Manga Double Bill – Ghost in the Shell & Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

Double-bill of the groundbreaking Japanese anime feature and its sequel. In ‘Ghost in the Shell’ (1995), set in a futuristic world where cyberspace, artificial intelligences and cyborg cops are the norm, only the Ghost (the indefinable element of human consciousness) exists to determine who is alive and who is purely a creation of the Net. Major Motoko Kusanagi (voice of Atsuko Tanaka) is an elite officer in the Shell Squad who has been so heavily modified that little more than her Ghost remains. She is assigned to finding a computer criminal who is skilled enough to hack into the minds of his victims, and she finds that he uses humans as puppets to do his evil deeds. Things soon take on a more sinister twist, and it’s up to Kusanagi to get to the bottom of it. ‘Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence’ (2004) is set in 2032, by which point the boundaries between human and robot have started to break down, and cyborg alteration is now completely the norm. Public Security Section 9 is the organisation responsible for policing this brave new world, and when cyborg detective Batou (Akio Ootsuka) takes on a case of a female pleasure robot that brutally murdered its owner, he uncovers similar crimes taking place throughout the city, as robots, cyborgs, and even humans start to question what it really means to be alive.