Review : Appleseed on DVD

One of the most eye candy heavy movies I have ever seen is the Japanese computer animation movie Appleseed. I love watching the rich depiction of sci-fi tapestry that is this movie. This has to be one of the most ambitions pieces of animation to come out of Japan this decade.

Appleseed is based on the manga sci-fi epic masterpiece by Masamune Shirow. Most serious sci-fi literature fans would put his work up with the ranks of Asimov, William Gibson and Philip K Dick. So the very attempt at trying to make a movie with the vision but believably engrossing world that was though up by Shirow is a massive effort that could have gone horribly wrong. Appleseed is one of the projects that he did before Ghost In the Shell and it is beloved by hard core Manga and Anime fans around the world.

The filmmakers had to make some hard choices about what to include and what not to include in a normal slightly long movie script. They had to make a new storyline with elements from the first two chapters of the Appleseed storyline with some new angles and interpretations. If the just made the script from the comic it would have been weeks long and would be dense and incomprehensible for the average viewer. When I first saw the restructuring of the story it did bring a bad taste to the mouth but when I saw the movie as a whole I could live with the changes. I am a bit biased in that I am intimately familiar with the context and subject of the manga storyline and it would be hard to gage how a viewer would grasp the hard and fast philosophical ethics in the movie.

Even if you don't get the plot it is a purely enjoyable visible treat. The difficulty of making a movie out of Appleseed is almost to the scale of making a movie of Lord of the Rings or Neuromancer.

This is a visual experiences that ranks up there with Fantasia and Akira. The entire movie is done in a mixture of stylized 3d animation with anime cel-shading and some realistic backgrounds and effects. They spent a majority of their rather large budget on hiring an small army of 3d modelers and animators. I think they defiantly surpassed Final Fantasy Spirits Within in scope and unlike Spirits Within they actually made money at the box office.

The cel shading helps the viewer process the characters as animation and it is easier to sympathize with the characters than the Uncanny Valley of attempted hyper realistic 3d animated humans. The robotic suits, giant gun platforms, massive Utopian cityscapes, cyborgs and action sequences are wonderfully faithfully reproduced from Masamune Shirow's artwork and seem larger than life. I got goosebumps for the last twenty minutes. There was a good mix of motion capture and hand key frame animation and after a few minutes you can empathize with the cel shaded animated forms and follow the conversations as if it was normal actors. Pixar who? Lucas who?

It is a bloody shame that this did not see a major theatrical release because I think it could have swept up in the US. I see that this movie is going to be released on the PSP UMD format and this would be one the better animated movies on the PSP. This is the first movie that I would get on Blu-Ray and a HDTV. There are two DVD sets. The single disc version just has the movie in Japanese or dubbed English and the two disk set has a disk of making of extras.

A reason why this movie is artistically important is because it could show what a computer animated stylized world looks like on a post PS3 level of graphical complexity. That being said this movie does not disappoint and is a cool choice for a Saturday night action popcorn movie. Did I mention this movie was visually freaking unbelievable? Ok good.