Or maybe it’s supposed to be silly, what with the first half of the movie being spent largely on Balot swimming nude with a homosexual dolphin while jumping through a sort of cyberspace. In the end it all comes across as incredibly silly. The contrast between how blatant the naming convention comes across is completely at odds with the effort it then goes into making it relevant. It’s as though Ubukata read the first page of ‘Symbolism for Dummies’ but got totally the wrong idea from it, like he read a book on how to chop down a tree with an axe but then stuck the axe up his backside and started to gnaw at the tree trunk. Its shtick of characters being named after eggs is probably supposed to tie into rebirth, but it’s so shoddily implemented. Mardock Scramble has always had a bit of a problem with symbolism. Sharks, and a completely baffling shift to gambling as though the author got really into Kaiji while he was writing it. Second Combustion has homosexual dolphins, Norio Wakamoto being eaten by flying

Sure, the movie also had a man who grafted a vagina onto the palm of his hand, but it was ultimately centred on their relationship and that’s what made me come back to the sequel movie. Their dialogue revealed more about their characters through their contrasting viewpoints. The relationship between teenage prostitute turned mute cyborg assassin Balot and her inter-dimensional transforming intelligent golden mouse Oeufcoque had this wonderful contrasting symmetry. The first Mardock Scramble movie had some…well, a lot of problems, but there was something genuinely fascinating at its core that I really enjoyed.

Mardock scramble watch