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Visually stunning and thought-provoking. You need to concentrate to follow some of the philosophical dialogues.

Despite being a confirmed geek, I’ve never really got into watching or reading animé or manga. I’m aware of it, of course, I’ve just never really got around to seeing what all the fuss is about. I think I’ve also been slightly put off by the reputation of manga as being somewhat obsessed with nudity and violence: nudity I can handle (as long as it’s not exploitative), but I’m not keen on violence. However, after seeing ‘Ghost in the Shell’ (the precursor to this film) mentioned as the inspiration for the ‘Matrix’ films, I was curious about this one. In retrospect, it would have made a lot more sense to rent the first film first, but I often do things in the wrong order.

Ghost in the Shell 2 is visually stunning. It blends CGI animation with a simpler, hand-drawn 2D style for the characters, which is very striking and quite different from any Hollywood animation I’ve seen. The opening sequence over the titles had me absolutely glued. It shows a dreamlike, sensuous sequence of an gynoid (female robot) constructing itself while floating in a golden fluid, with limbs floating into sockets, vertebrae extending to form a spine, and wires connecting. The rest of the film lives up to this standard pretty well, with another wonderful sequence featuring a parade of floats and giant robots moving through the streets of a city.

The story is superficially quite simple. Batou — a cyborg detective — and his mostly human partner Togusa are investigating the murders of several men by their gynoids. The gynoids seem to be malfunctioning, but why, and who is controlling them? Along the way, there are some interesting discussions about artificial intelligence, and about why humans feel the need to try to replicate life and create robots that appear to be human. What does it mean to be human — and to be alive — anyway? Humans have also found a way to externalise their memories, thoughts and consciousness, creating ‘e-brains’, thus creating the opportunity for malign influences to hack into their consciousness and manipulate their perceived reality. You can probably see where the writers of ‘The Matrix’ got their inspiration from.