released 15 may 05 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* One of the Japanese comic (manga) author Masamune Shirow's best-known works is his APPLESEED series, which takes place in a future society and involves two commandos -- cute, impulsive, lethal Deunan Knute and her easy-going cyborg mate, Briareos -- working for Olympus, a semi-utopian city-state in which humans and "bioroids", or genetically tailored human clones, coexist.
An animated movie version of APPLESEED was made in the late 1980s, and proved totally forgettable, with mediocre production values and a completely by-the-numbers, empty-headed shoot-em-up script that had no Masamune Shirow flavor at all. Now a second stab has been taken at it, with the 2004 APPLESEED computer-graphics movie.
The new APPLESEED movie takes the elements of the original manga series and manages to consolidate Masamune Shirow's notoriously wandering plots into a fairly tidy, if somewhat melodramatic, script. Deunan is fighting in the ruins of a city at the fading end of a world war, when she is captured and taken to Olympus to be recruited by the ESWAT police commando force. There she meets Briareos, who she had left as a human, to find that he now has a machine body, and also befriends a bioroid named Hitomi. There is a conflict going on in Olympus, with humans attempting to fight against the perceived dominance of bioroids, and Deunan is quickly caught up in the struggle.
The scripting is OK, if like I said melodramatic at times. The movie establishes an interesting relationship between Deunan and the founding of Olympus that was only thinly hinted at in the manga, though the movie's recasting of Briareos in the role of brooding "beast" to Deunan's "beauty" is something of a disappointment. The manga's Briareos is a likeable, easy-going, self-confident, trustworthy guy and few of the characters, or for that matter the readers, think twice about his cyborg body. For some bizarre reason, the movie script reconstructs him as something of a loser. (One also misses the humorous, shifty, smartass mercenary cyborg Sokaku.)
However, the real disappointment to this movie is the production. What is frustrating is that a great deal of effort was pumped into it, with meticulous realizations of scenery and machines, but it fails to work because the characters come across as stilted and awkward. It's like watching some old "Puppetoon" production; they would have been better off to have used conventional animation with computer graphics backgrounds and machinery. The recent Masamune Shirow-based GHOST IN THE SHELL / STAND ALONE COMPLEX TV series takes this approach and, coupled with fair scripting, does a pretty good job of it.
I hate to dump on people who did this much work and seem in so many ways to be on the right track, but this APPLESEED movie fails to take flight. All I can do is encourage them to figure out what they did wrong, what they did right, and then take a better shot next time.