Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is the kind of film that requires your utmost concentration and attention. Set in the future, the film aroma captures almost everything ethereal and whatever a movie geek could think of. I think I do not want to watch it ever again. I regard Anime as one of the best masterpieces created by humanity. The incredibly slow and monotonic reel of the film is aided by the astonishingly great narrative of Mamoru Oshii retelling the exquisite manga of Masamune Shirow to the audiences. It does feel like he goes overboard with overselling the concepts of action and deservingly so. I’d still recommend the Anime because of my hatred towards modern cyberpunk, Ghost in the Shell left me very pleased.
The first rendition of Ghost in the Shell heavily revolved around the possibilities of achieving transhumanism. Subsequently, assuming the state does accept the concept, there will be substantial benefits of liberalism in whichever region it would be implemented. While all these conjectures were going on, the second ghost in the shell shifted focus towards the more humane issues that people are contending with. The desire to possess new bodies raises a lot of concern about what it means to be human post-transformation. It is indeed a fable. It was released in 2004 which does speak volumes about its credibility. It is a commendable piece of art for ushering in the milestones of feature animation into the digital era, linking the works of Patlabor with the modernized AI use in Oscillator.
When it comes to lighting, Production I.G’s CG is no stranger to wow, although there are some misses. What stands out the most are the waxy cars whose surfaces capture the reflection of neon signs placed on shining tall buildings. While some models may resemble early CG, Oshii’s more thoughtful approach utilizes it to full effect. The use of 2D animated characters over the newly built 3D backgrounds is quite impressive, and the characters’ textures at times so closely mimic the expansive layouts of the original film that they are based on, which is amazing.
One of the highlights is this now celebrated festival scene beneath the skyscrapers of Iturup, which features gigantic ornamental-style puppets and immense baroque-style floats parading in the super city island’s streets and canals. Kenji Kawai, the composer, created a familiar children’s choir that accompanies these spectacles inspired by the festival which celebrates the sea goddess Mazu. This sequence reveals the wonders of CG, with the cleverly designed models on the screen having smooth intricacy and movement that would be uncommon in most CG animation during the next twenty years. It seems this particular scene required two years of production to animate. It shows the architectural magnificence and immense scale that rival the peaceful scenes on the canals of the new port city in the 1995 film.
In the film, the technological achievement is a rather muted feeling, fitting somewhere between mundane and lackluster. The plot, which becomes increasingly self-absorbed, completely ignores the cultural context of the city and its characters, moving further away from mystery and into a seminar. The film’s discourse is shackled to phrases and epigrams, interspersed with fiction, philosophy, and even the Holy Book. (Oshii names Descartes in this speech more than one stick in which he “remakes” himself. Feels so much later with how quickly everything is processed.) When all actors have finished their monologues, and conversations look like normal talks between characters, the ideas are presented decently and eloquently.
The perspective character, the hulking cyborg Batou (Akio Otsuka) is working out a case for Section 9 together with his new partner, a younger Togusa (Koichi Yamadera), who has recently been posted to the intelligence division dealing with android terrorist cases. They are on the case of a murder spree, created by the newest line of hyper-intelligent sex androids horrifically dubbed who look more like life-sized dolls than women. The mystery of the murdered politicians, sexed-up lower-grade yakuza, and the secrets to their gynoid building stalks the characters, forcing them to reconsider their beliefs; all of it presents a unique problem.
And Innocence boasts fascinating cyberpunk action scenes such as hacking Yakuza to flank them using cheap eye implants and having a showdown with that guy who has that gigantic prosthetic weapon. Every piece works out in the end and gives momentum to the murder mystery.
An android coroner of sorts remarks that perhaps the dolls do not self-destruct or run away, but instead elect to kill themselves. The implication haunts Batou, who constantly remembers what the Major did in the original film the phase that made her transcend her human form completely. Oshii explains that every character has a different philosophy when it comes to humanity as a consequence of their wish to have children, pets, or dolls. These contrasts make the film attempt to decenter the human body from the conception of intelligence and sentience instead of just assembling a bunch of quotes of those perceived to be enlightened to have the director’s opinion.
The conclusion of the murder investigation integrates the themes nicely and provides the longest criticism for the movie during its 2024 re-release. Similar to the techniques in AI in our world, the work of sexaroids which have been murdering their important clients is the peak of disaffiliation in a corporate techno-state. It is revealed that the technology that makes androids so ingratiating is the cloned “ghosts” of actual women that have been placed into the dolls after a gruesome procedure that kills the original women. It reflects the manner AI is used today as technology through which the body of doomed workers is concealed by the internet to disguise the age of high-tech innovation from the failed Amazon grocery stores and self-driving cars to content moderation.
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Irrespective of the terrible movie, the original Ghost in the Shell manga is mad, meets artistic beauty and remains underrated.
Employing sex and sex work as a means to delve deeper into the subject adds complexity to the crude doll metaphor that never stops during Innocence. This is the alchemy of the obsession that turns maniacal, yearning to recreate pets, humans, dolls, and androids to no end. But there are faults here too; this is an area that helps define the boundaries of fiction and technology in the present age. What Oshii, Shirow, and other writers of the genre were calling fiction a hundred years back, as predicted by Oshii, was science fiction. Yes, it is rooted in technology but is also allegorical and metaphorical. Insemination, ghosts. What is called AI today is a collection of loosely related technologies that can be marketed by the effect of these fictions.
The most glaring disparity between this past vision of the future and the vision of the future sold to us by technology companies today is brought to focus by each’s sexbots our reality of AI is still much more software than it is hardware. We “could have made them look like anything,” but we haven’t yet.
However, as Oshii establishes, anthropocentrism is not purely a question of how bodies are shaped, but of how there is a constellation of ways of thinking. Tech that has been so erroneously mislabeled ‘AI’ exposes our fetish-like preoccupation with the human physique. Take, for example, the Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI), for which the goal is to build a chatbot from language models trained with the sounds recorded from sperm whales. Similar to how ChatGPT generates text that takes the English language’s form by analyzing a lot of written English, CETI is interested in developing software that could speak with whales. The framework kinda makes sense. We won’t know what it’s saying and really have any means of verifying it works, but that comes after because what’s being sold now is a narrative that this could save the world.
The existing expectation that all non-human animals will finally be recognized for their intelligence, is laughable in the world we currently live in, particularly in a colonized world. Moreover, this assumption is a total failure of empathy. Let’s take, for example, James Cameron, who originally appreciated Ghost in the Shell. He repeats the anthropocentrism of CETI in the movie Avatar The Way of Water. He uses similar but very fine things as whales having languages, music, and even nuclear families to promote humans as more empathetic creatures. He never, however, touches upon the point let alone the way Oshii forgets as sentience.
A liberated child confesses to Batou, at the end of Innocence, that she and the other kids had the capability of disabling the systems fitted within using them as tools of murder to get attention from the authorities. After rescuing her from that horrible fate, he confronts her, “Didn’t you think what would happen to the dolls endowed with souls?” while blaming her for the lives lost in her actions. The statement may come as shocking, but he does see his android counterparts, or doll-like beings, as more worthy than the helpless girl.
Even though I would honestly never want to see Innocence again, and I would do my best to avoid it, I appreciate it is also one of the few feature-length films that has managed to keep up with Ghost in the Shell’s high standards as an interesting cyberpunk film. You can look at Edgerunners, Mars Express, to Belle while every one of them does something in form or in content that Oshii has done in cyberpunk, none take the steps forward the way Oshii manages in Innocence.
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