Appleseed (2004) 9/10

What happens when some Japanese filmmakers without the brain damage make a fully CG movie? You get Appleseed, what Advent Children SHOULD have been. Damn you SquareEnix.

Riding high on the recent popularity of Masamune Shirow's various Ghost in the Shell incarnations somebody felt that the less than impressive Appleseed OAV (1988) was worth re-visiting. Of course instead of just re-hashing the same old crap this version is condensed into an impressive 100 odd minute movie with a tighter, more interesting storyline packaged in the coolest CG since...well....ever.

This movie gets HUGE marks on the technical side. The backgrounds here are nothing new but great nevertheless, the futuristic city of Olympus is rendered here in exquisite detail as is to be expected in this modern CG age. The mechs and action sequences here are top notch with shit realistically blowing up left and right and giant walking fortresses fucking over the city like nobody's business. The music is great though I'm not a huge personal fan of the techno songs here and the voice acting is great as always with anime. The REAL great stuff here is the animation of the main characters. Instead of the hideous "attempt at reality" that many recent CG efforts have inflicted on us *cough* Advent Children *cough* we get a really great set of cell shaded CG characters in an anime style, big eyes and all. Since I'm an anime fan first and foremost I have been impressed with this style before in Tales of Symphonia. Why this hasn't been done before I don't know. To explain, cell shading is where the 3D model is only rendered using 2-3 colours, this makes the characters look like traditional animation on a very impressive fully rendered background. The main character Deunan Knute, the blonde, green-eyed heroine is the hottest CG animated babe I've seen so far. VERY impressive.

The plot here isn't bad for your average anime movie. Deunan Knute (pronounced Deunan Knute) is a pretty hot looking soldier girl who's been fighting in WWIII and gets scooped up by some commandos from Olympus and whisked off to the new, non-WWII Warsaw looking, CITY OF TOMORROW. Here she meets up with her former boyfriend Briareos (pronounced Briareos) who has been turned into a cyborg after being seriously injured in a battle elsewhere. It turns out Deunan is a popular person as her father was once a great soldier and her mother was pretty much the scientific architect behind Olympus's fancy new idea of society. You see about half the people in Olympus are Bioroids, genetically altered people who have their emotions repressed in order to act as buffers between all those hot-headed, warmongering, diva-ish normal humans. Of course as with all genetically engineered peoples they have a limited life span, are sterile, and must undergo routine "stop from pulling a guy at the end of Last Crusade" treatments. The city is run by a Bioroid president but the military is run by a bunch of humans who take to Bioroids like Republicans take to gay marriage. This brilliant setup can't go wrong can it? The city is also controlled (there's alot of chefs in the kitchen by this point) by a massive supercomputer (isn't there always a massive supercomputer) that discusses it's logical decision making with 7 human elders to provide a human perspective. It seems this final group wields the true power in Olympus but usually don't meddle too much in the affairs of the other 2 groups. At least until this movie gets started.

The movie's story revolves around how each faction wants to run the new society. The Bioroids are under constant threat by not only the dependency on the anti-horrible-death treatments but a horrible-instant-death virus kept by Gaia and the elders to snuff the Bioroids en masse should things require some snuffing. The military figures they can run things better (as the military always seems to think) and is keen to encourage the pre-mature mass snuffing to get the ball rolling. The elders have their own agenda but this is revealed later in the film.

I liked the plot here and the sections of explanation are well split up by some pretty frequent action scenes. This movie doesn't dwell as much on the incessant yammering of the main characters as the 2 Ghost in the Shell movies do so don't be alarmed by the fact the original mangas were both written by the same guy.

Other than a couple of less than perfectly rendered scenes I can't find anything wrong with this movie. Sooooo. Recommended.