".
The writer, Shirow Masamune, named his manga "Ghost in the Shell" to pay homage to a book about philosophical psychology by Arthur Koestler, "The Ghost in the Machine".
First anime film to be released at the same time in Japan, Britain, and the United States. Its intended goal was to bring anime to a more mainstream audience in the UK and the US. It didn't, but it did become a sleeper hit on video and DVD.
The director, Mamoru Oshii, was so obsessed with realistic movement in every frame, especially the shooting scenes in the movie that he took the production to Guam to shoot guns into different materials to see how they reacted.
The creator names in the end credit were injected into computer code. The code were numeral codes that were converted from Romanized Japanese.
Mamoru Oshii: [gun] The usage of guns and Togusa preferring to use a revolver over a semi-automatic pistol.