More than manga splatter, animé maestro Mamoru Oshii's cult neo-classic is an indelible spiritual inquiry. Toiling in a noir-tinged future (2029) where human flesh has dwindled with the advances of synthetic cyborgs, the humanoid dwellers spend as much time pondering their crise de conscience as they do blasting truckloads of ammo into mechanized enemies. The main ruminator here is Motoko, member of anti-hacker Section 9 and a fembot increasingly unsure of her identity -- teamed with hulking partner Batou to track down an elusive cybervillain known as The Puppet Master, her quest pushes both into the bowls of the metropolis and within her own "shell." For all the high-tech set-pieces (a chameleonic thug chased through a teeming fair, Motoko's single-handed raid on a mammoth mechatank), Oshii's concerns and style are essentially meditative, as obsessed with the spirituality of objects as Ozu's. Rather than comic-book jazzing, Oshii uses the lustrous animated visuals to plunder the doubts stemming out of creatures born fully developed but grasping for the emotions and memories that make a full sense of self -- the ghost rattling inside the corporeal armor of the shell. Firmly planted at the genre's heart of kinetic bloodbaths and big-boobed amazons, the film nevertheless positively aches in its portrayal of humanity striving to survive technology, surveying the pitfalls of the future with a melancholic rigor that's closer to the spirit of Philip K. Dirk's story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? than Blade Runner's official adaptation. (A less obvious reference -- Oshii's visual bow to Persona during the climatic merging of the "shells.") The 2004 sequel, Innocence, channels in even more complex ways the importance of a soul no less essential for being plugged through a wire.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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