Meat Loaf once said that two out of three ain’t bad, but he obviously never saw Ghost in the Shell. Two volumes of the original manga – and then an interquel – two original movies and two seasons of the television show, and when that television show finally got a sequel almost 20 years later, it ran for two seasons. Now, each of these examples feels incomplete because the trilogy is such a natural expression of “beginning, middle and end,” and also, because Ghost in the Shell is really good, and fans always want more. I mean, for the most part. The experimental, almost anthological nature of the series means there are misses along with the hits, including an ill-advised Hollywood rendition and the franchise’s latest, a Netflix anime in 3D CG. Only until recently, on the occasion of its 20th anniversary, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence could arguably be counted among them, having never generated the same enthusiasm as the original 1995 classic. Of course, even if left disappointed by Batou’s adventure, I bet fans still wonder about the follow-up that never was.
And I don’t know why it never was, but I can surely speculate. If you were to ask Ghost in the Shell director Mamoru Oshii about his favorite works, he’d probably list Kerberos Saga and Patlabor above the more popular Ghost in the Shell and Urusei Yatsura movies. I believe he took the ‘95 gig as a career lifesaver, and he didn’t exactly rush to do the sequel. Which is not to say he doesn’t care about Ghost in the Shell, as clearly he does – and he later contributed story material to the TV series – but by 2004, he was trending away from animation altogether. Similarly, Ghost in the Shell itself had already transitioned, though in-house at its studio Production IG, from Oshii to one of his understudies, Kenji Kamiyama. His TV series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex had debuted two years earlier, likely with a crossover of resources and personnel. It would’ve also just been confusing from a brand perspective to have both running at the same time, though by that logic, it’s the premature introduction of Stand Alone Complex that’s confusing – not that I’m complaining.
So, if things had turned out differently, and Oshii was totally jazzed about a second sequel to Ghost in the Shell, what would it be like? First of all, its story would likely be pulled from the original manga, as the two movies’ are loosely based on Masamune Shirow’s Puppeteer storyline and an issue entitled “Robot Rondo,” respectively. So which part of the manga? Well, that’s where it gets tricky, especially if you consider the tonal shift between source material and feature adaptation. “What the hell did Oshii see in this?” was always a go-to reaction of mine, which isn’t to say that the Shirow manga is necessarily worse, but it’s at least wildly tonally different. I’m hoping Science Saru gives the material its due with a faithful adaptation in 2026. It’s also tricky because given the cycle of moving from the Major in Ghost in the Shell to Batou in Ghost in the Shell 2, I’d guess that our hypothetical Ghost in the Shell 3 would center on Togusa – and, if memory serves, there are no Togusa-led stories in the original manga?
Elsewhere, however, there is precedent for a more centered Togusa. In Stand Alone Complex, he’d often take the lead, as Kamiyama himself admitted he didn’t understand the Major in the first season. In the first half of the true third season of Stand Alone Complex, the OVA feature Solid State Society, the Major is gone and Togusa has taken her place as commander of Section 9. In a position of authority, he’s no longer the one team member who’s valuable because he gets by on wits rather than brawn or super-hacker skills. He used to call Batou “boss,” and there’s that little moment in the episode “Not Equal” where he tells the Major he knows how to force an enemy to talk before she goes ahead and threatens the guy with a knife and dental torture. Nothing he was imagining could’ve possibly been that scary. But in the Major’s absence, he’s allowed to cosplay as a grown-up. At least, until she returns, and knocks his ass out in order to save his life.
In the Oshii movies, the depiction of Togusa is actually pretty similar, as he’s a relatively normal guy with a family. This is what makes him vulnerable, in contrast to his ex-military, even ex-yakuza colleagues in Stand Alone Complex, along with his lack of cybernetic augmentation. I don’t know off-hand how much that’s spoken about in the Oshii movies, but it’s a constant refrain on the show. In Ghost in the Shell 2, we glimpse Togusa’s home life; it’s his daughter’s birthday when most of the events in the story take place, and he makes a reference to his wife. We even see his house in the suburbs at the very end. This reminds me of the little hints we saw of Batou’s inner life in the original movie. So before we can gauge how we’ll jump from Batou to Togusa for Ghost in the Shell 3, it’s worth remembering how we made that jump from the Major to Batou for Ghost in the Shell 2.
My read on the original Ghost in the Shell movie, certainly indebted to the metric tomes of critical analysis out there, is that it can be boiled down – if it must be – to a story of self-acceptance. The Major is a brain in a cyborg body, and with the revelation of a criminal hacker known as the Puppet Master, who implants false memories in unwitting accomplices, she begins to wonder if she has any claims to personhood whatsoever. In the end, she reaches the Puppet Master and merges her consciousness with “his,” transforming into a new, actualized being. This is great news for the Major, but bad news for Batou, who never quite figured out how to properly express his burning feelings. Calling her an idiot for questioning her sense of self was probably not the way to go.
At the start of Ghost in the Shell 2, Batou has lost the most important person in his life, and his grief takes many indirect forms. He’s turned the number 2521 into a daily password, he lives alone with his precious dog Gabriel, and of course, he still works at Section 9, where all anyone can talk about is how the Major is gone and nobody could possibly replace her. The world itself has become a reflection of Batou’s emotional state, expressing with its shadows and darkness what he does only with behaviors and gestures. He wasn’t as much of a chatterbox in the original movie as he is in Stand Alone Complex, but he’s gone video-game protagonist levels of silent in Innocence. I love that moment when he’s halfway out of the car and Ishikawa reminds Batou he should really try giving Gabriel dry food. Batou just pauses for a beat and then exits, wordlessly.
The new case involves gynoids, robots built for sex, going haywire and murdering their johns. As an aside, I don’t know why sex robots are built to be so potentially lethal. Like, sure, the inner mechanisms of any sufficient sexbot would be durable enough to pose a physical threat, but in the film’s climax, we see one of these robots swipe the head off a guy, in this movie miraculously rated PG-13. Throughout the film, Batou and Togusa engage in several philosophical conversations on the nature of man and machine, gods and dolls, children and dogs, largely drawn from the writings of Donna Haraway. There’s even a character named for the futurist-feminist-scholar. In the end, Batou discovers that the sexbot manufacturer was “dubbing” the minds of actual young girls onto the gynoids, tapping into yakuza sex trafficking to conquer the market.
He frees one of these young girls, and she explains that a company defector instructed her and her fellow captives to make these gynoids kill their clients in order to draw police attention. Batou reacts with disgust, to which the girl reacts with disgust – a very funny moment – because the entire operation, including the girl’s own plea for rescue, required overwriting the gynoid’s sense of self. By now, he’s able to recognize even a doll’s right to exist, and in doing so, comes to terms with what the Major has become. Where the original story was about self-acceptance, this is the same story from a different perspective, making it a story about the acceptance of another.
Ghost in the Shell 2 is honestly one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen, by a very simple logic: its visual splendor is matched by a breathtaking moral conclusion. I know people were put off by its unique look, but having viewed Suzume recently, I think it might have presaged a lot of how anime movies would adapt to the digital era. As a funny aside, a lot of this Ghost in the Shell 2 plot summary is recycled from a YouTube video I posted almost ten years ago, itself recycled from a paper I wrote in college. A while ago, I uploaded that paper to Academia.edu, and now promotional emails for that site occasionally inform me that other students have cited my interpretations of the film in their own papers. So, that’s actually less funny and more alarming, when musings about a film – by nature, neither right or wrong – are codified as some kind of precedent. So, for the record, as if it needs to be said, I have zero qualifications. I just really like Ghost in the Shell 2.
With all that established, Ghost in the Shell 3 now has the unenviable task of completing an already complete arc, a situation comparable to, say, Terminator 3. And just like with that movie, we’re gonna plow ahead anyway. We had threads of Batou’s inner life in the original movie, his unrequited love which became grief for the sequel. Similarly, we have threads of Togusa’s family life in the sequel, so maybe we have enough to say that Ghost in the Shell 3 can be about his personal dilemma of becoming more cyberized, and how that affects his family. In this way, the third movie would serve as a kind of thematic prequel, with the other two dealing with the endgame of transhumanism. Now we explore the beginnings.
The movie opens with Togusa having a close call in the line of duty. He starts to feel pressure to augment his body in order to stay competitive with those dastardly cyber-terrorists. In the initial conflict, he worries that he might be sacrificing something by literally replacing his organic parts with tougher hardware and installing software in his brain to help with guns and reflexes. Remember, he almost took two grenades to the face in that yakuza den. His wife might externalize this conflict, saying that she didn’t marry a cyborg. “Think of our daughter!” Ugh, but actually, I don’t know if I want to turn cyborgs into a metaphor for, like, racism and bigotry. That shit is so old.
Old, but unfortunately, very real. Over the course of my Ghost in the Shell fandom and, to a lesser extent, my now mostly extinct cyberpunk fandom, I’ve learned that part of the audience for these stories is actual cyborgs. People with prosthetics or wheelchairs just love when scifi tells them that becoming part machine is losing your humanity. There’s been a lot written about how weirdly conservative cyberpunk can be, having been spearheaded by non-disabled, non-queer authors – Sterling, Dick, Gibson. For all their prophetic powers, the foundation they laid nevertheless gave us memorable gaffes like the gender representation in Cyberpunk 2077 and the above image from Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.
For my own sanity, I tend to think of Ghost in the Shell as postcyberpunk, as there’s really nothing “punk” about it anyway. This is a franchise about the police, and the most violent possible police at that. But I think our burgeoning Ghost in the Shell 3 has an opportunity to come full circle and address some of those cyberpunk ideas. If the Major’s world is heightened and Batou’s world is grief-stricken, Togusa’s world would be ours. I don’t know that he’d take the Major’s place like he does in Solid State Society, but I like to think that after Ghost in the Shell 2, he simply turns up at work the next morning and Batou’s there. The only difference is that Batou has his guardian angel, and he seems to be in better spirits.
However, Batou’s also off pursuing the more dangerous cases, leaving Togusa with a new partner – Azuma, probably. Together, they do the street-level work, and gradually uncover a case that embroils him just as much in conspiracy as it does in a philosophical dialogue about the definition of “human.” Maybe we learn that, like the tank boy in the second episode of Stand Alone Complex, he comes from a religious family with strict definitions of personhood. It’s something he’s had to battle privately ever since he started working for Section 9, and he’d considered it resolved. Now he has to face it head-on, and in the end, determines that he’s Togusa no matter what.
So, that’s a lot of Point A and Point C, but just because one watches Oshii, that doesn’t make him Oshii. Or Kazunori Ito, the original film’s writer. I’m sure if Mamoru Oshii had actually written and directed Ghost in the Shell 3, it would be something I can’t even imagine. And yet, I’m not too saddened by its nonexistence, not like I was in the period between Appleseed Ex Machina and Appleseed 3. Boy, that didn’t pay off. Nor how saddened I am now, wondering why Amemiya and Moriyama never made Zeiram 3. She said they were going to! She said! I mean, I love the Oshii movies, but Stand Alone Complex proved that his approach wasn’t the only viable one. For me, it’s always between Ghost in the Shell 2 and Ghost in the Shell 2nd Gig. With twos as good as these, who needs threes?
With Eyes East 