![]() They are realistic, but they are not real, and their unreality is emphasised by giving them the familiar voices of Sutherland, Woods, Ving Rhames and Steve Buscemi, to whom they bear little physical resemblance. They're neither flesh-and-blood people we can respond to nor are they animated figures that we take to heart the way we do Bambi, Dumbo and the inhabitants of the nursery in Toy Story.īecause we're thinking of how they were produced, we're as unmoved by them as we are by the waxworks at Madame Tussaud's or by the protagonists of computer games. Thereafter, the characters fall between two stools. My wonderment had abated after the first two sequences - a mysterious dream in which the heroine thinks she's on an alien planet, and her venture into a blitzed and abandoned Manhattan. The novelty of the technique wears off quite quickly. ![]() The movie alternates between banal chat and violent action with the characters always talking very slowly. Sid's assistant, Aki Ross, is beautiful, intrepid and resourceful, like Ripley from the Alien series, and she's assisted by a commando team led by a Ben Affleck lookalike that's right out of James Cameron's Aliens. Opposing Sid is the gung-ho General Hein (James Woods), who urges an all-out war against this enemy. A kindly old scientist, Dr Sid (voiced by Donald Sutherland), a believer in Gaia, the earth spirit, argues that these deadly, diaphanous creatures can be neutralised by combining the power of seven spirits that lurk in fish, plants and birds around the world. The co-author of the script is Al Reinert, who won an Oscar for the screenplay of Apollo 13, and the film is a set in a future in which a tribe of malevolent aliens known as the Phantoms have invaded our planet, destroying New York and threatening the extinction of mankind. Square's vice-president and director of the film has said: 'Our actors are always willing to work on time and take direction', but in fact such a film is more expensive and labour-intensive than one with live performers. But here, so we're told, the heroine's hair is made up of 60,000 individual strands and it responds to breeze and movement. In the past animators have had as much trouble rendering characters' hair as ventriloquists have saying 'bread and butter'. Technically, it's a remarkable achievement, made by a team of several hundred artists and technicians from all over the world working for three years in Hawaii for Square Pictures, the film division of a leading Japanese computer-game company, whose logo is actually rectangular. ![]() But Final Fantasy: the Spirit Within, inspired by a bestselling computer game, attempts to go further than anyone has previously done in its effort to make a computer-generated film so realistic that animation will be accepted as reality. ![]() Nowadays, of course, actors can be digitally replicated in live-action films as Oliver Reed was in some shots in Gladiator after he died during the production. ![]()
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