Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence - Movie Review

Ghost in the Shell 2 Innocence was once again directed by Mamoru Oshii and was technically the sequel to Ghost in the Shell, despite the fact that he doesn't necessarily view it that way. Come on, it's the sequel. And this film follows Bato and Togusa as they team up on an investigation as they try to figure out why this murderous sex doll has decided to slaughter her owner. My first encounter with this film was when I saw the DVD of it in Blockbuster. I snatched that thing up. I was so excited. I ran home. I remember putting it in the DVD player, discovering there was no English dub available. So that disappointed a lot of people, but I was like, okay, I'll watch the subtitle track. I put on the subtitle track and not only did we get text for dialogue, we got text like footsteps and door opens and helicopter approaches. That's right. The original subtitle track for the first release of Ghost in the Shell 2 Innocence in America was simply closed captions. What the hell did you just say? So that was probably the worst thing ever that could have happened to this film in America. And this film has had a long history of licensing errors and wars between various companies. The version that I have of it is the Bandai Blu-ray that has an English dub, that has the corrected subtitles. That thing is out of print because as a lot of you know, Bandai stopped localizing anime in America. So that Blu-ray right there is actually the rarest Blu-ray that I own. It's so weird. This is Ghost in the Shell 2. Why isn't this more readily available? There's a great video on YouTube that went into the licensing war that went on with this movie. I'm just going to link that in the description below. It's by a YouTuber called Bennett the Sage. He has a really cool anime segment called Anime Abandoned. So this film came out nine years after the first one, and it was the first anime film to ever be nominated for the Palm at Cannes Film Festival. Even more so than the first film, this used a melding of digital and traditional cell animation. It's not as seamless as the original, and I notice it a lot here. It became a bit of a distraction. Oshi was given a bigger budget on this film. It's also about 20 minutes longer than the original, so clearly he tried to do different things with technology. And wherein the first Ghost in the Shell, the digital animation took a back seat to the traditional cell animation, here at times it seems like it's taking over entire sequences. And I remember when I rented this from Blockbuster and watched that very shitty release of a DVD on a normal CRT tube television. Even back then, I was like, this is kind of noticeable. I'm not sure if this works. And this is something that became even more apparent when I watched it on that 1080p Blu-ray, because the older traditional cell animation looks really good in HD and works really well in high definition. But those older rendered computer graphics from the early 2000s don't transfer well to HD, and you can really tell. So pushing the licensing issues aside, and the not-so-great computer animation aside, how is this film? I actually really enjoy it. And the reason I really like Ghost in the Shell 2, despite the fact that I don't like it as much as the first, is because this film does a lot more with its characters than the original did. The first Ghost in the Shell is a very short, contained, quick film without a scene that feels misplaced. Ghost in the Shell 2 is, as I've said, 20 minutes longer, and it has more opportunities to flesh out the characters of Bato and Togusa. We get to see Bato's home life in this movie. We learn a little bit more about what he feels, his connection with the Major as she disappeared into the Net somewhere in the first film. We learn a tad bit more about Togusa and his family life, and so we get to understand our protagonists more. We get more of an opportunity to build up character in this movie. Togusa here is clearly the most human character, because his reactions to things are sort of like us as the audience. He is that audience character. There's a scene early on in the movie when they're investigating this murder where he's talking to an android woman, and she is just waxing philosophical and going on and on and on and on, and he's like, I have no idea what you're talking about. The dolls are not surrogates in place of real babies. The girls are not practicing child rearing at all. It may just be that playing with the doll happens to be similar to raising children. What the hell are you talking about? So me as an audience member, I kind of zero in on Togusa for a lot of scenes in this movie and be like, yes, help me understand what's going on. That was at least how I felt for the first two times I've watched this movie. I've seen it three times now, and I have a complete understanding of everything that goes on in this film, because despite the fact that Ghost in the Shell is a very challenging movie, Innocence is far more so. The first half of this film is surprisingly traditional. It's basically just a police procedural with Bato and Togusa investigating these murders that are taking place, and I like police procedurals, movies like Zodiac or Seven. I really like watching people investigate crime and having it feel pulpy and entertaining, and this film really captures that in the first half. In the second half though, right after a very long parade sequence, the film takes a decidingly different turn where our characters get lost in a strange maze that's not entirely real, and then we get a gigantic action sequence that is beautifully animated, by the way, on a ship where all these dolls are coming to life and everything's really exciting, but I remember the first time I saw this movie thinking, is it the terrible closed captioning that's making me not be able to understand what's going on, or is this just a really confusing movie? This is one of those rare movies, similar to the first one, where you really have to pay attention to every line of dialogue. Every. Single. One. And that can be hard because this film doesn't give our characters too much time to pause in between saying very important things. Listen, I want to get something straight before we go. What is it? We're only going to question them, right? Do you like the Yakuza? No, I hate them. So do I. But we're just asking questions, right? Like I said, you don't need to be a Yakuza. Yeah, to go visit the Yakuza. But you also said we're going to need weapons. This to me is an animation error that I often find in anime films, at least when they transfer over to dubs, because in the English language, you're trying to catch up with everything that was just said in the Japanese language, and so they have to kind of spout out a lot of really important things really fast, but then there's not that pause that seems needed in between conversations for emotion to seep into the conversation, or frustration. I've noticed that a lot of animators in Japanese anime have a hard time allowing conversations to feel a little more realistic, and so Innocence does suffer in that respect, because you have to pay attention to every word as I said, and sometimes it all just gets thrown out there, and you have to be like, wait, rewind. What? Okay. Okay, I got it now. This film came out in that strange time period where the MPAA had no idea how to rate anime films. Cowboy Bebop the movie, for whatever reason, is rated R because of a few bloody moments, but Ghost in the Shell 2 Innocence, a movie about murdering rampaging sex dolls, is PG-13. Okay. I think what I love the most about Innocence is that it wisely does not try to one-up the first film. It steps back and smartly realizes that that's going to be a very difficult task, and so what we got was a very different movie. A film that really stands on its own, that is far more traditional than the first film, but requires a lot of thought and repeated viewings to fully appreciate. The similar line that flows between the first film and this film is what inherently makes us human. Can a robotic life form, or in this case a doll, be considered human? If you insert human thoughts into an artificial thing, is it human now? And just like the first film, our characters stand around in rooms and quote the bible and other forms of literature, and it's meant to make us think, and it does. The first few times you can kind of watch it and think, man, this is just a bunch of pretentious crap. And it's easy to do that in a film like this, but once you really latch on to the message that Mamoru Oshii is giving us in this film, and you discover that he's really trying to say that everyone is equal in some form or the other, and that if you exploit the tendency to want to control humanity or artificial intelligence, that's where things are going to get messy. He has since stated in interviews that that was his primary goal with this film, the message he was trying to get across. And while it doesn't always come through in the film, I appreciate this movie for its stunning traditional animation. The combination, though, with CG animation, for me personally, did not work as well in this movie. But I like the characters. I like the fact that Bato and Togusa get more time in this film to become more fleshed out people. I like the fact that this film is really trippy towards the last half. It asks you to really use your brain and think about what you just saw, and it does test your patience. That's rare in live-action filmmaking. This is a diamond in the rough when it comes to animation, a film that actually makes you think. I'm going to give Ghost in the Shell 2, Innocence, a B+. No, it's not as culturally impactful as that first film, but I think wisely. They didn't even try to one-up it. So the new Ghost in the Shell movie is coming out very soon. Let's all hope it's good. Thank you guys so much for watching. And if you like this, you can click right here and get stupmanized.