Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

Released in Japan on March 6, 2004 and in the United States that September, Innocence carried a production budget near twenty million dollars, roughly two billion yen. To cover so large a sum, Production I.G president Mitsuhisa Ishikawa brought in Studio Ghibli's Toshio Suzuki as co-producer. Mamoru Oshii directed, working from a story only loosely tied to Masamune Shirow's manga, and the same studio that made the first film and the Stand Alone Complex series handled production. A companion novel, After the Long Goodbye, was published as a prequel to the movie.

Much of the narrative reworks the manga chapter Robot Rondo, heavily altered. The action opens in 2032, in cities shared by shrinking numbers of humans, purely mechanical androids, and cyborgs like Batou, who still holds a ghost yet remains open to ghost hacking. With Major Kusanagi vanished since the first film, Batou now works beside a hesitant Togusa who feels he can never measure up to her. Section 9 turns its attention to a cyborg firm called Locus Solus and its gynoids, female androids sold as sex dolls, after eight people are killed. The malfunctions turn out to be engineered on purpose to force a police inquiry.

The dolls carry a ghost, which is exactly what made them so prized, produced by an illegal ghost-dubbing machine that spits out degraded mass copies while killing the originals. Young girls abducted by the Yakuza were sold to Locus Solus for the process, and two of them plotted with a shipping inspector named Volkerson to trigger the failures and draw official eyes to their captivity. Batou, whose body is now wholly artificial and holds little of his old humanity beyond fragments of brain and his memories of Motoko, follows the case with Togusa. The Major herself is officially missing while agents hunt her for what she knows about Project 2501. In the climax, as combat-enabled gynoids overwhelm Batou, Kusanagi downloads part of her consciousness into an empty gynoid and helps him shut the killers down, promising she will always remain with him online before the borrowed body powers off.

Innocence competed at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, only the sixth animated feature ever selected, and stood alongside Persepolis as one of two animated finalists for the Palme d'Or, an award that ultimately went to Fahrenheit 9/11. Its home release proved rocky in the United States, where the DreamWorks DVD drew heavy criticism for swapping the theatrical overlay subtitles for closed-caption text that cluttered the visuals with needless notes like footsteps or an approaching helicopter, prompting an exchange offer for corrected discs. Many viewers also objected to the absence of an English dub, though Manga Entertainment later issued a dubbed UK version using the Stand Alone Complex cast. Critically the film is dense with quotation and philosophy, threading references from Buddha to Milton through a doll-obsessed story, and Kenji Kawai's score, echoing the first film's Making of a Cyborg theme, deepens an atmosphere often compared to Blade Runner.