Innocence

With Major Motoko Kusanagi missing, Section 9's Batou is assigned to investigate a string of gruesome murders—seemingly at the hands of faulty gynoids, or sex robots. But when a faulty gynoid leaves Batou a cryptic message, he begins to question the cause of their malfunctions. Suspicions of politically motivated murder and an illegal "ghost" quickly crop up, drawing Batou and his partner Togusa into a perilous web of conspiracy.

As their investigation goes on, the line between man and machine continues to blur, and reality and perception become indistinguishable. Confronting strange and dangerous foes, Batou and Togusa explore a futuristic world filled with machines and living dolls but utterly devoid of humanity.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Batou Main

Ootsuka, Akio Japanese

Togusa Main

Yamadera, Kouichi Japanese

Kusanagi, Motoko Supporting

Tanaka, Atsuko Japanese

Aramaki, Daisuke Supporting

Ooki, Tamio Japanese

Ishikawa Supporting

Nakano, Yutaka Japanese

Kim Supporting

Takenaka, Naoto Japanese

Haraway Supporting

Sakakibara, Yoshiko Japanese

Crab Man Supporting

Lin Supporting

Arm Doctor Supporting

Suzuki, Toshio Producer

Maseba, Yutaka Producer

Ishikawa, Mitsuhisa Producer, Planning

Nishizawa, Masatomo Producer

Reviews

May 1, 2025

Halalex

Recommended

“We weep for the bird’s cry, but not for the blood of a fish. Blessed are those who have voice.”

Does the one sensible thing that a sequel to one of Japan’s most internationally influential pieces of media could ever do. Swapping out the protagonists and approaching this as more of a spin-off than anything else works wonders for the film, as not trying to one-up its predecessor is one of its greatest strengths.

That being said, this certainly has enough meat on its bones as to warrant its existence. I might have my qualms with the poorly aged CGI that’s present in most of the scenes, ... but it’s evident that no expense was spared either way. Just as much of the provocative existentialism is still there, and it finds new ways to comment on humanity’s primal foundations and the seemingly hypocritical nature of our relationship with evolution. The action is more plentiful and in some cases even surpasses the previous one as well, overall the characters are just animated with a staggering level of detail.

In the end, it’s just not presented as interestingly or as polished as the original, and unfortunately, a lot is lost in just that. A surprisingly great watch nonetheless.

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Jul 11, 2023

ViolentPete

Mixed Feelings

Feels like a parody of the first one. The story is the same general "We have to catch this villain with mysterious motives" plotline that shows up in half of Oshii's movies, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Issue is, GitS and Patlabor 2 were a lot more interesting and I just watched both of those, and by comparison this just doesn't have the extra spice to make it stand out. Batou's the main character this time but he isn't nearly as interesting as the Major, and a solid 50% of the script is dedicated to quoting philosophy. You could ask Batou what he had ... for breakfast today and he'd probably give you a Bible verse followed by a Confucius quote, then that wailing music would suddenly start playing for 30 seconds or so. The first movie actually brought up some interesting ideas about what it means to be human and all that shit, but in this one everything's muddled by the seemingly random quotes getting thrown out constantly.

The animation is also a general downgrade, usually the CG stuff looks fine but there are some cases with like parade floats and birds where it looks really ugly. I'm sure most people would agree that a lot of the appeal of the original GitS is that it's cool. In this case, there is some stuff that's cool but it usually just feels like it's either a retread of cool stuff in the original or it's just medium-level cool. Medium-level cool can't hold a candle to high-level cool stuff like the optic camo fight at the start of GitS or that one scene where the guy's hands split apart and type really fast.

Well, I wouldn't call this a bad movie, the problem is just that the original basically does everything better and this one often feels like it's trying to channel the original but not doing a very good job of it.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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May 22, 2025

1stDecame4Danime

Not Recommended

Following up GitS with a sequel centered on that cybernetic incarnation of blandness, brick shithouse soldier guy, Blando was definitely a choice they could've gone without, especially since we get to watch his story play out with almost 0 stakes since he's now plot-armored by god of the machine Major... God there is so much wrong with this movie.

Starts off very slow with a bunch of directorial vomit of more chopped in environmental shots and more bodies bodying, (it's just so goddamn unsubtle with its hamfisted symbolisms/quotes, juvenile philosophizings/dialogue, and yes copy and paste the entire sequence of constructing machine bodies bodying again for minutes ... just like the previous movie for blatant nostalgia fanpandering, but I digress) The sexdoll murder mystery police-procedural introduction while painfully uneventful and crammed full of terrible dialogue and exposition is nonetheless a decent highpoint of the movie (if a bit cliched especially since it's more or less the same as the prior movie just with the action scenes removed). Unfortunately it's all downhill from there as the 'investigation' just like movie 1 is bs contrivances strung together across a bunch of drawnout filler and terrible dialogue.

The 2nd half then takes a dramatic nosedive in quality as the dialogue becomes an obnoxiously vapid game of namedropping pointless and hamfisted references alongside more juvenile philosophizing. And the story itself becomes similarly vapid repetitive bs mindgame headassery where the main theme of movie seems to be an incredibly juvenile revelation-fascination at having discovered the very basic concept of pointlessness/absurdism (spot on... the nose how incredibly pointless this movie is to match the theme).

And then we finish with another strung together contrivance of a vapid action sequence that is very 1-note and incredibly dragged out while at the same time used just for Major not-appearing-in-this-film to plot armor it up even more by jumping in to do the vapid shoot em up too for an overdose of shallow nostalgiabait fanpandering. And then at the very very end they immediately solve the opening murder mystery, having done essentially no actual investigation, because that's a story alright.

There's a conspicuously absent action scene of them taking down a fleeing guy where it just cuts to them having detained him and interrogating him which exemplifies exactly how poorly cut together this movie feels. It feels like they lacked direction initially (ex: the pointless parade) and then wasted a bunch of budget on pointless stuff that they then jumbled together unpolished when their budget came down on them.

2/10 (where 5/10 is average)

Reviewer’s Rating: 2

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