Fantastic. This is the best computer animated film I have seen yet, I enjoyed it more than FINAL FANTASY (yes I loved final fantasy, me and about 3 others). Of course I am also a huge fan of Shirow Masamune. His Intron Depot books are amazing, and I always loved the Appleseed Manga, though wasn’t much of a fan of the original anime, though I do have it on VHS. My only real complaints are that this seems to suffer a bit from the Akira complex. They are trying to fit too much story into too little time, and my second complaint is that it is dubbed. I would much prefer to hear the original Japanese language track with subtitles. Most the voices were all right, though Hitomi’s voice was downright annoying.

Humanity is ripped apart by world war, and one warrior is the best of the best, out in the ruins of the world. Her name is Deunan. Her old partner Briareos now lives in a Utopian society run by a computer called Gia and a ruling council of elders. Briareos was almost killed and is now mostly cyborg, though he still loves Deunan. The society is half human and half bioroid, a genetically engineered humanoid that cannot bread on it’s own, and has it’s emotions suppressed. It was created to help humanity survive, but their is trouble in paradise and the Human’s running the military want to destroy all bioroids using a virus stored on top of the computer, but they don’t know they actual purpose of this virus. It is up to Deanan to rediscover where her mother’s research is hidden and save both the bioroids and humanity with the help of Briareos and a Landmate (about the coolest designed mechs I have ever seen).

The animation is fantastic, and I loved the blend of realistic animation and cell shading, which didn’t have the false reality that so many people hated in FINAL FANTASTY (though I loved it). Also the artwork seemed very true to the original manga, but translated very well into 3D. The use of motion capture gives a very realistic sense of motion, and I think really worked for this anime. It is just too bad this couldn’t have been a series so it could go more into ESWAT’s story before tackling this huge part of the Appleseed story. I have heard a sequel is in the works though. Woohoo!

The action was amazing, and I loved seeing mono-filament whip in action! That was too cool!

I also enjoy the soundtrack, but I like the Boom Boom Satellites.

This anime is amazing. I just hope the DVD has the original Japanese with subtitles! And too bad it wasn’t projected digitally.

Luckily the DVD has been announces, and it has 3 versions (the most expensive with an action figure) and it is subtitled. I wonder if the letter I wrote had anything to do with it? Ha, I doubt it.

The Special Edition is pretty nice. In a nice Metal Case, and came with a figure of Briareos. The Feature disc looks great, except for some color banding. Looks like the 8 Bit MPEG 2 caught up with them a bit, and the could have used some dithering to fix that up a bit, too many colors maybe, but it looks great and sounds great other than that.

The second disc has a doc in Japanese on the making of, with interviews with the creators and some footage of the Motion Capture for movement, action and facial animations, which were all different people, though some people played multiple characters. I actually wish their was more footage of that shooting stuff, and some of the motion capture data being applied to the rough animations, but it is a good documentary in Japanese with English subtitles. Interesting how the facial animation people were different, and couldn’t move their bodies, and have to have no makeup or anything for the dots to stick to their faces. Though I think the big eyes tended to take away a bit from the emotion the characters conveyed, but that may be just me. Actually I thought the faces were hand animated and not motion captured like the bodies, though of course they did both, interesting that in Japanese the lip sync is perfect though, which makes that awful English dub even worse. And damn that stunt girl is bad ass. running and flipping around on the motion capture stage. Wow.