7.5

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence Still Feels Like Unsurpassed Cyberpunk

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence Still Feels Like Unsurpassed Cyberpunk

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is exactly the kind of film you’d expect from a movie that opens with nanomachine sperms inseminating the CPU cores of androids, and I don’t ever want to watch it again. The incredibly slow-burn, noirish follow-up to filmmaker Mamoru Oshii’s original adaptation of Masamune Shirow’s manga mulls over its themes more than any commentary or action really needs. But it’s also something you should watch at least once, because I’ll remember Innocence fondly when I’m getting annoyed at less inventive contemporary cyberpunk

Whereas Ghost in the Shell was interested in the transhumanist potential of technology (and cyberpunk as a genre afterwards would be defined by the co-option of this liberatory potential by the state), Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is a humanist fable—one interested much more in what the desire for new bodies says about humans as they exist today. Released in 2004, it’s also a technological triumph in its own right, a stepping stone for feature animation into the digital age, bridging the gap between the likes of Oshii’s Patlabor: The Movie and the rebuilds of Evangelion with an extensive incorporation of CGI into the same style as the original film.

Production I.G’s CG is a mixed bag with some dazzling success in lighting. Most striking are waxy cars that capture the reflections of neon signs along all their curves. While some models of buildings and vehicles look like early CG, Oshii mostly incorporates the technology thoughtfully. The then-novel use of hand drawn characters atop 3D backgrounds is pulled off well, with the characters’ textures at times replicating the massive layouts of the original film that remain so enduring today.

The highlight is a now-iconic festival sequence set below the towering skyscrapers of Iturup, featuring massive ornamental puppets and huge, baroque floats on parade in the streets and canals of the island super-city. The familiar children’s choir of composer Kenji Kawai’s soundtrack accompanies the spectacle, inspired by the Taiwanese festival to the sea goddess Mazu. The sequence shows off the possibilities of CG, filling the screen with vibrant, intricately crafted models with better movement and compositing than we’d see from most CG animation over the next two decades. (It apparently took the studio two years of production to animate the scene.) It also highlights the architectural wonder and immense scale of layout artists Takashi Watabe and Atsushi Takeuchi, rivaling the quiet moments on the canals of the 1995 film’s New Port City.

But then…that script.

The technological feat is a muted experience in the timeline of the film. The cultural context of the event in the city and its relationship to the characters is lost in an increasingly solipsistic plot that veers away from mystery and into seminar. Oshii’s script falls apart to aphorisms and rejoinders, citing science fiction and philosophy and the Bible. (Descartes is name-dropped just 18 minutes in—which feels much earlier given the pacing.) When everyone stops reciting lines at one another and characters just talk to each other, the ideas come through well enough. 

The perspective character, the hulking cyborg Batou (Akio Otsuka) is working out a case for Section 9 with his new partner, a younger Togusa (Koichi Yamadera) only recently assigned to the intelligence department specializing in android terrorism. They follow a trail of bodies left by a new model of intelligent android companionship robots — unfortunately called “sexaroids” — that more resemble porcelain-toned dolls than fully human forms. Tracing a path from dead politicians to lowly yakuza to the trade secrets of gynoid manufacturing, the mystery challenges the characters to rethink their anthropocentric view of the androids.

And Innocence is full of great cyberpunk action beats, like hacking the eyes of yakuza with cheap implants in order to flank them, and the obligatory boss battle with that guy with a really big prosthetic weapon. Each scene eventually finds its stride that propels the murder mystery forward.

An android coroner of sorts suggests that the dolls have not self-destructed or gone rogue, but died by suicide. The implication haunts Batou as he constantly recalls the decision of the Major in the original film to transcend her human form entirely. Oshii establishes different humanist philosophies out of each character’s desire for children, pets or dolls. These juxtapositions, both in visuals and dialogue, contribute much more to the film’s attempt to decenter the human body from an understanding of intelligence and sentience than simply laying out a collection of quotes from intellectuals to speak for the director.

The resolution of the murder investigation ties the themes together well and offers the most enduring commentary for the film’s re-release in 2024. Much like AI in our world, the work of the sexaroids that have been murdering their high-profile clients is the climax of alienation in a corporate techno-state. It’s revealed that the tech making these androids so compelling is the cloned “ghosts” of actual humans, transferred into the dolls in a process that kills the original women. It echoes the use of AI today as a technology where the body of exploited workers is merely obfuscated by the internet to maintain the guise of technological innovation—whether that be Amazon’s failed grocery stores, self driving vehicles, or content moderation.

Using sex and sex work to explore this adds a layer to the heavy-handed doll metaphor running throughout Innocence, which makes the obsession with recreating humanity in children, pets, dolls and androids out to be a fetish of sorts at the boundary of our omnipotence. But it’s also a useful area for identifying the limits of fiction and tech today. What Oshii, Shirow and other sci-fi writers Oshii quotes have written of AI over the past century was speculative fiction. Grounded in real-world tech, yes, but also allegorical and metaphorical. Insemination, ghosts. What is now called “AI” is a collection of loosely related technologies that can be marketed by their affect of these fictions.

The biggest difference between this past vision of the future and the vision of the future marketed to us by tech companies today is highlighted by each’s sexbots: Our “AI” reality is still more software than hardware. “We could have made them look like anything,” but we haven’t yet. 

As Oshii establishes though, anthropocentrism is not just a matter of the shapes of bodies, but ways of thinking. Tech erroneously labeled “AI” reveals our fetish-like obsession with the human form. Consider the Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI), which aims to construct a chatbot from language models built from recordings of sperm whales. As ChatGPT strings together texts resembling English from processing a lot of texts written in English, CETI wants to create a software that could communicate with whales. The framework kinda makes sense. Sure, we wouldn’t know what it’s saying or really have any way of verifying it works, but that comes later, because right now what’s peddled is a narrative that this could save the world.

The unspoken assumption—that people will finally see that non-human animals have intelligence once that intelligence looks like our own—is laughably ahistorical in a colonized world, even without getting into the logistics of stopping the climate crisis. But it is also a complete failure of empathy. James Cameron, who praised the original Ghost in the Shell, repeats the anthropocentrism of CETI in Avatar: The Way of Water, building up whales as empathic creatures through their similarity to humans/Pandorans: they have language, music, nuclear families, math. It never prods at what sentience is the way Oshii never forgets to.

At the end of Innocence, a rescued child tells Batou that other kids were able to sabotage the systems in the sexaroids to go murder their clients and draw attention the company. After he’s rescued her from the horrifying fate, he accosts this child for not recognizing all the death in her wake: “Didn’t you think what would happen to the dolls endowed with souls?” He now fully sees the android dolls as worthy of saving as the human girl – maybe even more worthy.

So, as much as I don’t really want to ever watch Innocence again, it’s also one of the only features to have truly followed Ghost in the Shell as a compelling cyberpunk film. You can look to Edgerunners, to Mars Express, to Belle — each do something in form or in content that Oshii has done in cyberpunk, but none take the steps forward the way Oshii manages to in Innocence.

Director: Mamoru Oshii
Writer: Mamoru Oshii
Starring: Akio Ōtsuka, Atsuko Tanaka
Release Date: March 6, 2004; June 23, 2024 (4K re-release)


Autumn Wright is a freelance games critic and anime journalist. Find their latest writing at @TheAutumnWright.

 
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