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Cyborgs, Blood and Sex
Anime sequel delivers thrilling visuals
by Noah Bowman
For all of those helpless souls lost in the wonderful world of Japanese anime, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, the sequel to Asian filmmaker Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 super-cult classic Ghost in the Shell, should prove to be an enjoyable and manga-quenching experience. And even for those who are not necessarily regular anime fans and prefer real-life actors to the illustrated ones, Shell 2 should—if they walk into it with an open-mind—be a somewhat enjoyable 99 minutes in the worn and flipped-down cushioned seats of the specially-selected movie theater.
Fortunately for my own sense of cheap entertainment, I fall somewhere between the two character types and found the film quite engaging. And even though I’ve seen the first movie (back when I wasn’t nearly as “cool” as I am now), I don’t think that it’s necessary for a viewer new to the genre to have any extensive knowledge of what took place in the first film in order to grasp what’s going on in the sequel. What one should be aware of is that the dialogue in Innocence is delivered completely in subtitles, and it’s delivered quickly, so more times than not, the viewer is forced to make a choice between either concentrating on the text or sitting back, relaxing and taking in the feature’s remarkably exquisite artwork. But not to worry, I split my time in the theater doing both and was still able to follow the story and grasp the plot fairly well.
Set in the year 2032 in a darkened, neon sign-riddled metropolis world that very much resembles that of Ridley Scott’s imagined visionary epic in Blade Runner, Innocence is the follow-up story of Bateau, the supporting, yet bad-ass, pony-tailed, half-man, half-machine detective cyborg. Having lost (or did he?) his long-time partner, Major Motoko, to the infinite prison of cyberspace in the first Ghost in the Shell, Bateau is forced to take on a new, mostly human and family-oriented partner, Togusa, and the two are assigned the difficult and dangerous task of finding out why a certain model of “gynoid, hyper-real female sex robots” are malfunctioning and turning on their human masters in the most horrific and graphic means imaginable.
Which brings me to my next point.
Roger Ebert wrote in his 1996 review on the first GITS installment that the movie “is not in any sense an animated film for children and, filled with sex, violence and nudity (although rather stylized), it’s another example of anime aimed at adults.” And while GITS2 is not quite as sexually graphic and violent as Part One, Ebert’s warning could still very well apply to Oshii’s latest creation. There are a lot of messy organ explosions, blood, bullets and an army of little, angry naked sex dolls. Happy-go-lucky Yu-Gi-Oh! this is not.
Regarding the enchanted visuals of Innocence, I was dumbstruck, simply blown away by the incredible details of the artwork throughout the movie, both the characters rendered in the traditional 2D form and the conventional 3D backgrounds. Oshii obviously spent the last eight years mastering and honing his already impressive skills at Japanese anime. There was just so much effort and detail put into every single dramatic shot, and from the opening credits, it was obvious that the amount of time, technology and talent that went into the film’s creation was well worth the wait for the sequel.
One criticism worth mentioning is all of the obscure, philosophical quotes from the various characters throughout the futuristic film. It almost seemed that Oshii couldn’t allow his odd mix of scientists, cyborgs and sex-doll detectives to go three minutes without blurting out some long, forgotten line from Descartes or Milton. For many people, subtitles are usually pretty difficult to follow in the first place, and to throw in what seems like long, random verses from Isaac Asimov or the Old Testament, seems a little too much, and it grows tiresome after awhile. (Although, I’m sure there are viewers out there who majored in Existential Banter 101 and will be falling out of their gummy seats in pure ecstasy the second they actually recognize one of the seemingly endless lines of bizarre quotes.)
But overall, there really isn’t much else to complain about in the movie. Innocence was extremely entertaining and by throwing in a couple of much-appreciated and interesting references to the first movie and also dropping possible hints to another sequel, the story was very much intriguing and kept me guessing around every twisted plot corner. That, added with the incredibly detailed animation throughout the film, made for a pretty good time. From a former manga-comic geek’s point-of-view, I wouldn’t say Oshii necessarily outdid the first Ghost in the Shell, but he certainly didn’t disappoint.
October 14, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 42
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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