This must be the year for turning video games into feature-length movies - a nice change from turning movies into games.
The latest entry in this burgeoning genre is Hironobu Sakaguchi's Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.
The film was produced by the same company (Square) that produced the Final Fantasy games, with Sakaguchi, the creator of the games themselves, acting as the film's co-director and co-producer.
The story is basic science fiction/fantasy with the corresponding wooden dialog and implausible action. The characterizations, too, suffer from the B-grade values common to sci-fi flicks in general.
But the remarkable thing about the film is not its content but its form: It's entirely computer-generated, right down to the "transparency of the teeth" and the eye sockets of the characters.
The film is, in fact, a breakthrough of its kind, leaving far behind the plastic world of Toy Story. Here we enter the quasi-real.
The settings seem actual, and the animation of the two main characters (voiced by Ming-Na and Donald Sutherland) is breathtaking.
Breathtakingly narrow, too, is the gap between what technology is capable of today and what it will accomplish on that day in the very near future when even a savvy audience will not be able to tell the difference between compu-gen and the real thing.
But that day, so close you can almost see the smog over Tokyo, has yet to arrive, and if this film acts as a bellwether of the times, it is also a warning buoy to the compu-gen films which will come after it.
What warnings does it peal? What are the rocky shores that threaten the development of this new and exciting genre?
Let's look directly at some of the problems of the film itself.- The minor characters all look alike. Their animated movement and expressions are wooden and queer - not quite right.
Whatever pod these people crawled out of, they would not fool a clever three-year-old for two minutes. Obviously, they received much less time and attention than the principle characters did.
- It's wrong to try to fool the eye. Obviously, that's what this film wants to do. At times it succeeds. But whether it succeeds or fails, it's got us thinking about technical wizardry rather than being carried away in the story.
Take a page from other forms of animation; it's not about looking real, it's about looking interesting. Animation looks more interesting than reality: Keep it that way.
- There's something about the light in compu-gen settings that reminds me of the big films of the '80s - smooth, featureless, beautiful light. Scrap that.
Better (and by that I suppose I mean "worse") light will open our eyes to the world being lit.
- Characters must have character. The "stars" of this film have it; they are people and seem individual and real. (I'm not talking now about the way they're animated, but their overall look, the way they're drawn.)
However, in support you've got voices like those of James Woods and Steve Buscemi. These are some weird-looking dudes. They have distinct voices that simply ooze character.
Somehow I don't believe Buscemi's nasal whine is leaking from the android you've got fronting for him.
Maybe it would be better, at this stage, to use lesser actors for your voice-overs, at least until you're ready to create characters as off-beat in their looks and presentation as these two men.
Final Fantasy is not bad science fiction. It's not bad action.
And it's the best compu-gen we've got going.
If that kind of thing appeals to you.
Copyright Daily Nebraskan Online
