Being far too ignorant of anime and manga to speak knowledgeably about “Ghost In The Shell 2”, there’s really no point in reviewing this film other than distilling the sum of my reaction: the film is a beautifully rendered series of images that depicts a future that is as believable as it is frightening. Like the best science fiction, the film immerses its audience into an uncanny new world without bringing undue attention to its strangeness. It takes for granted the truths of its world, and soon enough so do we.

The story fuses bits of noir, cyberpunk, and sheer strangeness to great artistic effect. The plot has few turns to take, but the scenery along the way is simply unforgettable. The first cyborg’s suicide left my jaw on the floor; there is more poetry in that harrowing image of destruction than a hundred live-action sci-fi films. Ripping away layers of synthetic skin, the cyborg’s plea for death and pathetic end ought to leave one cold about the film’s ham-fisted existential fixation. Instead it seems exactly appropriate, and more: fearless, bold, pitch-perfect.

Those are the bigger moments, and for every set piece there are dozens of throwaway effects that make “Ghost In The Shell 2” a small miracle of background detail. In a scene that’s Kubrickian in its arid intellectual meandering, a forensics cop sets a shotgun shell on what looks like a featureless tabletop but is actually a high-tech scanner that flickers to life and analyzes the evidence. The shot lasts for mere seconds, but lesser films would have built a scene around it, including lots of expository dialogue about the swell new device. Not in “Ghost In The Shell 2”, which boasts an embarrassment of such riches. For these alone it belongs in the same class as “Blade Runner”. Truly, for this viewer, an eye-opening use of animation.