What is Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence?
The sequel that took anime to Cannes: Batou’s film, made over four years.
Released in Japan on March 6, 2004, Innocence is Oshii’s standalone sequel, co-produced by Production I.G and Studio Ghibli and set in 2032, with the Major absent and Batou carrying the investigation of a gynoid who killed her owner. Four years in production, it fuses 2D animation with 3D graphics more aggressively than its predecessor. Its festival history is unmatched in the medium: selected in competition at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, it remains the first and only anime to compete for the Palme d’Or, and it won the 2004 Nihon SF Taisho Award at home.
THE FILM IN FACTS
2004A Ghibli credit on a cyberpunk film
Studio Ghibli, through producer Toshio Suzuki, helped produce Innocence: the era’s most famous family-animation studio standing behind its most adult science-fiction film is part of the record, not a rumor.
Dolls as the subject
The film’s craft obsession is the doll: ball-jointed figures, automata, and gynoids photographed and animated with a jeweler’s patience, the theme (what a made thing owes its maker) carried in the production design.
Reception
Eighteen films were chosen for Cannes competition from some 1,300 submissions; Oshii called the selection recognition of Japanese animation as a genre standing alongside all others.