Empty Shell
Anime fans may be salivating for the release of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, but they may be the only ones. The talky, incomprehensible movie—the first anime picture ever to compete at the Cannes Film Festival—is so boring most audience members will likely have their eyes riveted shut throughout the proceedings.
Picking up sometime after the events of the first picture and the disappearance of protagonist Batou (voiced by Akio Otsuka)'s partner the Major, the movie is a Blade Runner wannabe set in a future in which humans and cyborgs coexist in a sort of uneasy societal balance. This balance is being threatened by the malfunction of a gynoid, a new type of advanced pleasure robot. Enter Batou and his new partner Togusa (Koichi Yamadera) members of the elite Public Security Section 9 which is responsible for dealing with robot and cyborg crimes to solve the mystery.
What follows is a lot of violence, some beautiful animation and enough philosophizing (quotes range from the Bible to Milton to Confucious to fortune cookies) to make your head spin. In the end it's all very existential and very confusing.
There is little plot in Innocence and even less logic. As a police thriller, the movie would have made Charles Bronson proud. Batou doesn't so much investigate as he executes. He is a walking, talking terminator with a badge. Togusa, slightly less cybernetic than his partner, walks around whining about how he isn't as good as the Major and complaining when Batou kills a roomful of bad guys with little provocation.
The fortune cookie philosophizing seems to be director Mamoru Oshii's primary focus, apart from showing endless shots of cars and aircraft going from point A to point B. And this is where the movie really unravels, because there is little pinning the philosophy down. And the "shocking ending" that the press notes promise is just ho-hum hokum.
Innocence was produced at the animation studio Production I.G.—the same one Quentin Tarantino used for the anime sequence in Kill Bill Vol. 1. The visual style is hyper-kinetic at times, highly stylized and always interesting. Too bad the movie's story and philosophical pretensions don't match the look.
Picking up sometime after the events of the first picture and the disappearance of protagonist Batou (voiced by Akio Otsuka)'s partner the Major, the movie is a Blade Runner wannabe set in a future in which humans and cyborgs coexist in a sort of uneasy societal balance. This balance is being threatened by the malfunction of a gynoid, a new type of advanced pleasure robot. Enter Batou and his new partner Togusa (Koichi Yamadera) members of the elite Public Security Section 9 which is responsible for dealing with robot and cyborg crimes to solve the mystery.
What follows is a lot of violence, some beautiful animation and enough philosophizing (quotes range from the Bible to Milton to Confucious to fortune cookies) to make your head spin. In the end it's all very existential and very confusing.
There is little plot in Innocence and even less logic. As a police thriller, the movie would have made Charles Bronson proud. Batou doesn't so much investigate as he executes. He is a walking, talking terminator with a badge. Togusa, slightly less cybernetic than his partner, walks around whining about how he isn't as good as the Major and complaining when Batou kills a roomful of bad guys with little provocation.
The fortune cookie philosophizing seems to be director Mamoru Oshii's primary focus, apart from showing endless shots of cars and aircraft going from point A to point B. And this is where the movie really unravels, because there is little pinning the philosophy down. And the "shocking ending" that the press notes promise is just ho-hum hokum.
Innocence was produced at the animation studio Production I.G.—the same one Quentin Tarantino used for the anime sequence in Kill Bill Vol. 1. The visual style is hyper-kinetic at times, highly stylized and always interesting. Too bad the movie's story and philosophical pretensions don't match the look.
