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Appleseed: The Movie review by Lynk Former
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Appleseed is one of the earlier works from Masamune Shirow
of Ghost in the Shell fame. This latest version of the story is the first 3D live anime of this magnitude to be made and is quite an achievement in terms of "graphics," though to be honest there are a lot of moments where you do realise that although this technology has come a long way, it still needs to go a lot further to achieve more life-like movements in human characters.
Appleseed is set in 2131, after a global war that has left much of the earth barren. A single utopia exists in the form of the city of Olympus, a place populated by humans and bioroids (artificial humans). On the surface these two races coexist, however there are hidden tensions amongst some of the human factions who seek to destroy the bioroids. Deunan Knute, a warrior and survivor of the global war, is taken from the wastelands by an elite group of soldiers led by Deunan's former commander, Briareos, and taken to Olympus. As tensions within Olympus come to their climax, Deunan finds that she holds the key to the very survival of humankind and the bioroids.
The 3D animation with celshading effects are absolutely beautiful, however as stated before, it does have its limits and the technology still has a long way to go. Creating such a large virtual environment obviously took a lot of effort and for the most part it's brilliantly done. The only downside in terms of animation is the more human element that is recreated in this virtual 3D world. The first problem comes from the movement of the human characters; while motion capture technology is very powerful and accurate, it's too good. The actors used often perform an exaggerated performance that you would expect from a theatrical performance on Broadway. This sometimes creates the feeling that the characters are overacting, which can be a little distracting at times. Despite this, there are a few moments where the movements of the characters seem very natural.
Another thing that you will notice immediately is that anime characters don't necessarily translate well from 2D to 3D and, even with motion captured facial movements from the Japanese voice cast themselves, the gap between the real world and animated world is still too wide, meaning that the expressions on the characters' faces don't translate well. This may sound harsh, but in terms of human visual performances, Appleseed plays like a cheesy videogame cut scene. Saying that, however, the mecha elements are done extremely well and you do get a lot of kickass scenes you could never accomplish with traditional animation.
The English version has some disappointingly poor voice acting, with Briareos as the only exception. The Japanese version sounded a lot better, though in the end both versions suffer from your usual cliché story and dialog problems. The music, for the most part is pretty cool, though I admit I'm not a fan of electronic/pop beats; nonetheless, I still think that the music flowed with the movie very well.
In the end, after you get over the the fact that this movie doesn't involve anything as deep and profound as you would find in Ghost in the Shell, you see that it's all about kicking ass and looking good. It is a lot of fun, though to be honest, I wasn't expecting it to be as cliché as it was. To be really honest the only thing that caught my interest in this movie when I first heard about it was that Shinji Aramaki of Bubblegum Crisis fame was the director.
~ Lynk Former
