Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

Mamoru Oshii's sequel to the phenomenally successful Ghost in the Shell, which I praise to the skies here. This second film departs quite a bit from Shirow Masamune's original manga, and feels quite personal to the director. But Oshii is an inscrutable guy, insisting that he doesn't interpret his films until after they are made. And his obsession with realising visual ideas clearly overshadows concerns with plot, theme and character. The festival sequence took a year to make apparently, and I'm not sure it's more powerful than Kusanagi wandering around the city in the first film.

So making sense of Innocence is a tricky task, but let's give it a go. Batou takes centre stage for this one, with Kusanagi serving as his 'guardian angel' – intervening only when he's in a really sticky situation. Quite a bit of time is spent exploring Batou's loneliness, and his relationship with his dog. The film circles around the idea of humanity's interest in creating human-like robots, without really confronting it head on. The villains in the film manufacture sex-dolls with the implanted 'ghosts' (or souls) of children. Batou's dog, according to Oshii, is also a creature manufactured by humans to serve as companions. But it is nonetheless an animal and different to ourselves. And that difference is a reminder of our uniqueness. We would never feel that lack we feel with a human-shaped doll or robot, which spurs us towards greater feats of Frankensteinian creation. Controversially, Oshii seems to suggest that pets may keep us more grounded than our own children, who we are always trying to mould in our own image.

Oshii's ideas are a bit garbled, but he is clearly committed to the importance of treating sentient beings as ends in themselves, with their own equally valuable interests and attachments. Our urge to make the outside world a reflection of ourselves, and shape the reality of others, is what seems to worry Oshii. Ironically, he describes the film-making process in very similar terms – expressing the psychology of different characters visually, through the look and feel of a futuristic cityscape or mysterious ritual. Oshii clearly works his animators very hard to fulfill his vision. It's almost as if his will-to-power is siphoned away from the real world and into harmless works of art.