I also hated how the gynoids looked. I thought they were hideous. Is it just me or were the robots in the original movie more advanced.
For what it's worth, the gynoids were supposed to look odd. The design was inspired by the photography of German-born Surrealist Hans Bellmer.
Given that Haraway describes the Hadaly-model gynoids as "pets" and "sexaroids," I think the consumer base would be agalmatophiliacs with a pronounced robot fixation or fetish... The customers would hardly be normal in their tastes. They'd be searching for something that resembled a human being and had "organs unnecessary in service robots" but still looked mechanical. ("Nothing to brag about to your neighbors, but hardly illegal.")
In an interview with
The Village Voice's J. Hoberman, Oshii mentioned the following:
Translator: Mr. Oshii and his crew visited toy factories in Germany and Italy to look at the dark side of doll manufacturing. And they went to New York for the Hans Bellmer show [at the International Center for Photography]. The very first scene [where the gynoid self-destructs] is based on New York's Chinatown.
http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0422,h ... 41,20.html
In a Sci Fi Wire article, Oshii puts this more directly:
"I was convinced about the outcome of this film when I visited a museum in New York, the International Center of Photography," Oshii said in an interview. "They exhibit the dolls made by Hans Bellmer, and those are the dolls depicted in the movie. Those dolls were made by [Bellmer] about 50 years ago, and [they] are famous for the balls they have for [arm and leg] joints. I based the idea of the gynoids [pleasure robots] on them."
http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/art-film ... 12.00.film
I think the look of the gynoids relates directly to the "imprinting" done by Locus Solus. In fact, Batou finds the holographic image of the little girl in a copy of Hans Bellmer's book
La Poupée/ Die Puppe,
The Doll...and children can be said to be "inside" the gynoids.
Regarding Bellmer, art historian Sue Taylor notes:
The Surrealist fascination with automata, especially the uncanny dread produced by their dubious animate/inanimate status, prepared the way for the enthusiastic reception in France of Bellmer's doll. His stated preoccupation with little girls as subjects for his art, moreover, coincided with the Surrealist idealization of the femme-enfant, a muse whose association with dual realms of alterity, femininity and childhood, inspired male artists in their self-styled revolt against the forces of the rational... Bellmer's doll, the first sculptural construction of an erstwhile graphic designer, developed out of a series of three now legendary events in his personal life: the reappearance in his family of a beautiful teenage cousin, Ursula Naguschewski, who moved to Berlin from Kassel in 1932; his attendance at a performance of Jacques Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann, in which the protagonist falls tragically in love with the lifelike automaton Olympia; and a shipment from his mother of a box of old toys which had belonged to him as a boy. Overwhelmed with nostalgia and impossible longing, Bellmer acquired from these incidents a need, in his words, "to construct an artificial girl with anatomical possibilities...capable of re-creating the heights of passion even to inventing new desires."
Therese Lichtenstein, Guest Curator for the International Center of Photography's Hans Bellmer exhibit, states:
Although Bellmer is generally classified as a Surrealist, he actually initiated his doll project with a specific political purpose: to oppose the fascism of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party in Germany in the 1930s. After the rise to power of the Nazi Party in 1933, Bellmer, an established painter and graphic designer, declared that he would make no work that would support the German state. The unconventional or "degenerate" poses of his dolls were directed specifically at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany...Bellmer's work was also an attempt to destabilize representations of gender being widely circulated in contemporary mass culture.
I think that the gynoids' inhuman appearance is part of the appeal for Locus Solus customers.
[EDIT: In the film, the gynoids remind us of Bellmer's dolls, of Olympia in Hoffmann's "The Sandman" and in Offenbach's opera, of Hadaly in Villiers'
L'Eve Future, and of Asimov's robots. They also suggest the philosophical problems raised by Descartes and La Mettrie and embodied in "moving dolls" such as the 18th Century creations of Swiss watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz. (
L'Eve Future was, in part, Villiers' belated response to/satire upon La Mettrie's materialism; the 1886 Symbolist novel specifically addresses 19th Century materialist attitudes foreshadowed by the 18th Century philosopher's works. Bellmer's art- and Surrealism in general- can be seen as a similarly motivated reaction to a mechanized world; several literary critics and art historians have commented upon resemblances between French Symbolism and the Surrealist movement in style, attitude, and subject matter.)]
(WARNING: The following link leads to an Art Institute of Chicago essay on the works of Hans Bellmer. It includes images from Bellmer's
La Poupée, the cover of which is shown in the film. I offer the link simply to provide interested readers with an academic resource on, and examples of, this well-known Surrealist's work, and to demonstrate that the gynoids' look in
Innocence implies the sort of perversions to which Locus Solus, with its Bellmer-like sex dolls and its child-victims, panders. The article and accompanying Bellmer artwork may offend some folks. [If you find Dali's weirder pieces offensive, you'll want to steer clear of Bellmer.] The pictures are not pornographic, but they are upsetting. Bellmer's work is some creepy stuff. Just remember, these are dolls... made to resemble humans,
but they're not quite human-looking. And when thinking of Bellmer's art in relation to the film, remember that "la poupée" means both "the doll" and "the puppet"...)
http://www.artic.edu/reynolds/essays/taylor.php
Some images from the International Center of Photography's Bellmer exhibit- the exhibit visited by Oshii and the Production IG staff- can be sampled at the Center's website:
http://museum.icp.org/museum/exhibition ... ntro1.html