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Ghost in the Shell

I just finished watching Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, written and directed by Mamoru Ishii. It's dazzling. It's set in a time where robots are everything man is but without a soul. Some dolls have gone beserk and begun killing their masters. They break the Laws of Robotics even further by committing suicide. It seems these robots are more than soulless pets, servants or slaves. Somehow they have been infused with souls.

Each character in the movie is complicated. Not happy, but not unhappy. They live in this ambiguous existence known to many as maturity. The only innocent being, that can be joyful without restraint, is the hound.

Director Ishii put it this way, he believes dolls and dogs are prime examples of how man, in an attempt to create in his own image, has brought sorrow unto himself. This makes me wonder how the word "i-dol" came to be. Did not the people of Moses fall into disgrace by idolizing false gods, whose likeness were crafted into substance by precisely those worshipping them?

Besides the perplexing, but captivating storyline, the animation is gorgeous. Ishii deftly combines traditional animation with virtual 3D computer animation in several scenes. The music also leads you through most of the movie; I recall paying attention less to the dialogue than to the music. Although at times I was not able to rationally understand with what was going on, I could feel and get a sense of what the director intended. I suppose in Tolstoy's vision (his essay "What is Art"), that is art in its highest form.

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