What is it?
The 2006 Japanese anime OVA Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd GIG – Individual Eleven.
Trailer (This is not for the OVA, but it is basically what it is about)
What is it about?
This is how The IMDb describes this anime OVA:
The year is 2030. Six months passed since the Laughing Man Incident was solved.
About 3 million refugees are living in Japan, invited to fill the labor shortage.
However, the emergent presence of the invited-refugees intensified their confrontation with the “Individualists”, who called for national isolation, which then led to the increased incidences of terrorist attacks.
Under these circumstances, a terrorist group called the Individual Eleven carries out a suicide attack.
But there was a greater scheme behind their action.
When Section 9 learns this, they attempt to nail down the mastermind of the incident.
Meanwhile, Kuze, a surviving member of the Individual Eleven, becomes a charismatic leader of the invited-refugees and intensifies the confrontation against the government.
And Motoko starts feeling a strange sense of fate connecting her with Kuze…
Invited-refugees from Asia: At the time of the Third and the Fourth World Wars, about three million Asians became refugees.
As a source of cheap labor, they were invited into Japan.
Thus they were called “invited-refugees.”
As post-war Japan recuperated, the unemployment rate of the invited-refugees increased.
This developed a circumstance that could lead to a conflict.
The problems surrounding the invited-refugees might explode any minute…
My Thoughts
Like the previous OVA, this OVA seems to have changed the original voice acting to new voice actors and voice actresses.
This time it was not as noticeable overall, but it still hurt this OVA because the original voice cast for the anime TV show is better.
As I predicted, I liked this OVA better than the other OVA, probably because I like Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd GIG better than the first season, and this OVA did a better job setting up the story and was easier to follow.
This OVA also had more action than the last one, better overall animation in my opinion, better and more music, a better villain (who was not shown as much unfortunately), and a more interesting main story overall in my opinion.
Like the other OVA, this OVA is not better than the season that it is based on, and so once again you are better off watching the entire season instead of this very condensed version of the overall main story.
Especially for this season because the filler/stand-alone episodes for this season were probably better than the main story episodes.
They are some of the best filler episodes probably ever, and you will miss those if you only watch this OVA instead of watching the entire anime TV show.
The end,
- John Jr
John Jr's Blog 