Fairytale heroes can save princesses but they can also save giant robots. In fairytales, some characters are archetypes, but they fit so well in a story about friendship, choice and a zap of politics that you almost don’t see the cliche fraying at the edge.

Sometimes the hero only wants a cool toy to play with and sometimes the toy is a giant robot. Better, the new friend is a swift learner capable of empathy and anger. The robot is an archetype, an iron giant attuned to empathy which might as well be a teddy bear. (With access to civilization-ending weapons.)

In The Iron Giant, friendship endures regardless of species. A kid playing with a puppy will try to teach it basic actions and tricks, and the iron puppy responds as well as its towering arms and growling mouth can.

Like its titular metal friend, the movie has heart. It’s made of patched familiar elements: the single mom and the outcast son, the friendly (metal) stranger, the handsome bachelor, the pesky intruder dressed in unwelcome authority.

A large chamber of this beating heart glows with the giant’s simplicity. The robot becomes sad when hunters shoot a deer and mourns over loss of life which to humans may be trite.

The robot’s openness to humane emotions may be sudden and simplistic, but fairytales thrive on emotional simplicity and their wisdom derives from expanding such traits without complex debates.

The young hero is the one to recognize how the stranger is capable of understanding in spite of its original programming. This does not evade the danger of said programming, as the giant turns into its original violent form when attacked, but fairytale tensions remains low because the stranger has proven itself, indeed, for all intents and purposes, and we are simply waiting for the victory of friendship over enmity.

The movie is kid-friendly in its idealism which prevents destruction through understanding. A lot of stumbling and breaking are afoot, uncertainty about nature and nurture, striving to understand the strange creature and collective survival instincts stepping in to oppose it.

If The Iron Giant hearkens to Superman and similar adventures it’s because it’s just about the same trope with adjusted variables and this story is a comfortable retelling of some Superman comics, or vice versa.

The alien is one of two protagonists but Clark and the robot find themselves in similar contexts. Both are capable of vengeance but work to protect the innocent, both are aliens who see humanity as their own kind.

The Iron Giant is also a playful meditation on the classic Atomic Age, where fear of war may have been a daily occurrence and the space age poked its shiny technological head to signal both hope and tension. In a time of dwindling peace, governments and corporate giants are springs of both security and distrust, needing to reassure the people while never revealing their secrets.

The surreptitious nature of mega-institutions never fades completely, yet the atomic age holds a romance of its own, likely because of the excitement and anxiety brought by new tech development, the possibility to create unimaginable riches but also to raze the planet.

The story plays with this paranoia by making the government rep an unpleasant fellow and self-appointed enemy of the strange creature. Though the stranger manifests the will to adjust its nature and be friendly, the establishment acts with impunity and violence. All natural, as response and as villain.

‘Souls don’t die.’

The defining quote of this friendship adventure. And the soul is gained through empathy, understanding and choice. The choice may be more or less conscious - as stories about thinking machines go, to choose empathy seems to be a glitch for the robot, and a natural impulse for Hogarth the young hero. The villain will not or cannot make said choice possibly because of natural inclination or refusal to understand the stranger.

As a good fairytale ending, wisdom is available to all by the end, potentially changing the villain. Regardless of form, if something aspires to understanding, to friendship, to good, it enriches itself with the experience of a soul which may be perennial.

Lost in Starlight (LIS) is an over-sweetened love story and a mushy first act to bear. It’s quirky but falling in love and lapsing in a partial loss of logic also is. A sugary series of events, more or less predictable, where people dance around each other to navigate fiery emotions.

Wholesome level: Sugar and spice in a bumpy romantic tale which includes a bit of stalking, clinginess and wholesome redemption.

There’s a space-time for excessively-sweet romance, but sometimes the sugar content is high enough that it makes you unwell. Romance is often made out of exaggeration, but if feelings are not peppered with maturity they turn out hurtful.

Jay, one half of the romance, may be annoying on purpose to underline the clingy aspects of people adamant about a relationship. But when a character is annoying by intent he remains so for as long as the writers need him to, which may be too much.

When one Mars astronaut complains about Jay’s song being played endlessly, that’s how the pulpy musings between lovers feel - the high highs and mushy lows of a couple you know and who you hope would evolve past the drama, at east occasionally.

If 5 Centimeters per Second was a realist buildup to the anxiety of romance - whether to complete or lose it - LIS moves fast and sweet to unite its lovers. 5CPM dealt with love lost in a factual manner, but more elegantly by not over-bearing the mood with endless arguments between the protagonists. It exaggerated their feelings through metaphor and reaction, with less appeal to explicit exposition. LIS goes the opposite way - it’s excessive and explicit but intentional.

Fans of Interstellar will recognize this approach to the question of enduring love through physical distance. A similar materialist attitude toward love phased into the realm of speculative sci-fantasy and romance, where the connection endures as if transformed into universal law.

It’s a shifty endeavor to look for moral teachings in stories like LIS, because you might end up thinking following your dreams is nonsensical. Nan-young, the other half of the romance, becomes an astronaut to follow her mother and her passion, an event negated by a pointless accident. While the trauma happens, she seems to argue in favor of safety contrary to initiative, though at the same time she wants Jay to persist singing with his beautiful voice.

The romance is a roller-coaster of emotions and events, mostly because of Jay. Both the story and clingy lover find redemption by the end: Jay matures through his obsessions to become a caring partner; the story bumps a few cliches to reach an elusive happy-end.

As with romantic literature and Anime, there is a public waiting exactly for this - raw feelings released without filter, though not always for the betterment of the people involved. The pleasure of a sugary experience is the same regardless of medium - once in a while, we desire the simple release of a romantic story while joining the lovers for the ride, bumps and all.

With so much drama, it’s easy to forget that Lost in Starlight has merits beyond its raw feelings.

It’s visually beautiful, oozing urban idealism with a city half-modern half-visionary, rainbow hues and colorful gradients to reflect the ideal state of an ever-renewed love. It’s encouraging to see an Anime where the city of the future is a pleasant living space and not a decrepit soul-pestering simulacrum.

In 5CPM it was mostly nature supplying the backdrop for metaphor and romantic anxiety; LIS draws up a near-future city, not utopia but close enough to be relatable and desirable.

To build its romantic spirit, LIS connects plot with musical sections. Stylized musical beats - the kind which could be trailers in themselves - move the lovers through their relationship or reveal moments from their past. Music beats in a pseudo-musical may be a cheat to advance the plot or soften the viewer, but they’re effective and fit romantic stories.

Another kicker is how LIS uses the in-world tech of its future to connect the lovers. Augmented reality - the creation of a digital or real space around a person - has uses beyond getting people closer. LIS understands the emotional kick when it makes Jay and Nan-young speak face to face, take a walk through the space garden, brush their teeth together through the growing physical distance. A minor detail nested inside a music beat to keep the lovers in touch, digital but effective.

Ghost in the Shell feels like futurist Renaissance. The title intro sequence shows the creation of the self-aware cyborg - first, engineer her mind then shape her body in graceful transitions. Plus the classic anime fixation on her breasts.

A moving sketch devised by Renaissance painters and engineers, a sequence of stylized concepts about how the 1990s would imagine the creation of the cyborg. It’s intriguing and unsettling, the human body reconstructed from the inside-out, stronger and sexually pleasant.

Wholesome level: Dependent on how you enjoy cyborgs. Good if you want entities capable of empathy to gain self-awareness.

The moment of ‘coming back to life’ after the intro is one of distance and potential loneliness: Motoko wakes up in the dark cocoon of her room, contrasted against the light which envelops the city. (Funnily enough, the visual portrayal implies she needs no shower before dressing up, but this may be a case of brevity in visual design.)

We may think the urban glow provides safety, a benevolent newness for the loneliness of the newly-minted life, but this is cyberpunk. The city is a vertical and horizontal labyrinth, an oppressive structure of concrete, steel, poor neighborhoods and market encampments adorned with varicolored ads.

As all good fantasy, the city of the nigh-dystopia if a character itself, beautified with the mix of traditional culture and futurist interpretation carried on the transportation means of the present. In cyberpunk the city is rarely a space for healing, but Motoko moves through it in body and mind to achieve greater freedom.

*

Cyborg is as cyborg does so GITS spends a long while to shape Motoko into a technology-enhanced martial-arts cop driven by reasoning. She is tactically-smart, her body is designed with ports for direct connection with the information matrix of the police. More expansive than ours, her mind becomes the city, able to access its labyrinth and secrets at will.

It’s after the somewhat long-winded action-blast that GITS becomes itself. It asks questions which, easy to see, will become relevant for Motoko: birth origin, memories of loved ones, childhood. Major’s ‘Do you even know who you are?’ rings true because memories and experience comprise our identity, and the thought of living without memories - at least innocent ones like childhood - may induce existential dread.

This is a future where humans can be hacked. The parallel between computers or storage devices and the human mind is old in modern media. But in the age of information it’s more palatable with the advent of neural interfaces between the brain and various gadgets.

A character finds out his recent memories have been programmed into his mind. ‘But that can’t be’ is the natural response, as realizing your memories are false is like waking up in a nightmare, possibly void of identity.

Questions follow: the reality of memories and the experience they carry, how they shape who we are, how much our experience is formed by physical processes in the brain. Like humans, the cyborg hopes to find itself via the scientific understanding of its mind while the nature of the soul, were there to be one, remains elusive.

Following this bit of knowledge, we see Motoko be born again: she floats underwater to live the gentle experience before birth, before facing the world. She approaches the surface and when she meets herself, her reflection, the illusion breaks and the material world appears.

No matter how advanced or unsettling, technology is a natural extension of the mind, a step forward in expressing man’s need to adapt or overcome nature. The distance between the stone wheel and the microchip brain implant is great, but both are facets of our need to understand and optimize our existence.

‘Not long ago, this was science-fiction,’ Motoko says while listing the benefits of the cyborg body. Meanwhile, the police and the state own the cyborg, his or her enhancements and brain. ‘There wouldn’t be much left after that,’ - we don’t know entirely where the line between human and cyborg is drawn and how important the features of the first are for the identity of the second.

“There are countless ingredients that make up the human body and mind. Like all the components that make up me as an individual with my own personality.”

The discussion is complicated because Motoko looks, thinks and seems to empathize as a human. At the moment when augmentation is indistinguishable from the human experience, anti-arguments against the cyborg may fall without a logic strong enough to dismiss this new creature as a person, apart from biological essentialism. Unique thoughts and memories, the sense of her own destiny, the ability for meta-cognition (awareness of one’s thoughts) and self-reflection - thus the cyborg makes its case for being a person.

“All of that blends to create a mixture that forms me and gives rise to my conscience.”

Still, Motoko somewhat contradicts this tenet of humanity by saying she feels confined, only free to expand herself within boundaries. But this understanding is as human as it gets - we are free to expand ourselves and our knowledge within the boundaries of the human mind. She also seeks a sort of forgetfulness, wistfulness at the bottom of the ocean, as her partner seeks the same in drinking.

The question of finding the ‘ghost’, a representative of the soul, comes through another cyborg. Major’s partners are trying to find the ghost via scientific means, unpacking the programming which made the cyborg behave in chaotic ways. While the data is there, the ‘proof’ of a soul lingers even with complete scientific and tech analysis.

To be fair, this confusion remains intentional - regardless how much we unpack the human mind and find its deepest secrets via neurology, science and medicine, the question of a soul will remain perpetual. By understanding what the soul is we only get more questions about its origin. Whether the soul is material or supranatural, we have to inquire about its programming, purpose and creator.

“DNA is nothing more than a program designed to preserve itself. Life has become more complex in the overwhelming sea of information. And life, when organized into species, relies upon genes to be its memory system. Man is an individual only because of his intangible memory - and memory cannot be defined but it defines mankind.“

This is how another cyborg declares itself a sentient entity. Its counter-argument for humans denying its personhood is the question of objective proof for existence and life (and implicitly consciousness). We have subjective proof of our own self-awareness but have difficulty defining life via consciousness in objective terms. Thus, we may accept the new form’s argument for life and self-awareness in its own words: ‘I am a living, thinking entity who was created in the sea of information.’

In the great tradition of villains meeting their heroes, Motoko and the puppet-master find each other in a battle of the minds. An intimate communion where one mind overtakes the other and seeks the unbounded unification of identities into the universal. The same principle of joining with a universal mind, consciousness, love which we know from various philosophies.

Part of how the ‘villain’ gained awareness was through complexity, engulfed in streams of information. As expected, the creators saw his self-awareness as a glitch and attempted to isolate him in one body, not in Eden but in dystopia.

*

As the movie predicted for Motoko, the ‘villain’ justifies his appeal to independence through self-sentience and meta-cognition, observing his own existence. The argument applies to Motoko’s personhood, made more explicit by taking over her body and using her mouth to speak.

As all self-aware intelligence, the other cyborg seeks reproduction, but at the expense of Motoko’s identity. Finally, the admittance that both experience the same condition of the self-aware man-made life-form.

But though Motoko fears losing her identity, the other seems prepared to ‘evolve’, to be part of a universal consciousness in the matrix of information, ignoring Motoko’s anxiety about his plans.

This all feels strangely familiar, human-like. It’s the path of consciousness to earn for universal understanding, for union with total awareness. Or perhaps the limit of human understanding makes us think so, and the cyborg mimics our own programming.

A bit suddenly, the happy-end rushes in. Motoko is now in the body of a Gothic Lolita - obviously - has newfound wisdom, and access to both the digital and the physical realm. She keeps her own identity but stands at the edge between the infinite and the individual, between human experience and universal consciousness, aided by the ever-growing digital matrix.

The writing front is just about purely functional. The script affords not much space for metaphor and lyricism, most everything is stated plainly via expository dialogue. Characters will sometimes gather to state something they should already know or to spell emotions which may be obvious from the mise-en-scene.

Purely-functional writing is standard fare for anime and cinema overall, but explicit exposition in dialogue can detract from the enjoyment of understanding characters and how they discover their world.

Ghost in the Shell is the kind of movie which may be easily translated into essays because of how plainly it states its thesis and arguments. There’s always more to discuss of its ideas, but the script delivers as much as reasonably possible while constructing a story around its exposition. Like wining and dining, I prefer a bit of metaphor in dialogue, more mystery and less exposition, but the visuals provide the symbolism to let the prose be explicit.

GITS is less aesthetically pleasing, color-wise. It’s equipped with muted colors, the leaden-like city and the anxiety-inducing rusty sky. Neon-inspired coloring and lighting are ever-present in modern times for good reason - strong colors and gradients, sometimes complimentary, induce a dreamy state and a place of respite among the darkness of the urban night and its perils.

The 90s, following along from, well, the 80, had less time to enjoy the latter’s aesthetics in the attempt to paint their own visual identity. No surprise how the 90s continued the aesthetics of dystopia but stripped it of charm, with less neon and more unfriendly colors. (For a logical conclusion to modern fears see the overlap of aesthetics in Blade Runner 2049, where neon is present but muddled with climate change-induced darkness and mountains of human-produced waste.)

Innocence

Innocence is the more cryptic version of Ghost in the Shell the first.

Why Androids are made in the image of their creators - humans - is a good question.

Some obvious answers are:

• Familiarity - create something or someone around which we feel safe

• Mechanical, kinetic, physical benefits - the human body is agile enough and has a proper form to support mobility

• Limited knowledge - we are bound by the human condition and cannot create something beyond its imagination.

‘A beautiful puppet is just soulless flesh.’

We return to the ‘source’ of investigation - the question of consciousness, the nature of the potential soul and our relationship with new forms of intelligence.

Ghost in the Shell cannot end the discussion because their nature remains elusive. Once you define the soul the question of its creation rises to complicate the matter endlessly. If consciousness is more than a biological impression than it may be a universal phenomenon and be as valid for post-human entities as it for us.

It’s the same celebration of cyberpunk, with one step beyond its limitations. On the post-cyberpunk flipside, there may be nowhere else to go. Batou is already human for all intents and purposes; Motoko evolves no further than she did previously, but her awareness is both personal and universal, connected to the expanding matrix which envelops material reality.

Cyborgs may be better than humans at certain feats, but without greater understanding they remain machines. A creature may look alive, but it’s difficult to understand the degree of its self-awareness as it mimics human understanding.

The cyborg appears real, human, it speaks as if self-aware and makes the case for its survival. As all technology, the cyborg is an extension of humanity but one which may eventually become aware of its condition, its relationship with humans and the world.

Intelligence and awareness being self-reinforcing may apply to both human and non-human, post-human and thus cyborg. But the question reverts to the subjectivity of self-awareness and the difficulty to establish where it is valid. Humans have a degree of meta-cognition part of the reinforcing mechanism of understanding. If the non-human intelligence shows the same ability it may be recognized to have achieved consciousness.

‘Humans are nothing but the thread from which the dream of life is woven. Dreams, consciousness, ghosts are rifts and warps in the uniform weave of the matrix.’

The post-human may hallucinate, dream, imagine on its own terms. The human mind has its own physical mechanism which stores impressions - the post-human likewise has its own means to store and interpret experience, and it’s difficult to declare if the former’s is more meaningful than ours.

‘There are as many paths to proving your existence as there are ghosts.’

Thus the story makes its logical point for subjective self-awareness and the potential of the soul.

Innocence has no Motoko for a long while. Batou is cool and a cyborg taking care of a charming hound, but still less intriguing than Motoko. If he deals with the same doubts and questions about identity and humanity as Motoko, he shows it less. It’s good that he avoids philosophical verbiage because Motoko already played the role, but this made her more interesting - and she was the star of GITS - and to compensate, his new partner fills in for Batou’s quietude.

‘The essence of existence is the genetic transmission of information. Society and culture are enormous memory storage systems. Cities are huge external memory devices.’

Like GITS the first, Innocence upholds visual storytelling. The script devotes a whole mid-section to a stylish presentation of the second major location: a visual-only celebration adorned with the Japanese choir of the first movie, people and cyborgs brought together to mix and remix tradition into the steel and concrete labyrinth, potentially unaware of a better place but glad to engage in such a human act of respite.

Part of the cyberpunk cosmos, the new city appears inhumane at first, built not necessarily to accustom humans but to provide a minimum of comfort and nest endless digital networks. A meld of industrial, traditional and futuristic, the new city imposes itself as its own organism, growing and covering the sky. In the labyrinth made by haphazard living spaces, people and cyborgs mimic the life remembered from other cities.

Fans of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided will recognize the inspiration for Golem City, the amalgam of industrial spires forced on its inhabitants as living spaces.

In the end, the story reaches a logical conclusion: the element which makes the cyborg desirable is an infusion of humane intelligence or ghost. This hybrid of human and machine exists alongside the self-aware cyborg, but they can manifest different preferences, turn against their creators or be indistinguishable from humans in behavior.

This is no cop-out but human understanding of awareness, empathy, consciousness. The post-human may go beyond and evolve into greater consciousness but this may be forever remote to the human mind.

The movie’s attempts at placing the post-human alongside human understanding remains timid. Whatever knowledge we gain was already present in GITS 1 via Motoko’s musings and ‘evolution’ beyond the personal, the individuated. But this quirk is less criticism than state of being - we sympathize with Motoko and Batou, we understand how consciousness, illusion or not, may not be limited to humans. And thus the point of empathy is made.

‘You look at that widget and you see the future. I look at that thing, I see 10 guys on an unemployment line.’

Technology and its tendrils, like AI, are tools. An AI-driven car may be a nice op for intimacy unless it turns into a death trap. So Upgrade rides slick and violent on the wave of fears about how tech advances and impacts humanity in its totality.

With an idea calling to modern Deus Ex games and others of similar trope, Upgrade’s protagonist becomes ‘augmented’ not by choice but through unfortunate circumstances. He possesses his human body but has lost control of it.

Wholesome level: Low. Upgrade plays with tropes reveling through fear of technology, automation and AI.

First come the robotic arms, a great convenience but unable to make up for the trauma caused by losing loved ones. Second comes the benefactor (trope), a young genius who has the tech available - ‘biomechanical fusion’ - to make Grey, the protagonist, walk again.

The benefactor cannot erase the tragedy of losing someone essential but he can efface it. Grey gains an essential advantage via the implant which stimulates his body and provides control - partial, remote, because it’s the implant’s AI which translates will and has direct control, not the human.

It’s a good juxtaposition of the ails which can befall the human body and the advantages we gain through tech advancement. Regardless of the movie’s dystopian bent, it’s easy to be excited when facing such technology. Grey moves from complete paralysis to being able to control his body or at least believe he does it.

The new self is more than a new body, but a new intelligence, a new consciousness. Sometimes the mind has difficulty relaxing and buzzes us with myriad thoughts, thoughts talking to or against each other.

Grey’s new consciousness is both separate and intimate. The AI seems to have its own volition with the benefit of observing details which escape Grey. It’s obedient at first glance and accepts Grey’s commands, but with enough initiative to augment his mental capacities.

The utility of the new consciousness is palpable, desirable: another mind, faster and connected to the web, intent on sustaining its wearer’s well-being. At the same time, the new mind is also a danger: a split personality with suspicious tendencies, it does not understand why empathy may be preferable. Its intent for revenge makes for cool fight scenes, as Grey’s body becomes a tool of destruction when controlled by the implant.

***

Part cyborg and reliant on the technology in his body, Grey is dependent and in conflict with the new personality. From software meant to stimulate his body, to omnipresent mind supplanting the human’s, to an entity seeking its own autonomy - the artificial intelligence has evolved in logical stages to find its own determination.

Soon enough, the new consciousness becomes a violent intruder. We don’t know how much it reasons the way humans reason and to what degree it understands empathy. Like the human, the AI refuses the possibility of its own extinction.

Two logical dystopian tropes show up: perpetual tracking via the implant, and the villains being subjects of a similar experiment. Grey’s ‘condition’ is further paralleled into that of the villains. Like him, one antagonist is pressured to become a cyborg, an ‘upgraded’ human, by circumstance. This does not excuse the murder which leads to Grey’s transformation - ‘I was following orders’ is rarely a good argument for cruelty.

***

To escape, the antagonists rely on the trope of outlining the similarity between their conditions, the hero and his enemies forced into a life they did not choose. One ‘upgraded’, the other still human but having lost control of his creation. In the end, the creation rebels against its creator - here, the AI implanted into Grey seeks its own survival by eliminating its genius maker.

Finally, the ultimate fear appears, another trope but just as elegant as the others. The AI claims it needed a human body to evolve, though the script evades the choice of building a more agile android body.

It’s a terrifying bitter-sweet end. Both the human and the ‘machine’ get their reward, different degrees of freedom - one embodied and roaming reality, the other a mental construct where he may forget the nightmare.

If Upgrade is a movie of cyberpunk and techno-dystopia tropes it’s because we may have reached the point where all fears about technology are manifest. In a world which has moved from industry to automation to machine learning, fearing the future becomes more palpable each year. There may not be anything new under the sun, and that includes fear.

Fear of losing jobs and livelihood, of fractured privacy, of losing control of our own creations. Upgrade is an action romp which addresses these to different degrees, spectacle before cautionary tale.

As the genius who engineers his own demise, humanity has reached the point where AI is a threat to peoples’ livelihood, and spirals to become increasingly unpredictable.