Ghost In The Shell 2: INNOCENSE

Ghost In The Shell: Innocence was simply the best anime I have ever seen. It is the secret payoff after having to sit through (and enjoy, I'll admit) I, Robot and The Matrix movies. Now don't get me wrong: I love the Matrix trilogy. And I even thought I, Robot was passable Saturday-matinée popcorn entertainment. But as of GITS: 2, I can honestly say that all those movies--and Spielberg's AI, as well--can just sit right down and shut the F up. Acclaimed anime director Mamoru Oshii has just sent y'all a digital bitch-slap to last generations. You wanna be subjected to an intelligent, mesmerizing vision of the future that incorporates the idea of AIs in effective and stunning ways? Innocence is the movie all die-hard cyber-afficionados have been waiting for. If one were forced to rely on comparisons with previous such cinematic fare, one could not avoid noticing the similarities in style to certain seminal works in the genre as Blade Runner and Star Wars, only as filtered through the clinically focused depiction of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and at the same time defying all these in favor of its own particular ideology. Anyone who sees Innocence and maintains the director is "ripping off" Ridley Scott stylistically has missed the somewhat unnerving point: it is merely that both auteurs have aimed for the same artistic truth and arrived near enough to their target to bring about certain undeniable analogs and parallels. Innocence is not derivative of Blade Runner so much as it is merely analogous to its central themes: certain urban & global trends become inescapable in any futurist's carefully aimed predictions of where mankind is taking his collective urban environments. But Innocence strives to achieve something that its predecessors only hinted at: that the essential "difference" between robots and humans is something imbedded firmly in the eye of the beholder. The way it achieves this noble vantagepoint is nothing short of pure artistry, in that the audience is not led to this conclusion via traditional plot devices; rather, we are gradually led to this inescapable conclusion only after having soaked up the ambiance of this highly-detailed futurist vision of the world and technology to come, and arrive there by a sort of osmosis, after having soaked up the detailed minutae of how artificial intelligence has proliferated throughout a wide variety of taken-for-granted applications.

What I found most fascinating about Innocence was its unrelenting sense of crystal-clear focus on the "realism" of what could be considered "realtime-action"; and I found it ironically satisfying that an animated film could strive for a realism (and achieve it) more focused than that which a "live-action" movie like Matrix: Reloaded strove for. In other words, Innocence was a glorious example of finely honed stylism in that it achieved degrees of realism even beyond that of the Matrix movies, with all their flesh & blood actors and tangible sequences. This in itself propels Innocence high above the farthest-reaching ambitions of its predecessors in the AI-genre, and results in a visually stunning film that comes across like a mutant hybrid of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, the Matrix movies, and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and then trumps them all with the careful introduction of our protagonist's basset hound (pictured in the movie poster), a remarkably "alive" anime-rendered pooch if there ever was one. This tail-thumpin' basset becomes the mascot of the film and also the keystone which secures for the filmmaker the winning card in his Royal-Flush homage to science fiction robot movies everywhere. I had to watch Matrix: Reloaded twice to even begin assembling any sort of meaning to the story; and with Innocence, the fact that I'd have to watch it 5 times to even begin unravelling all its connotations speaks more for its inherent simplicity than it does for any sense of harrowing complexity: the details are packed into its subatomic structure, just like life itself. Whereas curiously, the story itself is quite straightforward, actually: it's the connotations of the story's details which linger on to haunt your memory for days, if not years, to come.