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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.
I was going to see this movie but since you gave away the frame-rate I might as well stay home.
appleseed trailer torrent
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.
Ahh, the Achilles heel of 640x480.
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
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.
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-)
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.)