Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a mouth watering review of APPLESEED... If you're not aware of this Japanese animated film, click here for the trailer! Just make sure you have a napkin near by to catch your drool. This thing looks absolutely gorgeous. The lucky "Sorceror Bat" got to take a look at this flick and decided to share the love below!
To set the scene- Osaka. The city that became and always will be Blade Runner. Towering skyscrapers venting steam into the rain soaked air. People scuttling between shopping malls under pastel coloured umbrellas. Pylons, hoardings and air-con. The cinema is my refuge.
The lights dim. Trailers- Godzilla: Final Wars (ROOAR!). Steamboy (woo-hoo!). Crimson River 2 (the Japanese just LOVE Jean Reno) and the gently wistful Cutie Honey (one for Harry and his conscience). Anyway, enough of that- let's get going!
The film opens with a long panning shot of a collapsed city. Uh oh. Could this be another 'Final Fantasy: the spirits within'? But then the richness of the scenery sucks you in. There's a living glow about everything that makes it hard to believe you aren't looking at a real city, or at least a miniature. You begin to relax and enjoy the view. And then the action kicks in. Wallop. Snipers! Big fast evil barehanded skull crushing robots! Athletic young women taking on bloody great concrete-smashing tanks! Yee-hah! This opening sequence has the lot. And then we are lifted away from the war-zone, to the utopian city of Olympus. A huge plane breaks through the clouds, to the opening strings of Basement Jaxx's 'Good Luck' as the credits begin, and you can feel the sun on your face.
Appleseed plays like the offspring of the Animatrix, in particular the 'Second Renaissance' and 'Matriculated' sections. Visual ideas from both have been altered and refined until a new style emerges, building up layers of information, simplifying them, and adding more layers until each frame sings. The look is stylised rather than photorealistic, and the risk has paid off big time. In the same way that Antz won over A Bug's Life, the move away from perfection has added oodles of character to the visuals, bringing cold metal to shimmering life.
Avalon gave us a hint of things to come, but where that film tended to wander off and pretend to be deep, teasing us with snatches of grinding metal, this film really delivers. The action is great. Really cool. I won't say any more about it, or I'll get overexcited.
I should mention the hiccups. The villain with the squint, eye shadow and the sinister laugh is evil enough without being called Hades. The male lead's name 'Briareus' comes out in Japanese as the clunky 'Buriarieusu'.
Emphasis on blindngly cool wordless action sequences means that plot tends to get squashed into long stretches of exposition. And strangely, although machines are gloriously designed, the architecture of this utopia is god awful- our heroine lives in a bland brick clad bungalow in a city of plain skyscrapers. A couple of other niggles could be to do with the language of Manga/Anime. Male faces are rich caricatures, whereas women are Barbie dolls, in particular the simpering 'Hitomi'. The pace, camera angles and delivery of a sentimental flashback sequence is scarily reminiscent of a computer game cutaway.
But back to the good.
The animation job on all of the robots is utterly fantastic. These are BIG bastards, and you can feel the sheer weight and momentum of them, while the motion capture gives you a sense of the person inside. The love that has been put into the technical details is fetishistic to the point of indecency.
The LandMate exoskeleton. Yum yum. Tougher than the Loaders in Aliens, meaner than ED 209, faster than Akira's bike. These things are seriously lovely, and realised down to the last nut and bolt. God, to see them bloom open ready for a driver is a joy to behold. There's a great detail where the driver's tiddly armour-clad arms stick out of the robots ribs, dwarfed by the huge mimicking robot arms above. A film featuring these babies alone would have sold me, but there's more.
Superathletic whip wielding chrome buttoxed robo-vixens. Robocop with bunny ears. BIG guns. Solar powered Arcologies. And then there are the Superfortresses. Just wait till you clap eyes on those beauties!
This film- wow. I loved it. This is one hell of a robot movie. A gut crushing chrome plated robot movie. I had a silly grin on my face the whole way through, and after as I stomped around Osaka in the rain.
I'll write something about GITS later on; it's interesting to compare and contrast.
I'll be... Sorceror Bat.
