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Live-Action Anime: Casshern
Silverhammer writes "Apple Japan is hosting the trailer (Quicktime required, of course) for an upcoming movie called simply CASSHERN. There have been many attempts at so-called 'live-action anime', but this is possibly the most impressive attempt I've ever seen. Part 'Final Fantasy', part 'Brazil', with CG and green screen work that puts even 'LoTR' to shame. (Hat tip: Penny Arcade)."
More impressive than the original matrix?
The Wachowski brothers were very much anime-motivated in that movie...
The Sailor Moon Live-Action anime is one of the more humorous attempts
r vl et/showid-22841/
http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet/ShowMainSe
Or go to animesuki.com for torrents of the series.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
Anyone else think slashdot should always include a BitTorrent seed when pointing to a huge file?
-Colin
FYI DVD-box for the original anime version from 1973
Original anime version characters
One of original anime character designers is AMANO Yoshitaka, who is famous for original character designer of Final Fantasy.
I don't think this will be better than LOTR, and I certainly don't think it will beat it in terms of effects. There were a lot of great discoveries as a result of research and development at Weta, and although 'CASSHERN' looks aesthetically beautiful, it doesn't seem like it even comes close to the capacity of work done at Weta. It's not to say that it indefinitely isn't, but so far it doesn't seem to be as impressive. It does look beautiful though. I've really never seen this sort of aesthetic in a live action film. Again, the Japanese are a whole different culture than most of us Americans. If 'CASSHERN' had a completely CG animated character from scratch like Gollum with details like sub-surface scattering and HDRI (High-Dynamic Range Imaging) scenarios, then maybe, but from the looks of it, it seems like a lower production value.
The large version is Here! I haven't got it yet.. so go easy :p
I don't follow anime that closely nor Japanese cinema at all, but I watched the trailer and the eye candy looked pretty good. I have a bunch of questions:
1) Will there be a release in English?
2) If so, will it have subtitles or overdubbing?
3) Where was the movie shot?
4) The actors and target audience are clearly Japanese. Was the rest of the production (directing, crew, special effects) all done by Japanese?
5) Most of the writing in the trailer was Japanese (no surprise), but the title (CASSHERN) was in English. Is there any significance to this? Is this a common practice? Does the movie have both a Japanese and an English title? (I couldn't tell on the Japanese side.)
6) The production values and trailer looked pretty darn good (and I didn't even understand what was going on...) Is there any particular reason why Japanese movies don't get released in the US the way US movies get released in Japan? Don't most US movies get released in Japanese when shown in Japan?
--LP
The fish is our friend. Or maybe not; see if you find this useful. I got it off the story section of the Casshern site.
Um, yeah.
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
No, you're not a heretic, you understand. People have to realize the HUGE amount of people that work at WETA - I've heard horror stories about their sweat-shop type atmosphere (which goes for the likes of ILM as well). They have a large number of people, each working on a very small task, 99 percent of which require no creativity at all.....personally I'd rather work for Pixar or a smaller independent f/x house than ILM, WETA, etc.
;).
Of course once I graduate college we'll see who will actually want me to work for them, and I might change my tune a little bit
At any rate, CASSHERN looks awesome....definitely looks like great cinematography and use of color...what I love most about Japanese filmmaking.
I belong to the ______ generation.
This is *MUCH* better than the Power Rangers! ;-)
- "They misunderestimated me."
i guess i could agree with you here. but to me, Gollum was pretty damn impressive and i hardly saw any faults, with few exceptions obviously. the work is definitely painstaking and i think there wasn't much room for 'creative freedom' simply because if you're going for realism, there really isn't much room for error or personal input, especially if you're working with a team of animators, coders, compositors, lighters, etc., who must all have the same output and feel. i don't know, as a striving 3d artist, i felt the work done at Weta is currently unbeatable right above ILM, in terms of realism (praise 'Hulk' here). what's great about this community is that there's always room for improvement and that's how it should always be because that's what keeps those paychecks coming in.
Guys, that's gonna be great. The original anime was shown on italian tv about 10/15 years ago. It was called Kyashan which is phonetically pretty much the same. So, the story is that androids go mad and try to conquer the world (and pretty much succeed) the son of a brilling scientist which collaborated constructing the androids becomes a cyborg to save the world... There are a girl and a dog-cyborg that go around fighting with him... It sounds cheesy but the anime was *great* to say the least. Brilliant. And the trailer makes me hope for the best!!! Man what a news!!! I can't wait!!
If it's live action anime you want - that one is a musty watch as well. There is some pretty slick CG work in there. If you watch the specials you'll see some of the really hard (and painful) work the actors had to go though!
IMDB Link
Jon - TheSpork
Hrm, I didn't actually think our eye was that sensitive to color differences beyond 8-bit gradations per-channel (although clearly the eye is way more sensitive in some channels like green if I recall correctly), so your claim that it senses 128-bit difference is sort of a surprise to me. Do you have a source for that 128-bit assertion? That's way higher than anything I ever heard and I did study this stuff at one point; I don't claim to be an expert though.
I've privately long-considered the intensity and luminosity to be more fundamental limitations on film (or computer screens). Light shining off things just doesn't glare as much on film as in real life. I suspect that's a much bigger difference between film and real-life than the bits-of-color issues you're describing.
Anybody have the pronunciation for this? Is it "cass-hern" or "cas-shern"? I caught the Japanese narration saying "ca-sher-no" but I was wondering if anybody had it in English.
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!
I don't know if anyone knows this, but there is a movie called Casshan: Robot Hunter (anime) that is basically the story of the series, only much shorter (kinda like the Vision of Escaflowne was for Escaflowne). It was a pretty cool movie. Was the movie that got me into anime in the first place, actually.
They finally got it on to DVD a few months ago. Very cool indeed.
Hail Black King!
Why oh why didn't I take the purple pill?
Oooh. This was made into a 4-episode OVA in 1993 (which got shown as a movie on the Sci-Fi channel, back when they had Saturday Anime ... which I remember seeing, and it kicked all sorts of ass when I was 13 ^_^; ), and was originally a 35-episode TV series which started in 1973.
The general plot is the usual mysterious-fighter-saves-world-from-robot-army, with twists.
it will be interesting to see this done, if only just to see how well they pull it off.
I'd watch it, subed or dubed :). Anyone see the Final Fantasy VII Advent Children trailer?( http://www.square-enix.co.jp/dvd/ff7ac/) ;). Bebop has a great into though, but terribly overplayed (the series).
The Wachowski brothers were very much anime-motivated in that movie...
Yep, but no one in the mass media seem to coment on this. I'm so sick of hearing "Matrix inspired" or "Matrix like", I know the Matrix pulled out some great effects but a good portion of them were seen on Anime before it!
No other anime is better than Big O. Simply for the fact of the intro.
I'm not that much of a fan of the intro, kind of chessy IMO
Can't read the Jap, but from other comments I gather it's a post fallout world with androids who want to conquer the world, and a cyborg who helped create the androids wanting to save it.
./ pretty well, i'll post a BitTorrent link if it goes (or anyone can on the site in my sig, post it under the Releases)
Just watch the trailer, the eery graphics is SUPERB. The interweaving of live action into anime is intriguing, and from just the trailer I can already get a sense of the style and mood of the movie, with a strong feel of Dune (future tech + medieval setting).
I will certainly want to see this in theater, if it's not Japan only. I'm in Canada.
PS. The trailer seems to be surviving
VIVA1023.com | Political Fashion.
The future of the film industry is going to be amazing as filmmakers are finally unshackled from the limitations of physics in creating special effects. Imaginations are going to run unchecked, and thousands of great stories that have been trapped in the realm of books and cartoon will be unleashed.
LOTR, SpiderMan, and Xmen (as well as numerous other great CGI movies) were just the appetizer for the feast of fantasy we'll be dining on during the next 20 years. It's going to be fantastic.
There is another remake anime version in 1993, that is 4-volume OVA (image). Its character designer is the designer of Kite, UMETSU Yasuomi.
Ok, I call BULLSHIT on your post. Do you have any idea what you are talking about? Are you just pulling numbers out of the air?
Or perhaps a better explaination is that you're confusing internal representations with output formats. My younger brother tells me that LightWave uses some 192-bit internal format, but I'm not going to be some wannabe loser and claim that it creates "192-bit color". Gee, perhaps they're using floating point numbers. 3 x 64 = 192, oddly enough. Or maybe they're using single precision, which gives us 6 x 32 = 192. I don't know exactly what the six numbers are, perhaps RGB with a surface normal.
Also, lets look at your numbers. Firstly, you're always counting an alpha channel. But alpha is only needed for compositing, not for final output. Secondly, most of us here are using 24-bit (8,8,8) or even 15/16-bit (5,5/6,5) true-colour display modes. Have you noticed any colour ringing or banding because of the lack of precision? I rarely have, and even then it was back when I used a 16-bit mode. 24-bit (i.e 8 bit components) is just fine for almost any work. About the only place it would be inadequant is perhaps doing X-ray or some other type of medical imaging. Now you're not only trying to tell us that Hollywood currently uses 32 bits per component but that the human eye can see 128 bit components? BULLSHIT. You do realise that for every bit you double the number of possible values? So 96-bit colour (3 x 32) has 16 million TIMES the number of values PER COMPONENT than 24-bit colour? My god, can you even comprehend how many different shades of colours that would produce?
Sorry to come down hard on you, but I think you sound like just a confused adolescent with bit-inadequacy issues. You're confusing internal representations with output formats. For internal work, sure you need extra bits to guard against rounding errors. You'd probably scan any film with a 12 or 16 bit scanner (i.e 36 or 48 bit colour), render to either a similar precision or even HDRI formats (floating point, 96 or 192 bit colour) and keep any intermediate images at the highest precision you can. And for compositing you'd have an alpha channel (or three for chroma-key work). But when you process it for final output, you throw away the alpha (which hopefully equals 100% by that stage) and round everything down. For DVD, that means converting to the YCrCb colour space, subsampling the croma channels to half size (i.e 4:2:2 sampling) and encoding. For a film "printer", it might take 36 (3x12) or 48 (3x16) bit RGB, or maybe just 24 bit.
</rant>What they've gone for here that gives a good Anime 'feel' is a 'Parallax' effect of filming; something the Matrix did not employ.
The basis of this idea is that in the animated animes, the forground would be moved frame by frame in relation to the backround moving in the opposite direction. - This is effectively an easy way for animators to quickly produce the effect of the camera moving within a scene.
The effect in this film appears to be replicated by actually moving a camera with a telephoto lense across the scene.
All in all, from the trailer, the effect appears good and in combination with other anime-esque effects although I could see how it would become annoying in live-action if over-used.
The motion effects in anime nearly all stem from the animators tricks to avoid having to constantly redraw cells when they can just move them around.
Its quite an amusing transposition of techniques to watch.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
So in other words, you pulled the numbers straight out of your ass with a reference to what somebody told you some time, and got moderated up as informative. I love Slashdot!
MPEG2 video on a DVD/SVCD is digital with 8 bits per color channel. If Gollum looks "fake" and Frodo not when you are watching Return of the King at home, it won't be because of the color depth. It might be that the color and lighting calculations, with regard to shading techniques and blending, do not give a realistic enough result: but this has nothing to do with the color depth that human vision can percieve.
Hence the chance that on the street in Tokyo you might see a 12 year old girl wearing a t-shirt with "Free Vagina" on it. Of course, she's the spiritual cousin of all the white North Americans who have Asian-language tattoos, which could translate as "Stupid Honky" for all they know...
Freedom: "I won't!"
What is this...object oriented movie making?
-L
Don't Panic.
are you sure this is a movie based on anime? i didn't see a single person with blue hair...
... and for some reason, i got blue hair. ya gotta have blue hair!
Strong Bad:
I agree, though I believe it goes far beyond special effects.
A lot of people would point to the "Old Hollywood" as the golden age of movie making, but I believe we are on the threshold of what will be seen as the real golden age.
Movie making, special effects or not, is becoming much, much cheaper. What we're going to see in the coming years is an explosion of non-Hollywood movies (U.S. and non-U.S.) that are first-rate in terms of polish. So-called "independent" films are going to look as good as any other and have far more impact than they do now. Hollywood will no longer enjoy the position it has enjoyed since its inception.
There is a wealth of talent out there -- actors, writers, directors, cinematographers, makeup and set designers, computer graphics artists -- that exist on the fringes (especially the actors, writers and directors), ignored by the money-chasing, unimagintative, group-think of the Hollywood studios. The talents of these professionals will finally be able to find a vehicle for their expression that will have a world-wide impact.
Even more amazing than filmakers being unshackled from the laws of physics will be the results of filmakers being unshackled from the "laws" of MGM, Newline, UA and so forth.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
And someday I'll enter my golden age of spelling, and not misspell "filmmakers" twice, after having it spelled correctly in the parent post!
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
The future of the film industry is going to be amazing as filmmakers are finally unshackled from the limitations of physics in creating special effects
This reminds me of an MPAA propaganda/commercial that was shown last time I went to the movies: We see a stuntman describing how he does an exciting but dangerous job. And then he says something like 'see, so don't download MP3 because it puts guys like me out of work and insults all our hard work'.
I had two immediate thoughts on it: first, "what has mp3 have to do with movie stunts?". But more importantly, my second thought was: "too bad CGI will have your job way before that, sponsored by the same organization you now support".
Ironic, isn't it? This was probably not the way the ad creators intended the message to come through. Oops.
The ENIAC Demo Competition
Here's my brief translation of the section mentioned in the parent, as well as some background from other parts of the official site. These are from the website as it was 3 weeks ago, though I doubt the plot will have changed. (This was a quick overview I did at a friend's request.)
Alternate future where a world war (WWII?) continued for over 50 years. The world ultimately divides into two sides: Asia and Europe, with Asia winning and forming the huge political entity of Eurasia. Still, the question lingers: with all the chemical, nuclear, and biological warfare (and ensuing damage) was victory really worth it? Does mankind just sit and wait for the end?
Is there no road to recovery?
There was one man who proposed a solution: Doctor (Professor?) Higashi (Azuma?). He believes he has discovered a way to create "neo-structure cells" which can regenerate any lost body parts... and has given lectures and presentations of his theory. He wants to test his theory so that he can cure his wife's terminal illness. However, the Ministry of Welfare will not authorize Higashi's research unless he gives them all rights to it. He declines. Soon afterward, they begin their own research for their own selfish, war-mongering desires.
Inevitably, a new lifeform, the neo-human is created... as man begins to play God.
However, the creation of neo-humans... which was supposed to rescue mankind instead begins to lead them into destruction...
Apart from his fame from being the visual concept designer for the Final Fantasy series (including the logo for each of the games), Amano is a well-respected artist in the anime/sci-fi/fantasy world genres as well (Vampire Hunter D springs to mind...)
His website can be found at www.amanosworld.com .
I have several of his art books, some calendars, and a few prints... I feel they are all well worth the money spent on them.
Here are some plot overviews from joblo.com:
... a theory that would create a new powerful human structure and a new life body. (Casshern?)
:
:
This movie looks kick-ass. I hop it's going to have worldwide distribution, or at least worldwide DVD distribution.
Plot #1 : (Loosely Translated from the Official Site)
The great 50 year war continues, as for the world is divided into two camps: Asian federal republic and European combination.
On an end of a long fight, Asian federal republic wins control over the East Asian Eurasian continent. But the victory caused a great devastation of human nature. The actions of chemical weapons and germ weapons resulted in major chemical injuries and a large "radioactivity" virus.
Doctor Higashi, whose wife is suffering from the "radioactivity" illness, creates a "new structure cell" theory
Though dismissed by the hygienic ministry, Higashi continues his research with the help from a troop of authorized personnel (who is utilizing the theory because of their own selfish desire).
Plot #2
Made for 5 billion yen, "Casshern" tries to address the idealistic question proposed in Shakespear's "Hamlet" (Why do people fight with each other?) It is also a continuation of the Japanese animation, "Shinzou Ningen Casshern" which was broadcasted back in 1973. A riot occurs within the robots that were made to clean up environmental pollution. As a result, a professor of robotic engineering revised his "son" Casshern to calm the riot.
Plot #3
The world has taken a different path as we know it today. The great war has gone on for 50 years and the world is divided into two groups, the Republic of Asia and the European Union. After the long battle, the Republic of Asia came out as the victor and it has come to take over the Eurasian Continent. However, the only thing that came out of this was the demise of the human spirit, chemical weapons, germ warfare, viruses derived from nuclear bombs, the prognostic symptoms of radioactivity, and the razed land. Will mankind just sit there and look at the fall of its kind?
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
"Live Action Anime" ?! Yeah right, according to the trailer there is not even ONE weirdly colored hairdo.
Ridley Scott is a good example of a director who does this, many French works (City of Lost Children had some recognition in the states), all the way back to Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
Tossed in among all the HK fantasy/SF cinema, this looks like just another film. A high budget one, one that looks like it could be really good, but not some sort of exceptional breakthrough that people have been making it out to be of late.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
The original series
:)
The OVA
The live action movie
Hehe, ANN rocks
Enjoy a movie like this? Are you kidding? OF COURSE!
The USA has been exporting massive amounts of 'cultural products' for the last 100years. To everyone *outside the USA* (or english speaking countries), it is in a 'second language', yet, its still they eat it up.
Now, consider this trailer again, imagine that it wasnt in Japanese -- what would you be thinking of this movie? It frankly looks terrific. If this movie were coming out of America, it would be MASSIVE. One of these days soon IMHO, Japan is going to drop a blockbuster on the USA. Its cultural products are very much palatable to the American Cultural Sensibilities (for bad as well as good, the USA->Japan post WWII influence is imense) -- Japan is very much due to have its own modern Culture play well in Peoria.
Maybe this movie is it, maybe not, but Japan is becoming a more influencial player in international 'style' and culture. And really, being a fan of Anime is not a pre-requisite. Im sure this movie will stand well no its onw.
Try The Day of the Jackal (the 1973 version, not the crappy Bruce Willis remake), for one.
Sheez... I think you could pick a better example for comparison than that. I mean, watermelons exploding is a pretty well established meme. I'm sure that there've been dozens of films with such scenes.
|>
Here be Dragons
If I recall correctly from biology class :
Each human eye contains an array of exactly 5760 x 4608 receptors, each of which act as a 16bit CCD.
Data is sampled from this array at a rate of exactly 148Hz, transferred to a framebuffer, and then pushed up along the optic pipeline, where it undergoes various transforms, such as flipping about the X axis so it does not appear to be upside down.
You will note that the resolution of 5760x4608 pixels is an exact multiple of PAL standard resolution 720x576 (8 times, to be exact)
So, if you are having trouble with Gollum appearing a little 'fake', then its probably because you are watching LOTR on a silly NTSC resolution of 720 x 480. This can create banding and other visual artifacts caused by incorrect interpolation along the optic pipeline.
Watch LOTR in PAL format, and you should notice that Gollum is anything but fake.
On a side related issue, it should also be noted that the biological processes which combine the left and right optic framebuffers to produce 3D perception rely on the gathering of meta-data from the environment to aid as hints in the calculations.
The format of this meta-data conforms closely with OpenGL 1.4 standard. For this reason, you will find that a lot of OpenGL based games appear a lot more realistic than their DirectX brethren, since the emitted meta-data is compatible with human internal data processing.
This may change soon, since Microsoft is pushing the DirectX format, and it is widely known that certain processed foods contain genetic mutagens which when combined with exposure to DirectX meta-data cause a 're-programming' of the optic pipeline to use 3D algorithms which are closer to DirectX's meta data than OpenGL's.
So, if you have been playing a lot of XBox games, and merrily munching down McDonalds, then your visual perception may well have been morphing slowly towards a new format.
Worth considering.
.. for the trailer. Translated and everything! (except for the one line I can't really decide on) 00:00:02 I'd like to present, to this body, one of our accomplishments. 00:00:13 It's name is "neo-biology." [more like "newly created bio"] 00:00:17 You've made all these already? 00:00:19 I've heard your wife is ill... 00:00:25 What are you going to do about Luna? 00:00:28 I can't stay alone in a place like this when my friends are fighting. 00:00:30 Cause unknown! 00:00:31 "Neo-biology"is still incomplete?! 00:00:38 What are you saying? 00:00:40 That the military is moving. [its forces, etc, whatever] 00:00:44 I wonder why people fight... 00:00:46 What have you done? 00:00:49 [The line I can't make heads or tails of] 00:00:53 I'm going... 00:00:57 ...to annihilate the human race.
00:01:03 Code 2-0-6!
00:01:04 Hurry! DO IT!
00:01:13 I will save you.
00:01:17 Who the hell are you?
00:01:22 I'm not human anymore!!
00:01:35 One life, cast aside
00:01:39 and reborn with an invulnerable body
00:01:41 will strike and destroy the iron demons.
00:01:45 If Casshern doesn't do it,
00:01:47 who will?
00:00:02 I'd like to present, to this body, one of our accomplishments.
00:00:13 It's name is "neo-biology." [more like "newly created bio"]
00:00:17 You've made all these already?
00:00:19 I've heard your wife is ill...
00:00:25 What are you going to do about Luna?
00:00:28 I can't stay alone in a place like this when my friends are fighting.
00:00:30 Cause unknown!
00:00:31 "Neo-biology"is still incomplete?!
00:00:38 What are you saying?
00:00:40 That the military is moving. [its forces, etc, whatever]
00:00:44 I wonder why people fight...
00:00:46 What have you done?
00:00:49 [Beats me]
00:00:53 I'm going...
00:00:57
00:01:03 Code 2-0-6!
00:01:04 Hurry! DO IT!
00:01:13 I will save you.
00:01:17 Who the hell are you?
00:01:22 I'm not human anymore!!
00:01:35 One life, cast aside
00:01:39 and reborn with an invulnerable body
00:01:41 will strike and destroy the iron demons.
00:01:45 If Casshern doesn't do it,
00:01:47 who will?
http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~thoureau/japanese.h tml
Having taken japanese for two years, I can confirm that it is all true.
It's interesting, but it's hardly new. It seems to be a big-budget form of the "tokusatsu" Japanese special-effects film genre--the same genre that brought us Power Rangers.
If you're interested in checking out what the original version of some of the Power Rangers shows look like, or in looking into the more mature Kamen Rider series, there are quite a few digital fansubbers out there who have started putting the series out--for instance, TV Nihon, which has a lot of stuff up on BitTorrent. Also, there are badly-subtitled pirate DVD sets selling on eBay...
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
An non-official English translation of the trailer can be found here.