Final Fantasy the movie
Posted on August 21, 2001 @ 09:25 in General
I went to see Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within yesterday and I'm impressed. The most impressive feat I think is that they managed to tell an engrossing, captivating story even though the character animation is not perfect. (And it won't be everybody's story; I've been thoroughly deformed by decades of sci-fi, cyberpunk and manga.) It's strange that this movie is hyped because it's incredible human character animation, which in technical terms it undoubtedly is, but it doesn't exactly match up against real actors... yet.
I could tell you about peripheral characters with the facial expression of a Quake character, the fact that serious dialogue even between the more detailed characters broke my suspension of disbelief a couple of times, but that's not the point. What struck me is that with human animated characters, as opposed to the more cartoonish characters of for instance Toy Story and Shrek, also came a more actor oriented camera direction. One of the shots, quite early in the movie, is an over-the-shoulder shot, following a character into a room where other characters are. Treating the characters as actors, allowing for certain subjective overlaps in identification that we know from other movies, in my opinion, really sets this movie apart from other animated movies. A lot of animated movies suffer from a certain "objectness" of the characters; although there is a certain emotional involvement with the character, the character usually stays in the shot in such a way that the subjective overlap between viewer and character on the screen is impossible. Final Fantasy I enjoyed as a whole and I think it would be wrong to judge it in terms of the human character animation, however technically advanced it may be.They simply reached a level of animation sufficient to be believable in the world of the movie, in the story that is told.
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