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ghost in the shell 2: innocence
Gabu got very sick with a slipped disc during the production of Innocence and it was only, claims the director, because of a miracle treatment that cured her that he was able to complete the film. But Oshii is careful to make clear that the basset hound is not just a cute animal character: dogs belong to the cosmology behind the film.
“As humans became more ‘mind-oriented’ and the environment more urban, people have forgotten the idea of the human body,” he says. “As far as they’re concerned, the human body does not exist anymore. The reason why people of today choose to have dogs is because they’re looking for a substitute for the human body.” Dogs, he adds, are like the (entirely non-human) dolls in Innocence: major motifs in the film, functioning as alternatives to human kind.
Given all this, it should come as no surprise that Oshii does not necessarily think the disappearance of ‘humanity’ is a bad thing. It’s time, he reckons, for the race to move on; and in that sense, the Major’s decision at the end of the first film to ‘lose’ herself in the web was more a move into another dimension than a loss.
“What we need today is not some kind of anthropocentric humanism,” he says. “Humanity has reached its limits. I believe that we must now broaden our horizons and philosophise about life from a larger perspective. With this film, I hope to reflect upon the uneasiness that pervades the world today. Under such conditions, what is the meaning of human existence?”
Nothing could be further from Oshii’s aim in Innocence, in other words, than the romantic yearning which the title may suggest. He diagnoses the evils of the world in which we live - the increased urbanisation, the depersonalisation, the isolation, the ‘dehumanisation’ - and reaches out for the next step. His approach is that of the revolutionary, not the romantic.
“I’m interested in people and existence as a concept, but not in individuals’ emotions and psychology,” he said, during a recent interview, in which he shared the platform with Toshio Suzuki from the film’s co-producer, Studio Ghibli. “Let literature deal with that stuff. Some animator told me I could never make Spirited Away because my movies have no emotion. And I was thinking, ‘Yeah, and what’s wrong with that?’”
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GHOST IN THE SHELL 2:
INNOCENCE
Production I.G., Studio Ghibli
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Prod: Mitsuhisa Ishikawa, Toshio Suzuki; Dir: Mamoru Oshii; Scr: Mamoru Oshii, based on an original story by Shirow Masamune; Animation dir: Toshihiko Nishikubo, Naoko Kusumi; Prod des: Yohei Taneda; Mus: Kenji Kawai.
Voice cast: Akio Otsuka (Batou), Atsukko Tanaka (Motoko Kusanagi), Kouichi Yamadera (Togusa), Tamio Oki (Aramaki), Yutaka Nakano (Ishikawa), Naoto Takenaka (Kim)
International distribution:
UIP/DreamWorks Pictures
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