Dreamworks' folks sent along this great gallery of photos from the upcoming sequel to the classic Ghost in the Shell. Click all of the images for larger views of these amazing stills.Below is the production notes with quotes from the writer/director Mamoru Oshii and more. Great look at this first ever anime film to compete for the Cannes International Film Festival’s coveted Palme d’Or.

Nine years ago, writer/director Mamoru Oshii’s widely influential “Ghost in the Shell” burst onto the international film scene, becoming one of the most successful anime films of all time. Now, Oshii returns with the long-awaited sequel “Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence.”

“Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence” is set in 2032, when the line between humans and machines has been blurred almost beyond distinction. Humans have virtually forgotten what it means to be entirely human in both body and spirit, and the few humans that are left coexist with cyborgs (human spirits inhabiting entirely mechanized bodies) and dolls (robots with no human elements at all).

Batou is a cyborg. His body is artificial: the only remnants left of his humanity are traces of his brain…and the memories of a woman called The Major.

A detective for the government’s covert anti-terrorist unit, Public Security Section 9, Batou is investigating the case of a gynoid—a hyper-realistic female robot created specifically for sexual companionship—who malfunctions and slaughters her owner.

As Batou delves deeper into the investigation, questions arise about humanity’s need to immortalize its image in dolls. Together, Batou and his partner must take on violent Yakuza thugs, devious hackers, government bureaucrats and corporate criminals to uncover the shocking truth behind the crime.

“Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence” is the story of a solitary cyborg who desperately wants to hold on to what’s left of his humanity in a world where the worth of the human soul is fading almost into obscurity. “Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence” was written and directed by Mamoru Oshii based on an original story by Shirow Masamune. Mitsuhisa Ishikawa and Toshio Suzuki produced the film. It is the second anime film to be released under the banner of Go Fish Pictures, a division of DreamWorks Pictures.

“Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence” was the first anime film ever to compete for the Cannes International Film Festival’s coveted Palme d’Or. It also joined the ranks of such animated classics as “Dumbo” (1947), “Peter Pan” (1953), “Fantastic Planet” (1973), “Shrek” (2001) and “Shrek 2” (2004) to become only the sixth animated film to compete at Cannes.

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION

While the first “Ghost in the Shell” was said to have been based on the original story by comic artist Shirow Masamune, both that movie and “Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence” have original storylines, created by Oshii, that are different from those of the original mangas. Oshii comments, “It’s not always important for a director to faithfully follow the original story when making a movie from it, as movies and novels, or movies and comics, are completely different things.”

Shirow noted that the first request to make “Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence” came in from Production I.G, one of Japan’s most cutting-edge animation studios, which is well-known as the creator of “Ghost in the Shell,” as well as such titles as “Patlabor,” “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” “Blood: The Last Vampire,” “Jin-Roh,” and the animation segment in Quentin Tarantino’s international hit “Kill Bill: Vol. 1.” He said he needed no input into the film as long as it was being directed by Oshii and produced at Production I.G, the only animation studio with which Oshii chooses to create his anime titles.

“Mr. Shirow basically told me that he’d leave everything about the movie entirely to me. He did not need to approve of the script or storyboard. I had full freedom on both movies,” says Oshii, whose overall outlook on the world bears some similarities to that of Shirow, although they diverge on some of the details.

In 1995, Oshii and Production I.G thrilled moviegoers with “Ghost in the Shell,” a cyberpunk action anime about cyborg cops battling terrorist hackers. At the end of the film, the hero, Major Motoko Kusanagi, abandons her technologically enhanced body or “shell” to become pure soul or “ghost,” and disappears into cyberspace. It was a provocative conclusion to a film that posed questions about the nature of what it is to be human.

Oshii’s striking visual style brought him international attention and a devoted following. “Ghost in the Shell” was distributed theatrically in the US and Europe, and topped Billboard magazine’s video sales chart in 1996. The movie’s impact on the film community was even more pronounced: It reportedly influenced such notable filmmakers as James Cameron, Quentin Tarantino, and the Wachowski brothers, a testament to the extraordinary vision of its creator.

The sequel, “Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence” marks a new creative milestone for Oshii and Production I.G. It was four years in the making from development to completion—the festival segment alone took more than one year to accomplish.

The film also marks a blend of traditional and computer animation, with all the characters drawn in 2D animation, and all the machinery and backgrounds rendered entirely in 3D animation.

Oshii’s research for “Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence” took him around the world, from New York to Taiwan, from Berlin to the La Specola Museum in Florence and to the gothic cathedral of Milan, among other locations.

PHILOSOPHY FOR THE GHOST

In his restless investigation into the meaning of existence and the human soul, Oshii draws on literature and philosophy, spanning the globe and the centuries, and quoting from such far-flung sources as the Old Testament and the Analects of Confucius, as well as such legendary “thinkers” as Isaac Asimov, René Descartes, and Jakob Grimm among many others.

Oshii deals with a moral and spiritual crisis he sees as stemming from the advent of ever more powerful technology, noting “With cell phones and the Internet, people’s perceptions have expanded, but they’re unaware of how this has made their bodies obsolete.”

“Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence” envisions a day when humans are just a minority surrounded by robots, cyborgs, and people who have chosen to transfer their “spirits” into artificial and genderless bodies. Batou, Oshii’s alter self-proclaimed alter ego, guides the audience through his vision of year 2032, where he grapples with different choices of “life.”

“This movie does not hold the view that the world revolves around the human race," says Oshii. “Instead, it concludes that all forms of life—humans, animals and robots—are equal. In this day and age when everything is uncertain, we should all think about what to value in life and how to coexist with others. What we need today is not some kind of anthropocentric humanism,” Oshii continues. “Humanity has reached its limits. I believe that we must now broaden our horizons and philosophize about life from a larger perspective.”

HUMANISM…

The film also constantly and consistently questions humanism, which Oshii strongly believes is being forgotten or increasingly made more ambiguous by humans. “In order to understand humans, you must have a comparison to humans. It’s always difficult to look at yourself from an objective point of view. In this film I used dolls and dogs,” says Oshii.

…OF DOLLS

For 30 years, Mamoru Oshii has wanted to explore the theme of dolls. When he was a student, Oshii fell in love with photographs of a ball-jointed doll by Polish-born surrealist artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975). “Each body part of Bellmer’s ball-jointed doll is crafted so beautifully, you never get bored looking at it,” Oshii remarks.

Before starting production on “Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence,” the director and his principal crew went “doll scouting” both inside and outside Japan. At a museum in Sapporo, they saw a life-size, ball-jointed doll by Simon Yotsuya, one of Japan’s leading artists in the field, that was modeled after himself. That doll became an inspiration for the villain in the film, Kim.

Subsequently, Oshii and his staff got ideas for the design of Kim’s mansion from a dollhouse and giant music box they saw in Atami, a hot-springs town about 65 miles east of Tokyo. It was during this time that the filmmakers decided the dolls in the movie should have a “bisque” texture. Bisque refers to a type of doll whose surface is smooth like porcelain but not cold like glass. In the movie, this particular quality is reflected most noticeably in the whiter complexion of the dolls.

At the International Center of Photography in New York, Oshii was reunited after 30 years with his “first love”: Bellmer’s doll photo, which normally resides at the Pompidou Center in Paris. It had a profound impact on his vision for “Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence.” Then, in Berlin, he was introduced to the dolls that supposedly influenced Bellmer, and at La Specola in Italy, he saw wax anatomical models that were molded from actual corpses.

New York City, where Oshii was reunited with Bellmer’s work, also played a major role in the visual landscape of “Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence.” The director offers, “The only reason I went to New York was to see Bellmer’s doll. I wasn’t thinking about scouting locations, but as it turned out, New York was the city with the definitive gothic atmosphere that I had been seeking. It’s a city of ominous skyscrapers and perpendicular lines. Wherever you go, you’re surrounded by flat, perpendicular surfaces, and the city is completely closed off because there is no distant view whatsoever.

“When I saw beams of light coming through the gap between high-rise buildings, the whole megalopolis suddenly felt like an enormous temple,” Oshii continues. “I was reminded of the sensation I got during location scouting for the first “Ghost in the Shell,” when a sudden rainstorm transformed the entire city of Hong Kong into an enormous canal before my eyes.”