Mamoru Oshii

Mamoru Oshii's "Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence". Thinking Before the Act

by Frederic Clement

Aside from the title and the opening and closing paragraphs, this article is an abridged version of the third chapter of the author’s book Machines désirées: La représentation du féminin dans les films d’animation Ghost in the Shell du réalisateur Mamoru Oshii, published in 2011 by Éditions L’Harmattan (© L’Harmattan 2011). Translation of this article by Guillaume Desgagné.

Since the enactment of the Tokyo Metropolitan Ordinance Regarding the Healthy Development of Youths (the Bill 156... more Since the enactment of the Tokyo Metropolitan Ordinance Regarding the Healthy Development of Youths (the Bill 156 regarding the sexualized representation of so-called “fictional youths,” recently passed in Japan), creators of manga and animé have had to promptly rethink the way they display sexuality in their works. Japanese director Mamoru Oshii, as a shrewd observer of his medium and society, had already been reflecting on the increased sexualization of fictional characters.

In 2004, several years before Bill 156, Oshii directed the animated film Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, a futuristic police story in which sex dolls modelled after little girls seemingly become sentient and murder their owners. What remains of desire and sexuality in the age of their mechanical reproduction? Such seems to be the question Oshii was asking in his film. It was, for him, a way of thinking the discomfort in his civilization, long before the Act. In this article, first and foremost, I propose to discuss a few points brought up in two essential writings about the depiction of little girls (the “shôjo,” literally “little female”) from renowned animé and manga scholars Susan J. Napier and Frederik L. Schodt. Then, I will study the movie itself, mainly through the inversion of what Napier names the “disappearing shôjo,” as well as a reflection on the doll’s body in the movie as being a kind of sexual “no man’s land,” both metaphorically and literally. Subsequently, I will analyze the movie through the prism of horror – or how, paradoxically, these dolls become monsters in order to fight abjection, and thus claim back their innocence.