Both take Masamune Shirow’s brilliant manga as a starting point.
This 2004 film is a sequel. I’m not going to reveal any spoilers for the first film here but you absolutely must watch the earlier film first. Not because of the plot but because of something very very important involving one of the main characters that happens in the first movie.
Gynoids (female androids) have been running amok and killing their owners. That’s disturbing. What’s really worrying and puzzling is that often the gynoids then commit suicide. That’s something that androids do not, and cannot, do.
Batou is assigned to the case. Togusa is now his partner, the Major Motoko Kusanagi being (for very complicated reasons) unavailable for duty. They’re initially puzzled that this case should have been handed to Section 9. Section 9 usually deals with much more overt threat to public security.
The gynoids are personal servant androids but the first thing that Batou and Togusa find out is that the gynoids causing the problems are a special type of gynoid. They’re sexbots.
The various branches of the Ghost in the Shell franchise all deal with the intersection of the human and the digital worlds. The blurring of the lines between man and machine. In this future cyborgs and androids are ubiquitous. Batou is a cyborg and there’s not much of him left that is entirely human. Motoko Kusanagi is entirely a cyborg. The only human element to Motoko is her Ghost. But of course the Ghost is the most important thing of all. Cyborgs have human brains and cyberbrains. The Ghost resides in the human brain. It comprises our memories and it’s our memories that make us human.
This is obviously the kind of territory that has been extensively explored in cyberpunk fiction and cyberpunk movies such as Blade Runner and Total Recall. The Ghost in the Shell franchise takes a deep dive into this territory.
Batou and Togusa are making progress, or so they think. That’s assuming that the things they have found are true. They may be trapped in a web of illusions and lies.
When they reach the ship things get seriously weird. Reality starts to fragment. In a world of virtual reality and artificial intelligences is there any actual reality? If everybody is permanently connected to digital networks and everybody has a cyberbrain would you be able to tell if you were real or not?
There’s plenty of violent mayhem but this is a very cerebral movie. This is not a cool sci-fi action movie. It’s cool, but it’s cool in an incredibly complex and philosophical way. Western sci-fi movie-makers (and makers of TV sci-fi) will flirt with really complex ideas but it’s the Japanese anime makers who are prepared to take those ideas to the limit.
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is visually stunning but it looks nothing like the first movie. It’s moving into entirely new aesthetic territory. And it’s tonally quite different.
In western cinema the advent of digital technologies, CGI and the like, had mostly disastrous results. That was not the case with anime. In an anime movie such as this one what matters is having people who can use these techniques as something more than a crutch. Or a gimmick. And these techniques can be blended seamlessly into animated movies. In live-action movies they seem like they’re shoe-horned in.
You do need to watch the 1995 Ghost in the Shell movie first. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is a very different movie in many ways. It’s different thematically and stylistically. But to fully appreciate it it helps to have seen the first movie and it helps to have read the original manga. That makes it easier to understand why Mamoru Oshii chose not to make a straightforward sequel.
The extensive Ghost in the Shell franchise has a complicated history. It began as a manga by Masamune Shirow. Then came the first movie in 1995, directed by Mamoru Oshii and written by Kazunori Itô. Then in 2002 came the excellent Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex TV series. It does not follow on directly from the movie and may possibly take place in a slightly different timeline. In 2004 there was a second series of the TV series. And also in 2004, the second movie. In 2006 came the movie Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - Solid State Society. There have since been other iterations. It’s been a spectacularly successful franchise.
You could argue that it’s not a franchise in a conventional sense but rather a complex web of interrelated works.
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is strange and moody and surreal and it’s very highly recommended.
This 2004 film is a sequel. I’m not going to reveal any spoilers for the first film here but you absolutely must watch the earlier film first. Not because of the plot but because of something very very important involving one of the main characters that happens in the first movie.
Gynoids (female androids) have been running amok and killing their owners. That’s disturbing. What’s really worrying and puzzling is that often the gynoids then commit suicide. That’s something that androids do not, and cannot, do.
Batou is assigned to the case. Togusa is now his partner, the Major Motoko Kusanagi being (for very complicated reasons) unavailable for duty. They’re initially puzzled that this case should have been handed to Section 9. Section 9 usually deals with much more overt threat to public security.
The gynoids are personal servant androids but the first thing that Batou and Togusa find out is that the gynoids causing the problems are a special type of gynoid. They’re sexbots.
The various branches of the Ghost in the Shell franchise all deal with the intersection of the human and the digital worlds. The blurring of the lines between man and machine. In this future cyborgs and androids are ubiquitous. Batou is a cyborg and there’s not much of him left that is entirely human. Motoko Kusanagi is entirely a cyborg. The only human element to Motoko is her Ghost. But of course the Ghost is the most important thing of all. Cyborgs have human brains and cyberbrains. The Ghost resides in the human brain. It comprises our memories and it’s our memories that make us human.
This is obviously the kind of territory that has been extensively explored in cyberpunk fiction and cyberpunk movies such as Blade Runner and Total Recall. The Ghost in the Shell franchise takes a deep dive into this territory.
Batou and Togusa are making progress, or so they think. That’s assuming that the things they have found are true. They may be trapped in a web of illusions and lies.
When they reach the ship things get seriously weird. Reality starts to fragment. In a world of virtual reality and artificial intelligences is there any actual reality? If everybody is permanently connected to digital networks and everybody has a cyberbrain would you be able to tell if you were real or not?
There’s plenty of violent mayhem but this is a very cerebral movie. This is not a cool sci-fi action movie. It’s cool, but it’s cool in an incredibly complex and philosophical way. Western sci-fi movie-makers (and makers of TV sci-fi) will flirt with really complex ideas but it’s the Japanese anime makers who are prepared to take those ideas to the limit.
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is visually stunning but it looks nothing like the first movie. It’s moving into entirely new aesthetic territory. And it’s tonally quite different.
In western cinema the advent of digital technologies, CGI and the like, had mostly disastrous results. That was not the case with anime. In an anime movie such as this one what matters is having people who can use these techniques as something more than a crutch. Or a gimmick. And these techniques can be blended seamlessly into animated movies. In live-action movies they seem like they’re shoe-horned in.
You do need to watch the 1995 Ghost in the Shell movie first. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is a very different movie in many ways. It’s different thematically and stylistically. But to fully appreciate it it helps to have seen the first movie and it helps to have read the original manga. That makes it easier to understand why Mamoru Oshii chose not to make a straightforward sequel.
The extensive Ghost in the Shell franchise has a complicated history. It began as a manga by Masamune Shirow. Then came the first movie in 1995, directed by Mamoru Oshii and written by Kazunori Itô. Then in 2002 came the excellent Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex TV series. It does not follow on directly from the movie and may possibly take place in a slightly different timeline. In 2004 there was a second series of the TV series. And also in 2004, the second movie. In 2006 came the movie Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - Solid State Society. There have since been other iterations. It’s been a spectacularly successful franchise.
You could argue that it’s not a franchise in a conventional sense but rather a complex web of interrelated works.
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is strange and moody and surreal and it’s very highly recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment