The reviewer claims the interpretation comes from notes he was given on the film. The bit about the movie being
specifically about otaku and the anime industry is apparently just his own extrapolation, though, but apparently Oshii did state he intended for the film to be a critique of hikikomori.
If it were true Sky Crawler would be a bigger failure, because apparently no one picked up on it.
I never would have inferred this to be the point of the film at all, it would be far easier for me to read that kind of meaning into, say,
Neon Genesis Evangelion. As commentaries go this one is too self-absorbed and obscure to really have any kind of resonance.
But I did get how little the film liked its characters and were fairly critical of them as immature non-beings, so I'd argue it's not a completely extratextual inferrence. I certainly felt the movie was terribly cynical and deconstructed its own premise a tad, though I never in a million years would have made the leap to 'hikikomori critique'.
Anyway, does it want a happy ending for them at the end? I'm not sure what to make of that ending really, because how does one feel happy for characters so thin and non-there? Are we to infer they are finally waking up from their long dream of non-being or what? (I guess so, I suppose I'm meant to sympathise not with the nonpersons they are but rather they persons they will become... or something?)
So does it all work? *shrug* I'm just not sure. I haven't felt so ambivalent and conflicted about a movie in a long time; and usually I fall instantly in love with an Oshii film long before I try to understand them - I get
Angel's Egg now, but when I first saw it it was just an out-of-body experience. I think that's an apt comparison because much like that film the point of
Sky Crawlers is not at all clear on a first viewing, or even maybe several viewings.