Directors: Tetsuya Nomura and Takeshi Nozue
126 minutes (12) 2009
Sony 4K Ultra HD
Rating: 7/10
Review by Christopher Geary
This genre picture is entirely unreal. It was state-of-the-art digital animation for the year it was first produced and, even putting its fantasy content aside, it’s impossible to review this kind of movie fairly without commenting upon the visuals and the medium they were created in. Said images frequently achieve surprising degrees of photo-realism, with skin (though, admittedly, too free of random blemishes for convincing people) and eyes being presented with quite impressive clarity, opacity, reflectivity, and luminosity. Hardware is particularly well served, throughout, whether tangled detailing on stained or dusty ruins, or the appealing lustre of shiny futuristic machines. Textiles are imperfectly rendered but less attention is given to drapes and looser clothing (patterned after top designers?) than is awarded to flesh and muscle tones.
Sadly, voice-actors (whether they speak Japanese or English) sometimes fail to properly sell an emotive or sympathetic performance by the animated characters half as well as relevant sound effects help convince viewers that splashes in pools and puddles, or the random noise of rainy weather are entirely natural and synchronous with environments. Of course, decades of exposure to audio tracks generated entirely by sound design, and the remarkable work of Foley artists, ensures that a majority of viewers should have few problems in accepting digitally-generated backgrounds as location settings for unfolding dramas, but - for these animated characters - there remains the viewing problem of the ‘uncanny valley’.
Somewhat perversely, the harder that such 3D anime strives to produce any believable human figures and faces, the more that - even unskilled - viewers might unconsciously ‘reject’ the delicate balancing act of creativity and software which blatantly attempts to accurately imitate life. When such presentations approach perfection, their tinniest flaws simply loom ever larger than life itself. Discernable ‘imperfections’ in this illusion of life are not to be confused with commonplace human faults. They are, instead, entirely the flaws of something inhuman, and their manufactured state is always readily apparent no matter what the context, so any illusion of life here remains only partial and viewers are likely to instinctively disengage from the drama.
As ever with such genre productions, the biggest single flaw in the filmic narrative is not the presence of hackneyed dialogue or lack of believability for some fantastic aspects, but the movements and placement of virtual cameras. Simply put, there is just far too much ultra-fast cutting from one angle to another, and jittery whizzing about in midair, or swirling around in circles (that on a real film set would expose the ‘fourth wall’), and this amounts to a rather childish misuse of the possibilities available for such animation. Virtual cameras unwittingly compromise the - sometimes passable - test of basic physics within portraits of imaginary worlds.
It does not help matters that the main plot is wholly incomprehensible. Viewer might struggle to make sense of mystic nonsense crashing into explorations of otherworldly SF themes, such as the ‘geo-stigma’ disease that’s somehow being passed onto humans by the ailing planet. Visually, if not quite thematically, the influence of The Matrix films is evident in fighting scenes, where both the sword-play heroes (how do the spindly-limbed youngsters wield unfeasibly over-sized weapons?) and unarmed combatants lurch across the screen with gravity-defying leaps over tall buildings, and rather wretchedly silly notions of boot-strap help-mates who each hurl the hero upwards, like throwing a relay-race baton flung up the side of a skyscraper.
Nevertheless, this newly revised 4K edition is the director’s cut of the 2005 animated movie (100 minutes, cert. PG), and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete is hugely enjoyable, if you can overlook the amusingly ridiculous character names, like Cloud and Rude, and your appreciation of genre action cinema is not hindered by much intolerance for the confusing absurdities of variously convoluted and lengthy 3D-cartoon sequences. The planet’s mythic Life-stream infecting humans with geo-stigma disease as the central problem is a worthy ecological metaphor (a witty riff on the Gaia hypothesis) and it means the plot seems less vital to anime movies like this. FF7:ACC is best viewed as a collection of action sequences and visual poetry - like visionary vignettes of digital art - on SF themes of survival. Its fantastical artistic qualities and stunning exercises in stylish photo-real animation are of much greater importance than story-telling and genre-narrative concerns. Most effective as an expression of artistry inspired by the possibilities and impressions from game-play in an extraordinary fairy-tale franchise, this is basically an atypical sci-fi movie. Although it delivers frequently astonishing images of post-industrial city-scape and giant monster-fighting in a dystopian world, it hardly matters that many scenes defy the natural physics of motion and gravity, because it's the hyper-kinetics of super-hero traditions that are most clearly being respected here, not any conventional reality.
Magically fabulous, this movie boasts PRA (photo-real animation) of superior quality than 3D-styled ‘Hypermarionation’ for Gerry Anderson’s TV series New Captain Scarlet (2005). Despite its complete lack of actors on-screen, there’s more genuinely imaginative artistry here than can be found in Disney’s techno-fetishistic TRON: Legacy (2010), although that was more about quest gamers and explanatory narrative than this. FF7:ACC was followed by Takeshi Nozue’s equally impressive Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV (2016).
