Life and Death come and go
As for puppets on a parade float
If one string is cut
They promptly fall apart

Batou is a living doll.

His arms, his legs, his whole body are entirely artificial.
What remains of his human past are traces of his brain, and memories of a woman named Motoko.

In a time when the boundary between humans and machines has lost meaning, humans have forgotten they are humans.

This is the story of a lonesome man who is looking for the woman he loves, while striving to retain his humanity.

Life is... innocence.

Nine years after his hugely influential Ghost in the Shell burst onto the international film scene becoming one of the most successful anime films of all time, acclaimed writer/director Mamoru Oshii returns with the long-awaited sequel, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence.

The story is set in 2032, or three years after Major Motoko Kusanagi has vanished into the Network. The line between humans and machines has been blurred almost beyond distinction: humans have forgotten that they are human, and the few who still own an organic body coexist with cyborgs (human spirits inhabiting entirely mechanized bodies) and dolls (robots with no human elements at all).

Detective Batou, an agent for covert anti-terrorist unit Public Security Section 9, is assigned the case of gynoids -hyper-realistic female robots created specifically for sexual companionship- that have started slaughtering their owners. In the course of the investigation, Batou and his partner Togusa take on ferocious Yakuza thugs, devious hackers, government bureaucrats, and corporate criminals to uncover the shocking truth behind the crime.

More than a visually stunning futuristic hard-boiled mystery, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is the story of a solitary cyborg who is desperately trying to hold on to what's left of his humanity in a world where the value of the human soul has largely been forgotten.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is the first -and currently only- Japanese animated feature film to have been nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Festival de Cannes.

Release in Japan: March 6, 2004
Format: 1 x 99

© 2004 Shirow Masamune/KODANSHA · IG, ITNDDTD