Midnight Madness is a great place to meet unusual characters — martial-arts freaks, gore hounds, punk pinheads and Milton-quoting cyborg detectives. Though this last category can only be encountered on the screen, surely it won’t be long before we catch up to the future presented in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, one of the most anticipated entries in the Toronto International Film Festival’s two-fisted survey of genre cinema.
On Sept. 9, the series launches with the Canadian premiere of Japanese maverick Mamoru Oshii’s sequel to his anime milestone. (The new film goes into wide release on Sept. 17.) Four years in production,Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is a new benchmark for Japanese animation both for its technical achievement and its provocative content. It was created by Production I.G., the company responsible for the original Ghost in the Shell,Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade and the visceral anime sequence in Kill Bill Vol. 1. Using techniques Oshii mastered in his 2001 live-action feature Avalon, the style combines expressive 2D characters with 3D computer-generated environments and photorealistic backgrounds. The film’s dragon-filled festival sequence alone took a year to create.
During an interview at the Cannes film festival in May — where Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence played in competition — Oshii explains through a translator why he returned to making anime after a six-year break. “I thought I should do one pretty soon or else I’d never be able to do it again,” he says. “Directing animation is a very sensitive thing. You can’t really be away from the animation studio for a long time because you completely lose your sense of what’s happening in anime. It was about time to go back.”
Drawn from such diverse sources as Blade Runner, Japanese myth and Gothic architecture, the look of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is unusually opulent and the action sequences are bold and wildly kinetic. Yet despite the occasional frenzy of explosions, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is ruminative by nature. In the movie’s vision of 2032, human, animal and machine have intermingled to such an extent, distinctions among forms of life are largely arbitrary. Most citizens keep humanoid dolls or cloned pets to satisfy their emotional needs. Introduced in the original film, the cyborg detective, Batou, investigates the murder of a human by a “gynoid,” a hyper-realistic sexbot. Evidence points to a nefarious conspiracy.
Though the details of the plot are difficult to decipher even by the standards of anime, the story serves chiefly as a springboard for Oshii’s inquiry into humanity’s future. The dialogue is dominated by philosophical and literary quotations — besides Paradise Lost, Batou borrows his lines from Shakespeare, Confucius, Shelley and the Bible. (Oshii was a seminary student before making his name with TV’s Urusei Yatsura.)
“I’m a big collector of quotes from various books,” says Oshii. “I like to read and every time I come across a good quote, I write it down. So I have a good collection of all these quotes. Before I started writing the script, I thought of all the dialogue in terms of the quotes I wanted to use.”
As a result, the film resembles a philosophy lecture interrupted by the occasional blast of cartoon ultraviolence. Even Oshii admits that the strategy has alienated viewers. “Not a lot of people like it,” he says with a laugh. “Even in Japan, the fact that I used all these quotes was not well received. My producers are asking me to put subtitles for the Japanese DVD release because it’s hard to understand what they’re saying — the voice actors speak in old Japanese.”
Oshii would’ve used even more quotations had his own animators not told him to stop. But all the weighty pronouncements help give Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence the thematic richness of great science fiction literature (the director cites Theodore Sturgeon and J.G. Ballard as particular favourites). Oshii is happy to elaborate on the question at the heart of his film: why are humans so obsessed with recreating themselves?
“Humans can only confirm that they are humans by reconstructing themselves into something else,” he says. “That doesn’t have to be a clone or another human — it could be anything. A typical example would be women wearing makeup and putting on accessories or jewellery. It’s not about attracting other people so much as confirming themselves. Similarly, a man can identify himself in a car. In the olden days, a samurai would identify himself as a sword.”
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence explores the ways in which our emotions give life to the objects we keep or create. The movie makes much of the possibly apocryphal story of how philosopher René Descartes created a doll to replace his dead daughter, caring for it much as he had his flesh-and-blood offspring. Likewise, the stoic Batou has some surprisingly tender scenes with his dog. “The majority of Batou’s body is cyborg, so he doesn’t have a body any more,” says Oshii. “But he finds his body in the dog.”
Oshii can relate — he’s so devoted to his bassett hound, Gabriel, he has incorporated images of the dog into much of his work. “We call her Gabbo,” says Oshii. “I often talk to my wife about making a clone of Gabriel. My wife doesn’t want one but I definitely do.”
MORE MADNESS
Besides Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell 2, anime aficionados can look forward to the North American premiere of Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo’sSteamboy, a Special Presentation at TIFF. Meanwhile, Midnight Madness presents a variety of extremely lively live-action features. Here are four of this year’s maddest.
ZEBRAMAN
Dir Takashi Miike w/ Sho Aikawa, Kumiko Aso. 115 min. Sep 16, midnight; Sep 18, 9:30pm. Varsity.
Unlike most of the Japanese director’s taboo-busting, stomach-turning oeuvre, this year’s requisite Takashi Miike title nearly qualifies as endearing. Dead or Alive‘s Sho Aikawa plays a dorky schoolteacher obsessed with Zebraman, the star of a long-cancelled superhero TV show. Miike subverts this amiable, nearly family-friendly parody of Ultraman with heaps of extraterrestrial goo and a neutron bomb. Consider it the nuttiest episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers ever made.
DEAD BIRDS
Dir Alex Turner w/ Henry Thomas, Patrick Fugit. TK min. Sep 13, midnight; Sep 16, noon. Varsity.
The savviest American horror flick since Cabin Fever,Dead Birds features former E.T. star Henry Thomas as the leader of a gang of thieves hungry for Confederate gold during the American civil war. First-time director Alex Turner gooses up haunted-house clichés with great flair — his slow-burning terror tactics and creepy FX owe more to post-Ring Japanese horror than any Yankee antecedents.
KONTROLL
Dir Nimrod Antal w/ Sandor Csanyi, Csaba Pindroch. 106 min. Sep 15, midnight, Ryerson. Sep 17, 3:45pm, Cumberland.
There’s more than a few mouldy CHUDs under the streets of Budapest. In this energetic comedy thriller — a massive hit in its native Hungary — subway-ticket inspectors shake down disgruntled commuters when not battling each other. Things are so crazy underground, you can understand why our hero, Bulcsu (Csanyi), hasn’t seen daylight in weeks. But he’s gonna have to take better care of himself if he expects to outwit the killer stalking the tunnels or woo the girl in the bunny costume.
RAHTREE: FLOWER OF THE NIGHT
Dir Yuthlert Sippapak w/ Chermarn Poonyasak, Kris Srepoomseth. 96 min. Sep 17, midnight, Ryerson; Sep 18, 6:30pm, Varsity.
In the opening scenes of this Thai hit, a callous young playboy seduces a troubled student, leaving her pregnant and miserable. Her suicide is the beginning rather than the end to this tale, and what starts as a limp romantic melodrama abruptly turns into a gonzo horror comedy. Rahtree’s blend of gory shocks and lowbrow yuks ain’t for all palates, but it’s one of this year’s wildest imports.
