rangerBlog - March 21st, 2007

07:01 am - Appleseed (You fail at movie)

I saw the 2004 Appleseed movie finally. Amazingly, I didn't download it, will wonders never cease!
(Admittedly, this is just 'cause it was on Google Video...)

I don't like Appleseed. I didn't like the OVA, which was very... weird and unbalanced. The movie was okay- but it makes Briareos (who shone in the OVA) supremely boring and uninteresting. (Deunan comes off better here though.)

The movie is BEAUTIFUL, striking that lovely balance between CG and cell-style without feeling like mocap-mannequins. It also has lots of beautiful and intricate settings and models that are seen... once. "Let's fly through a fully realized cityscape, not for a second- but for three solid minutes, as we talk." The movie STOPS for that sequence to show off.

And impressive as it is? It's also extremely obnoxious. If this wasn't CGI, and they did 3 minutes of solid matte paintings of the city in action, people would bitch. Well I'm bitching ANYWAY. Yes, it's CGI, and that makes the effort involved enormous and helaciously impressive- but that doesn't change the fact that's it's narratively WRONG.

This checklist is by no means complete- but lets take a look at the ratio of things in the movie vs. things in the movie which are properly explored.

[ ]Cyberpunk and issues of consciousness
[ ]Global Civil War
[ ]Backstory of Olympus
[*]Kick-ass Robot Battlsuits
[*]Gaea/Council Relationship
[ ]Gaea Itself
[ ]Relationships between characters
[ ]Hitomi is special!
[*]Mankind is a hopeless creature given over to violence and bigotry, who does not deserve to live. (But don't worry, its not really central to the movie's plot, we're just throwing that in because every big anime movie has to do this riff.)
[ ]Wait- S.W.A.T.? L.A.P.D.? ...how far in the future is this?
[ ]what's with her father? He's mentioned like 80 times and I still have no clue who he's supposed to be. I guess he's connected to the missing chunk of LAPD backstory.
[ ]How long were you in the badlands?
[ ]The Bioroids are better because... Eloi are a utopian state to be aspired to?
[ ]...is Deunan secretly a bioroid? Everyone acts like she isn't, so I guess not, but it makes so much sense for her to be one given the backstory. </i>I suppose her being human made more sense in the original source material.</i>
[ ]Why was your mother making a virus to destroy mankind in the first place?

"CHECK OUT OUR AWESOME UNIVERSE! IT'S BIG AND BROAD, AND IT MAKES AWESOME VIDEO GAMES!"
"This movie does, broadly, make sense, but the sheer NUMBER of barely-touched-on elements that are indispensably central to the plot makes it very hard to figure out what the fuck is going on. 'Oh, what? I guess Hitomi is someone important now... nice to mention that before this.' "
"YEAH, THE VIDEO GAMES AND MANGA HAVE LIKE 20 HOURS OF STORY. BUT WE LOVE THEM SO MUCH WE COULDN'T BEAR TO CUT ANYTHING OUT."
"You fail."

It's an okay cross-section of a universe- but it's pretty terrible as a movie. And the cynical, bitter twisted section of my stomach whispers to me- "They're just doing this so they can have their own Ghost in the Shell franchise, with the big showy movies and the cerebral anime series that actually explores the universe."
I have 2 problems with that.

1) The Stand Alone Complex series works because it's so aggressively cyberpunk. It's not about the 'OMGLOL, OUR UNIVERZ IS TEH ROXORZ,' it's about speculative futurism, and the core-premise of the series 'the human mind will meet digital' is just an open-ended doorway to explore that. In short- it works (and I can take its ponderous self-importance seriously) because the universe is not defined, and these stories explore the implications of the single, central core premise.
Appleseed is not an open-ended futurist doorway. It's an anime saga about corruption, utopianism, war, cyborgs- etc. The universe is already established- aggressively, and if they try to do a ponderously self-important Appleseed series exploring the world-- it will fall on its ass.
When Star Trek did stories about alien biology that were allegories for the human condition, it had gravitas. When it started doing stories about alien biology that were 'hey, this is neat, lets play with that!' it became trite. When it started doing stories about alien biology that were 'lets add layers of complexity to the alien biology we previously established, and make THAT the core of the story,' people stopped watching.

SAC : About the human condition. Appleseed : Not.

2) I hated the Ghost in the Shell movie.
The series is okay.