#sfra2017

Oshii calls the architectures of his imaginary cityscapes in Ghost in the Shell: Innocence the “Chinese Gothic” style. Although sf fans will probably recognize his citation of Blade Runner’s city in the industrial spires of buildings rising through an orange-fog, the baroque details and flying buttresses also recall everything from classical Chinese temples to the form of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Oshii builds a hybrid city space -- not of “old” mixed with “new” but rather new technologies mixing traditional forms in new ways.

More human than human - the incomparable Donna Haraway is immortalized in Oshii Mamoru’s Innocence as a cybernetically enhanced robot coroner who speculates that dolls are the first cyborgs and models for how we will force our own humanity onto artificially constructed children because we’ve been doing it for years. Oh, and yes, her eyes are replaced in this scene (or are exposed as) machine connections that let her interface with computers - a literalization of our visual relationship to the terminals in front of us.

Steven Brown, in Tokyo Cyberpunk, does a detailed analysis of the relationship between Oshii’s gynoids and Bellmer’s dolls - reading them as “attractive and repulsive, erotic and grotesque” objects of Oshii’s exploration of mechanic desire. 

Unruly dolls are central to the exploration of the non-human/posthuman in Oshii’s second film in the Ghost in the Shell cycle. Here we see a citation of Edo Period (17th century) automata in the form of a tea-serving zashiki karakuri 座敷からくり or parlor/living room mechanical dolls. These little dolls had small repeatable tasks that they performed: serving tea, painting a single kanji and the like, and were powered by springs. But this little doll, after serving its purpose of distracting and hacking Togusa (and capturing Batou and Togusa into a virtual time loop), drops her tea tray and seeks to escape from their control. This scene of escape suggests the small doll body may be the secondary house for the haker Kim’s ghost, and while ultimately Batou interrupts the escape, the unruly nature of the doll escaping from her clothing and the confines of her programming is jarring and fascinating.