This movie would have worked so much better if it'd had a director who actually knew how to properly tell a story. The basic idea behind the narrative is actually an interesting one, but the characters and the background to the story are never properly established. It feels like many of the scenes are presented in the wrong order, which necessitates lots of backtracking where the characters basically have to explain what's going on - i.e. lots of boring talk which could have been avoided if the director had just found a way to let the story speak for itself.
The horribly cliché-ridden "emotional" scenes don't really help either. The same goes for some of the action, like the initial scene where Deutan or whatever her name is does the full Matrix spinning-around-in-the-air-in-slow-motion routine. Not new, not exciting. To continue with the complaining I also found 90% of the music absolutely horrible... some sort of crap techno nu-metal equivalent.
All which, to come to my conclusion, is a shame since the animation is at times absolutely stunning. Granted, the close-ups don't always work very well (I wish they'd taken a more traditional approach to the facial animation in-stead of relying so much on motion capture) but some of the action scenes are among the best I've seen. For fans of traditional anime I suppose this animation method is a bit like cheating (they've recorded real actors' movements, translated these to 3D models and then "cartoon shaded" the models) but when it yields results as good as when the landmates (?) attack the bioroids' headquarter it's hard not to see the advantages.
Long live the cyborgs! But if you let them tell a story it would probably look like this.
The horribly cliché-ridden "emotional" scenes don't really help either. The same goes for some of the action, like the initial scene where Deutan or whatever her name is does the full Matrix spinning-around-in-the-air-in-slow-motion routine. Not new, not exciting. To continue with the complaining I also found 90% of the music absolutely horrible... some sort of crap techno nu-metal equivalent.
All which, to come to my conclusion, is a shame since the animation is at times absolutely stunning. Granted, the close-ups don't always work very well (I wish they'd taken a more traditional approach to the facial animation in-stead of relying so much on motion capture) but some of the action scenes are among the best I've seen. For fans of traditional anime I suppose this animation method is a bit like cheating (they've recorded real actors' movements, translated these to 3D models and then "cartoon shaded" the models) but when it yields results as good as when the landmates (?) attack the bioroids' headquarter it's hard not to see the advantages.
Long live the cyborgs! But if you let them tell a story it would probably look like this.