Movies/Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within

Ethan and I both very much enjoyed it.

I liked best the way the movie was about the story, and not the special effects, or the curse words, or the actors' physical attributes. I also liked that the story was fairly straightforward, not overly clever.

All of these reminded me of the some of the best Japanese anime I've seen; Princess Mononoke came to mind.

I also liked the way the animation let them get the effects -- holographic controls, phantoms, that cool hard-landing goo, some nifty POV shots, etc. -- they wanted, as easily as any other effect.

I feel guilty quibbling, but I wasn't overly impressed with the character animation. Motion capture has a particular jerky quality to it that came through in the finished movie. They needed better puppetry or more control points, or something. There were little physical touches missing, too, things like Pixar's plants swaying realistically or the muscles jiggling on Disney's dinosaurs. Come to think of it, the lemurs' fur was way better than Aki's hair. Still, I'm glad they released what they did, and I'm very glad there is another group doing feature-scale photo-realistic rendered work, and I'm sure they'll only get better as time goes on.

Ethan's main quibble: he went expecting to see a lot of stuff from the games, since it is a "FF" movie, after all, but he says there wasn't really any. So, nice SF movie for him, but not really much in the way of FF. -- Peter Kaminski, 20010713