REVIEWED - GHOST IN THE SHELL 2: INNOCENCE/ INOSENSU: KÔ KAKU KIDÔTAI: AMORU Oshii's stunning sequel to his complex, bleak 1995 anime Ghost in the Shell - the most obvious progenitor of The Matrix - is filled with such disconcertingly peculiar images and is so layered with inviting foreignness that it just about makes up for the slight disappointment of Hayao Miyazaki's recent Howl's Moving Castle.
Like the later Matrix films, Innocence does have an unfortunate habit of drifting into adolescent, quasi-philosophical mumbo-jumbo - theories apparently devised from books of quotations, rather than the volumes from which they originally sprang. But Oshii does such a fine job of expressing himself visually that these footnotes can be ignored. There is an awful lot of babble about the nature of consciousness, but the image of a basset hound's sad face viewed through a fishbowl speaks more eloquently on that topic than all the yards of subtitles.
As the films begins, Batou, a square-headed, largely robotic police officer, has a near-terminal encounter with one of a class of cyborgs designed for erotic use named, queasily, gynoids. It seems the model in question has a design flaw which causes units to blow themselves and their users into smithereens.
After several more disturbing scrapes, including a spectacular shootout in a convenience store, Batou's investigations bring him to an ornate mansion owned by the sinister Locus Solus Corporation. There he encounters dolls, automatons and other reminders of his own mechanical origins.
Ghost in the Shell 2 was an unlikely competitor at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, where it was greeted somewhat coolly. It certainly requires the viewer to shut off certain critical monitors - pretentiousness alerts, hokum detectors - but few recent animated films can rival it for extravagant beauty.
The lengthy fiesta which Batou encounters on his travels took a year to animate alone and, rich in both grand sweeps and fastidious attention to detail, the end result justifies every second of that labour.
