Mamoru Oshii's Innocence airs today on BS12 in the Sunday Anime Gekijo block

The film Innocence, directed by Mamoru Oshii, airs today, November 15, at 19:00 on BS12, as part of the Sunday Anime Gekijo block.

Released in theaters in 2004, the movie is the sequel to Ghost in the Shell, the 1995 film. The story takes place three years after that installment, in a 2032 Japan where cyberization and coexistence between humans, cyborgs, and robots are already part of everyday life.

Batou and the mystery of the killer robots

The protagonist is Batou, an agent of Public Security Section 9. His body is almost entirely mechanical: he only retains a minimal part of his brain and the memory of a woman, Motoko Kusanagi. When a companion robot with the appearance of a girl murders its owner, Batou and his partner Togusa dive headfirst into an investigation that pits them against a hacker capable of attacking their network-connected brains.

The film doesn't settle for being a police thriller. Oshii returns again and again to the underlying question: why humans create dolls in their own image, and what that says about what we understand as being alive. Batou, trapped between the human and the artificial, carries that doubt throughout the entire runtime.

A voice cast that is already history

The voice cast brings together names that fans of the franchise recognize instantly:

• Akio Otsuka
• Atsuko Tanaka
• Koichi Yamadera
• Tamio Oki
• Yutaka Nakano
• Naoto Takenaka

The script and direction are by Oshii, with the original work by Masamune Shirow, published by Kodansha, as the basis.

Today's broadcast is a good excuse to revisit a film that still gives people plenty to talk about more than two decades after its release. Did you see it back then, or will this be your first time? Tell us in the comments.