Appleseed

Directed by Shinji Aramaki
Written by Haruka Handa, Tsutomu Kamishiro, Masamune Shirow (comic)

Ah, the double-edged sword of the CG-heavy sci-fi movie. On the one hand, their makers are usually so concerned with showing off all the cool things they can do that they neglect to tell a compelling story in an interesting way (I'm looking right at you, Wachowskis), and on the other hand, all the cool things they have to show off, frankly, don't look very good (again, Wachowskis).

In these respects, kudos to the makers of Appleseed of making a movie which is interesting, sort of, and also looks good, sort of.

Putting aside what I think I remember of the original Appleseed movie (wasn't this just a cop show?), the plot (involving the uneasy relationship between mankind and a new race of "bioroids"(cloned, synthetic human beings not unlike the Replicants of Blade Runner, complete with truncated lifespan), and the dying romance between a troubled ex-soldier and an even-more-troubled soldier-turned-cyborg-cop (Briareos, pictured above)) wound up having a bit more depth than your average PS2 game cutscene, and aside from some crummy water, fire, smoke, and broken glass effects (I've finally decided that CG programmers are NEVER going to get those right, so I don't even pay attention anymore), I must to say that much of the non-character animation was the best I've ever seen.

Much of the non-character animation was, in fact, as good as the character animation was bad, which is to say the character animation was extraordinarily bad. Their movements, which according to the credits was based on motion-capture, ranged from okay-that-was-weird to what-the-hell-was-that. The faces, also based on human models according to the credits, were as alien, frightening, and expressionless as porcelain masks (also shiny). Watching these faces reciting some already pretty bad dialgoue was...not something I'd like to see in another movie, ever.

You'll find a lot to be annoyed about in Appleseed, but with its complex (if a bit overwrought) plot and great non-character animation, it's certainly not as bad as it could have been. In fact, if you're way into either anime or sci-fi, it's probably worth a viewing. If you really want to see some engaging, human, intelligent, and well-animated sci-fi, though, you should watch the Ghost in the Shell movies, or better yet, Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade or the criminally underrated Patlabor: WXIII.