When I first saw the shots for this anime, I thought “wow”. As I finally got to watch this after having it for so long, and then finally buying the DVD (which I got a few weeks ago), the words “wow” do not justify the awesome magnitude, passion and love of this movie that the people creating it had given.
Let’s talk about animation and artwork first. Simply put, this is the most amazing rendering of environments that we would consider realistic. Let’s take Toy Story, it’s a wonderfully created world, but everything looks bold, everything looks…cartoony. Take every Disney CG movie, and everything still looks cartoony, and I guess that is the whole point and the reason for the way they are.
Now let’s take Final Fantasy Spirits Within – as character animation went, it was pretty disappointing as the characters were meant to look and behave like humans, yet they managed to move and look like mannequins with indigestion.
What this movie does is create the environments, and about 90% of the movie in CGI, whereas the remaining 10% is 2D animation. The mixture of 3d and 2d is exquisite for most of the time. Very occasionally they seem so far apart that it does distract you and remove you from the world you’re watching.
Initially this mix of styles is abstract, but as the movie continues, you fail to notice that there are two different animation methods in progress and your viewing becomes ignorant of this, creating a seamless view. I cannot emphasise enough how amazing the CGI is in this movie – it’s truly inspiring to see how CGI can be used for the “better”.
The 2D art is by contrast clean and simple, with animation being standard for most of the time, and sometimes amazing at other times. It varies, for the most part you accept that the 2D animation could never match the detail or beauty.
The plot is explicitly simple, so if you’re looking for a Ghost in the Shell or Matrix style complication of philosophies then pass on this
The acoustics are presented in 5.1 Dolby or DTS, and are absolutely sharp and fantastic. The shrieking of the engines, the sound of the wind, the rumbling engine of the bike across dirty terrain. It’s all so amazingly created to match the beauty of the animation and artwork. The way the sound and music is implemented has been thoughtfully done, with some superb fading in and out of sound and music, operatic crescendos and so on. It’s clever, it’s different and it works leaps and bounds. Superb stuff.
Wonderful Days itself (supposedly to be renamed “Sky Blue”, or “Blue Sky” and dubbed in English for the West, complete with plot changes!) is a movie about two casts of people: The Marr and the Ecobans. After a war and intense pollution, the future looks bleak. With this in mind, a number of people decide to create a new future. One of the people leading this future is Dr Noah, who decides that having polluted the environment they could reuse the pollution as energy.
Unfortunately, the greedy amongst the creators of the future decide to take control, by using pollution as a continued resource for energy – of course this is a bad idea, and proves to be true when the dark clouds of pollution cover the blue sky and cause havoc with the environment. Things that require sun do not grow or die.
Simply put, this is the most amazing rendering of environments that we would consider realistic
Thus two casts are created, one cast the Marr are teh slaves and the workers that do all the work in the polluted environment, They are the refugees who were not selected to survive with the Ecoban. The Ecoban use the Marr to create the pollution, killing without mercy those that rebel. No one within a generation or two remembers what the sky looks like.
Except one guy, Dr Noah, who left the city of Ecoban in a pursuit of making the Ecoban see the error of their ways, more pollution would continue to increase enegry resources, but at the expense of their own demise.
He mentions the blue sky and the Sun to a young Ecoban named Shua. Shua is friends with Jay, and there’s a third fella and essentially we have a love triangle. Other fella loves Jay who loves Shua, who loves her back but hates the other fella because the other fella framed him as a kid and left him to die.
In anycase Shua and Jay are the only two, of the young uns that have seen the blue sky. Shua asks Jay to promise hm to see it again one day when they grow up. On that day, Shua disappears and the sky never returns.
The mixture of 3d and 2d is exquisite for most of the time
Shua has grown up and has become a device for Dr Noah to stop the machine that uses the pollution to create energy, to protect the Marr and to awaken the Ecoban to responsibility for the people and the world. As an ex-Ecoban, Shua was trained in fighting and knows the systems inside out. He joins a group of Marr rebels in a fight to stop the Ecoban. These are social misfits all passion for the cause but no brains. Amongst them is a kid named Woody, Shua adopts him as his brother and take him under his wing to protect him and teach him right from wrong, essentially a father figure.
The movie has a lot passion, there is no question about that. The plot is explicitly simple, so if you’re looking for a Ghost in the Shell or Matrix style complication of philosophies then pass on this. The characters aren’t very complex, nor are they intricately engaging, but they “float” and they work. THe bond that does work is between Shua and Woody, it’s short but sweet and works very well.
At 90 minutes it crams a lot in, the majority of the movie is frantic, but when it slows down its almost poetic, a ballet of images to images, spinning around each other creating animation – it’s jaw dropping. This is not in the same scale as Akira (though it obviously has been influenced by some elemnents of cyber punk, the riot scene and the bikes being just two examples), it’s not as complicated as Ghost in the Shell. I don’t think it’s trying to be. I think if the Director made a movie with people, then this would be it. It seems to have been made to look as realistic as possible hence he prolly couldn’t afford actors and did it using computers (at 13billion WON I dunno if it’s a lot!), and for the most part succeeds, if not completely.
Verdict: Simple, linear but entertaining.