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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.

10 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. just saw the trailer by Jotaigna · · Score: 3, Interesting

    its pure eye candy!!!. Last thing i've ever seen like this is ONI FPS game. Cant wait to watch it, although it means i have to wait like 8 months till it gets to Chile. 2 years if you are thinking of a legal copy.

    --
    "The quality of life is inversely proportional to the number of keys on your keyring."
  2. Stop with the fucking spoilers! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    I was going to see this movie but since you gave away the frame-rate I might as well stay home.

  3. Re:Bittorrents of Trailers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
  4. Re:Bad Anime Hall of Fame by andr0meda · · Score: 5, Informative


    Actually this movie is a remake BECAUSE the last one was that bad. There would not be an audience if the last one truely rocked, like AKIRA or GITS still does today.

    If you read the Appleseed comic books (and I mean books) then you'll see that they're among the best comics around (imho).

    --
    With great power comes great electricity bills.
  5. Re:Yow! by Lawbeefaroni · · Score: 4, Funny

    Ahh, the Achilles heel of 640x480.

    --
    "When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
  6. Re:Anime good! by tuffy · · Score: 3, Informative
    DVD release is supposed to be in July, but is this the Japanese release or NA with English subtitles? I would have RTFA, but it's all in Japanese :)

    Geneon (aka Pioneer) has the license according to Yahoo! Japan, but no R1 release date is set that I'm aware of.

    --

    Ita erat quando hic adveni.

  7. FYI If you're in Japan at the moment by Pope · · Score: 4, Informative

    Innocence, the new Ghost In The Shell movie, is playing this weekend:

    The Theatrical Release in Japan (English Subtitled Version)

    Roppongi Hills -Virgin Cinema-

    Released from March 6th 2004 (Late Show Only) LInky

    --
    It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
  8. Re:Bad Anime Hall of Fame by John+Whitley · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Read the manga, from which the anime was derived. Judging Appleseed on the first anime version is like judging Frank Herbert's _Dune_ on David Lynch's 1984 movie.

    The challenge that any attempt to realize Appleseed as anime faces is that the manga has a *lot* going on. Global politics, layers of social and racial turmoil, the affects of high technology on society (and vice versa), etc. With such a rich world and story line, creating a compelling version of that story in even one or two movie length features is very difficult.

    Last but not least, if you want your notions of superhero comics turned on their head, go pick up one of the graphic novels from Kurt Busiek's _Astro City_ series. Great characters, detailed world, and compelling storytelling. Oh, yeah, and with superheroes. 8-)

  9. Re:Bad Anime Hall of Fame by M1FCJ · · Score: 3, Interesting
    The challenge that any attempt to realize Appleseed as anime faces is that the manga has a *lot* going on. Global politics, layers of social and racial turmoil, the affects of high technology on society (and vice versa), etc. With such a rich world and story line, creating a compelling version of that story in even one or two movie length features is very difficult.

    Well, definitely true. That's why I really like TV series like GiTS SAC (and SAC op.2), GiTS the movie was pretty short and understanding what's going on was almost impossible unless you knew the story already. To be fair, I found the story in SAC much more gripping, detailed and fascinating. . SAC 2 is going good, so far I watched the first two and they were as interesting as the first series.

    There are so many bad anime out there, I can understand who never liked the genre. It is a pretty hard thing to pick the good ones out of the rubbish if you don't know anything about the genre.

    Last tip, if you liked GiTS SAC, you might like Paranoid Agent. It is good.

  10. Technical milestone? by mblase · · Score: 4, Informative

    As far as I know (which, I admit, isn't as complete as I'd like), this is the first feature-length movie which renders its human characters completely using cel-shaded CGI. (The buildings and machines are rendered more realistically using 3-D shading.)

    Cel shading is used extensively for humans in some other media, most notably MTV's "Spider-Man" series, but this movie looks like a step up. The more common cel shading becomes, the more I think we can expect traditional animation to fade into a quaint and over-expensive technique. (I wouldn't be surprised if this is already the thinking at Disney's studios, now that they've closed their traditional animation departments.)