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3D Computer Generated Movie From France
An anonymous reader submits a link to this Computer Graphics World article on a French-made film to be released in June. "A film by Xilam, Kaena is a full length feature film, entirely made from Off the shelf software. The previews looks amazing."
Well, pretty much all animation/sfx is founded in "off the shelf software".
Maya, Softimage/XSI, Lightwave...I'm sure all of these packages are on a shelf SOME where...
Of course, when you read about movies that use such software, the fx houses always add "combination of Maya and XSI...with special software written by us". This usually is tacked on because they don't want ordinary people thinking they could do the same thing. They want to keep the apperance of wizardry like the old days.
But the custom software is usually written in Maya script language and such...which is very powerful btw.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
You are seriously comparing Kaena to Final Fantasy and Spider-Man?! Yes, the animation in Kaena looks, as you put it, "very ghetto" in relation. But I think you need to consider the following.
Spider-Man budget: $139 million
Final Fantasy budget: $137 million
Kaena budget: $27 million
Kaena is also (supposedly) the first European CGI feature. You really shouldn't expect animation perfection in a first release like this.
And, to be honest, a lot of the animation in "Spidey" wasn't that good either...
Finally; why won't the story be the draw? What about Toy Story or Monsters, Inc.? I found the stories for those CGI features (among others) to be quite well done and entertaining. Just because a film is 100% CGI does not mean that it has no story. I'm not saying there will be a great story in Kaena; just that the two factors are unrelated.