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Appleseed World Preview Minireview
darrellberry writes "We went to see the World Sneak Preview of Masamune Shirow's Appleseed at the ICA tonight. Complimentary sake and sushi, a loving but silly flipchart presentation from the producer about the politics of the world in which it is set, then the film. The animation is amazing the rendering of the city of Olympus is beautiful, the battle set-pieces are fluid and very well choreographed, and the fine line betwen genre conventions and attempts at hyper-realism is treated with respect. Although the first few minutes owe too much to The Matrix-meets-Avalon, and in parts (to my eye) the human characters suffer somewhat from traditional anime styling, Appleseed is something genuinely new in animation. Detail everywhere, lovingly rendered. Way too much exposition, in the style of some Russian epic from the 60s, and music supervision that was entirely wrong: it was nice to see Basement Jaxx turning up for the premiere, but their music and that of Oakenfold and the rest on the soundtrack made no sense thematically or emotionally. I can see that they are going for a big international release with Appleseed, but the music is just wrong. On the plus side, the motion capture-based character animation is very convincing, and the Mobile Fortresses out-scale any other city-stomping weapons platform I can remember. And lovely to see anime at a high frame-rate, not jumping in triples. Go see it at a big cinema with decent Dolby when it's on release next month, or get it on DVD (evidently on release in July) and turn up the sub-woofer." I don't know if we linked to the official site in our last story.
come on people! how come any form of media that involes sci fi elements is ripping off the Gaytrix....the Matrix ripped off so many other things that is stupid to compare to anything.
...we get that. But I really want some of you to take a look at this guy's rant about Anime nerds. He's spot on. Sure, I've got my DVD of Akira, some old VHS tapes with Ghost in the Shell, Armitige, etc... I've enjoyed Totoro, Iria, and the like. I even took Japanese (long before I watched anime with any regularity) because I am into it. But, you wouldn't catch me anywhere talking about the philosophy behind an anime film and how it applies to the real world. I will never get into heated discussions about the balance of good and evil in a cartoon, or come to the defense of my favorite anime character (must admit that I don't have one) when someone else assails them for being a weak person. Get a life people! Oh... and the link I referred to above is hillarious. Check it out. Really.
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About time someone did Appleseed AGAIN. The first effort was not so good, I didn't like it at all. It's very, very difficult to pull off Shirow's style in animation, you would almost need him to draw every 10th frame to get it right. I was just thinking yesterday that if someone where to animate Appleseed , they should use the book's illustrations as a starting point and build it out from there. I don't know why the characters have to be completely redrawn for animation, it seems like it would be less work to use more of the original art. Fans would love it if the characters 'came to life' off the pages instead of being restyled for the screen. In short, too bad Shirow does not have more to do with the artwork when his works are put on screen.
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I think the larger question, the one I was attempting to address, was that most sci-fi writers tend to be immature in some sense. Whether this is simply knowing one's market, or a byproduct of focusing too narrowly on one's craft, I couldn't say. As to taking things personally... yeah, you could probably level that criticism at me. But you're not exactly above it yourself, gauging from the tone of your reply.
On the other hand, I think you are absolutely right on several counts. But to deconstruct someone's psyche based on his or her work and some interviews you've read, and then present it as a (rather damning) criticism of the same author ('typical Shirow'; 'needs to grow up') is in many senses extraordinarily flippant. To truly understand someone requires a lot more information than you suggest you have. If you extrapolate to specifics from limited data, it tends to reflect more upon you than your subject. Had you been more upfront about this to begin with...
But you happen to be right about his work deteriorating over time... I didn't enjoy Ghost in the Shell nearly as much as earlier Appleseed, but I think this is partly his loss of touch with more profound, overarching ideas, and not his lack of dramatic flair (which IMO was never particularly good - all his character interaction ever did [well] was serve as exposition or sounding boards for his ideas).
Anyhow, sorry if I hit a nerve.
- Bachelorhood is the father of necessity.