The Parade (Spoilers)
What's really going on during the festival. The sad monk without a mask stood out to me. The burning of the "bodies" at the end? Any thoughts?
sharePerhaps the bonfire with the girl dolls is a foreshadowing of the destruction of the factory that comes later. The thing that images in the Oshii movies share is metaphorical intent, not literal meaning.
See his directorial debut, 'The Angels Egg', for a nearly wordless story loaded with visual symbolism
This has to do with Ningyo Kuyo, the ritual cremation of unwanted dolls in Japan on the 25th of September.
Dolls occupy a very special place in Japanese culture, and are often considered to have souls (the Chinese characters used to compose the word "doll" (ningyo) mean "Human" and "Form"...).
It is thought that you can’t just discard them or throw them away without incurring some kind of karmic repercussion. They thus have formal shinto cremation ceremonies with priests chanting prayers as people watch (often with solemn looks of genuine sadness and awe on their faces) their old dolls being burned.
I think this is key to understanding the fascination with dolls in Ghost in the Shell and Innocence (the whole Batou "Descartes had a daughter..." monologue in the forensics lab, the Major's "If the dolls could speak, no doubt they'd scream, "I didn't want to become human"" quote, the final shot of both Batou and Togusa's daughter's doll, etc.)