Oshii Mamoru's animated Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004, hereafter Innocence) is indisputably an sf film, but does it constitute a cult film as well? Is it a cult film for all audiences, or only those outside Japan, fascinated by the world of anime? Perhaps we might better ask: can an animated film for adults, created within Japan for a Japanese audience, be considered anything but cult when it circulates in a non–Japanese context? This essay will explore these questions en route to a consideration of the connections between the “cult” elements of the film and the science fiction–esque issues that Oshii explores throughout his oeuvre. By using Innocence as a case study, I want to argue that, for Oshii, film is a kind of performed philosophical speculation, and many of the same elements that allow us to define his work as “cult” also function to highlight and enact his theories regarding technobiopolitics—theories typically linked to sf. To define Innocence as “cult” here is not a secondary designation; rather, “cult” is a fundamental element in producing the meanings of this sf film.

Oshii Mamoru is not a director of animated film, but rather a director of anime, with all of the technical and stylistic differences that designation implies. In an interview with Ueno Toshiya significantly titled “Anime begins from zure (disjuncture): on the border between 2D and 3D,” Oshii links the concept of zure —disjuncture, divergence—with his beliefs about what anime is, and especially what it can do that other cinematic forms cannot. The distinctive mixing of 2D and 3D animation styles in one film is only the most obvious of the various zures Oshii exploits to thematize his post–anthropocentric, anti–humanist philosophy.

This examination will begin with some arguments for designating Innocence as a cult film, at least as it circulates outside Japan, from both a phenomenological point of view, concentrating on its reception, and an ontological one, identifying the cult elements of its production—visual, narrative, and technical. Then we shall turn to a discussion of the ways that cult functions in this film beyond a simple genre designation.