New Place to Geek Out

Otaku and uber-hipsters, attend me: Now there’s a charming little two-screen theater on 59th between 2nd and 3rd called Imaginasian. It’s an offshoot of a prenatal cable station that will broadcast signals from contemporary Asian popular culture into the living rooms of Asian Americans who wonder now and again what’s going on in their parent countries. Anyway, you can go in there to see first-run eastern cinema, and the unbearably cute young panasian staff will serve you shrimp crackers and bubble tea, and if the disturbingly attractive pubescent Tadanobu Asano look-alike smiles apologetically and says they don’t have bubble tea today, you can instead have a Korean drink called Bon Bon which is a can of grape juice with GRAPE SAC in it (8%, claims the can). Then you can go in and watch the new retina-searing anime opus that is Ghost in the Shell II: Innocence, if you are me yesterday.

The long-awaited sequel is a decidedly gothic affair, an aggressively baroque and moody and haughtily literate reverse-Jack the Ripper yarn with gynoids (an ingenious name for female robots, frequently sex dolls) vivisecting their masters. Batou must take a little time away from mourning the disappearance of the only woman who was ever fit to serve beside him, Major Kusanagi, in order to lead his still-wet-behind-the-ears partner Togusa through crumbling urban yakuza turf and ornate walled cities and a variety of hallucinations to the conclusion of the mystery. In the process a startling amount of blood is spilled, but that quantity doesn’t begin to near the intimidating bulk of literary citations exchanged between virtually every combination of characters. If you were to remove all of the quotations from Confucius and Descartes and Milton and the effing bible and everything else in it, there would probably be about four lines of dialogue in the entirety of the film. Though under those conditions, you probably won’t understand much more about what’s going on than you do with the inclusion of the literary citations. But don’t worry about that; as with its groundbreaking predecessor, the actual political details are not the point. The point is pithy musings about the nature of sentient experience. The point is wondering at what point does one stop being definably Human in the evolution from organically human, to artificially augmented human, to classifiable cyborg, to a human mind transplanted to an entirely artificial body, to a “dub” of a human mind infused in a vast number of artificial bodies. And, moreover, wondering what is the true character of the impulse to reproduce by one’s own means that which one encounters in nature. Innocence goes balls-out on the matter, slyly accusing natural mothers and even their doll-toting daughters of acting purely on the impulse of a god complex.

But whether or not you have any investment in that kind of condemning psychosocial speculation, the question invites a rather curious consideration of the film itself. The original Ghost in the Shell of a decade past has continued to astonish otaku and cineastes alike not only with its philosophical probings but with its emotional depth and its raw visual beauty. Even if you’ve no connection to the narrative content or the pathos therein, there remains the fact that the spectacle of Ghost is…arresting in its most casual moments. To be frank, the film makes me cry like a child, and not just because of its sensitivity about The Human Condition, but because when I see it I simply cannot believe that it was delivered by way of human hands. The film is fundamentally about the child surpassing the father, and as that story is being told, the artifice itself becomes greater than the flow of organic life from whence it came. Even the opening title sequence is a document of human-born superpower.

Almost ten years later, Innocence arrives. The technology of animation has changed dramatically, enhancing the capacity to animate hand drawings, to make a drawing move by way of computer, to animating photographic imagery by way of computer, to animating raw CG imagery…Innocence seems to employ all of this, and in the process, deals a deathblow to the continuity of its artificial reality. Some of it bears that conspicuous dopey weightless textureless look of CGI, yes, but then…some of it simply looks far too much like live action. Masamune Shiro’s original manga design for angsty stone-faced Batou looks increasingly hokey and awkward as it moves through progressively more organic-looking urban environments and seedy yakuza dens and even his own hermetic bachelor pad. Straight-up cartoon abuts near-photorealistic images of puppies in dog food ads abuts implausibly seamless CGI, and the result is often jarring. Too often. The source of the problem? The artists’ obsessive pursuit of direct translation of external reality by their own hands. The familiar visages of Batou and Togusa are off-limits for update, but outside of that, there seems to be a god complex running rampant in the art department, frequently to the detriment of the stability of Innocence’s Japan. In the end, the film’s formal execution actually becomes an object lesson in the philosophical quandary proposed by the narrative.