Ghost in the Shell’s Weirder, Slower, Unloved Sequel Is Actually Great

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence and its dreamlike CGI have returned with a 4K restoration. Photo: GKIDS

In 1995, Ghost in the Shell hit like a precision missile from a Jigabachi AV anti-tank helicopter. Written and directed by Mamoru Oshii and based on the manga by Masamune Shirow, the film sits at the center of a Venn diagram of several cultural epochs. It’s one of the major works that gave anime international recognition, a continued touchstone for world-building and action in animation, and immeasurably influential within science fiction, especially the cyberpunk subgenre. As a key reference point for The Matrix alone, it shaped a huge swath of contemporary cinema.

In 2004, a sequel came out, again written and directed by Oshii — simply titled Innocence in Japan and titled Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence internationally. Reviews were friendly but the consensus lacked enthusiasm, and it failed to recoup even half its budget during its theatrical run. It’s one of the less acknowledged installments of this franchise; fans don’t revile it the way they do, say, the 2017 live-action remake of the original, but rarely do they praise it. Maybe they don’t know what to make of Innocence, which is much slower, quieter, and stranger than the first film. But those qualities are also what make it so interesting. The truth is that Innocence stands shoulder to shoulder with Ghost in the Shell. And now that the film has a 4K restoration and is back in theaters this weekend for its 20th anniversary, the opportunity is ripe for a reevaluation of its virtues.

While the movie shares the setting, some characters, and certain themes of Ghost in the Shell, Oshii and his crew put in tremendous effort to distinguish it as its own entity. Even the color palettes differ. The first film favors cool tones: blues, greens, whites, and purples. This one presents a world saturated in neon lights and smog-bruised sunsets with colors so warm as to be almost harsh: oranges, reds, and yellows, often contrasted with deep black. You can always tell from a glance which Ghost in the Shell is which.

Across its different incarnations, Ghost in the Shell explores the nature of consciousness in a futuristic setting in which humans’ “cyberbrains” let them mentally interface with machines, the internet, and each other. In the first film, protagonist Motoko Kusanagi, field commander of a specialized police unit, struggles with alienation borne of having a robotic body, her brain being the only organic part of her. She resolves this conflict by transcending physical existence entirely, merging with the emergent artificial intelligence her team has spent the movie hunting.

Rather than repeat the plot beats of the original, Innocence follows through on the philosophical implications of its conclusion. The film explores what happens in a world where the self is no longer harnessed to the body. Kusanagi’s erstwhile second-in-command, Batou, investigates a series of killings by gynoids — feminine sex robots that, contrary to their programming, appear to be manifesting personalities before lashing out and self-destructing. The mystery isn’t really a whodunnit. (This is cyberpunk, so when the name of a giant corporation gets dropped, you can make a good guess as to who’s responsible.) It’s more ontological: What is happening to the gynoids?

The respective beginnings of Ghost in the Shell and Innocence tease their differences. Ghost in the Shell opens with a frantic firefight in a sleek high-rise that climaxes with a dude’s head exploding, followed by an opening-credit sequence depicting the construction of a robotic body. It’s a one-two punch of excitement and then intriguing world-building. Innocence starts with Batou descending alone into a dingy building to confront a fugitive gynoid. The scene is deliberately paced and tense, and when violence erupts, it’s startling and unpleasant instead of cool. The film’s opening credits are ethereal, playing out over imagery of two doll-like figures floating in a sort of dance within a dreamlike void. Like the movie as a whole, it’s less tangible, more metaphorical.

Despite this, Oshii’s script for Innocence is more cohesive than the first film’s, which fused disparate manga chapters together and emphasized urban combat and chase scenes in populated areas. The second film is structured around a series of conversations that build on each other, mostly consisting of two- or three-person interactions in offices, lonely homes, cold labs, or liminal spaces. Innocence is a study in isolation; Batou spends a good deal of the movie alone (or with his wonderful, perfect dog). Gratifyingly, it tends to eschew overt exposition, unafraid of flat-out disorienting the viewer at times. One standout set piece sees Batou and his partner seemingly experiencing a time loop wherein they repeatedly enter a mansion and question a hacker before finding themselves outside again, reentering the mansion. As the characters’ sense of reality fractures, so does the audience’s, underscoring the narrative’s concerns around “real” and “fake” experiences.

To some, choices like this can easily feel pretentious. One of the film’s more derided elements is the density of classical quotations and allusions the characters drop in casual dialogue. But they perfectly suit the dialectical nature of the investigation. More fascinating, 20 years later, one can see how cannily this presaged the way the internet’s constant access to information has changed the way humans speak. Without spoiling it, the story also climaxes with a literal disconnection of service, reemphasizing the theme of isolation.

But the greatest difference between the films is still aesthetic, and not just in their use of color. Ghost in the Shell was animated traditionally with some digital assistance, while Innocence is suffused with CGI, taking advantage of the technological advances that had been made in the intervening decade. Often only the characters look hand-drawn, moving within entirely CG sets. Innocence’s imagery remains distinctive, and the environments look detailed and lived in — in fact, it looks more striking than many computer-animated works that have come since, though the underlying tools have developed even further. Granted, this is still 2004 CGI; it doesn’t have all the elegance and soul of hand-drawn animation. But that still plays fully into Innocence’s atmosphere and setting. These are people navigating a world made increasingly unfamiliar by encroaching technology and the diffusion of their personal identities. Visually estranging them from their surroundings only drives the point home. The 4K restoration renders this beautifully, scrubbing away the muddiness common in early-aughts CGI.

The way the film links a cyberpunk narrative to those visuals makes as good a case as any for Innocence to be as revered as its predecessor. In interviews, Oshii has compared the film’s themes to the nature of animation itself. “In anime,” he says, “there is no actual flesh and blood human being involved, characters are all puppets.” The gynoids, which look like ball-jointed maquettes, are revealed to be reacting to trauma that’s been imprinted in their programming — they were designed as surrogates for a male-coded user fantasy but are embodying female-coded emotional responses to being used. Someone else is pulling their strings. This beguiling but intelligent and beautiful movie is about puppets trying to figure out why other puppets are behaving the way they do.