Appleseed DVD Review
Written by JohnI watched Appleseed yesterday. The original Japenese-to-English name is Appurushîdo. I rented it from Netflix as usual. The Appleseed movie I saw was made last year in 2004. It is actually a prequel to Appleseed which was made in 1988. Yes the name is exactly the same.
Some aspects of the anime movie were really good but other parts were kind of crappy. The movie is about a battle of control between Bioroids (artificially cloned humans) and normal humans; a story that isn’t very original. If you saw The Matrix, or I, Robot, then it’s like total déjà vu in some scenes.
When the movie started out, I was kind of unsure about the quality of the CG; the movement physics looked kind of awkward but I think it is partly because I wasn’t used to cell-shading. But once the action started, my first impressions were totally wrong. This movie had some of the best CG I have seen. It easily rivals and might be even better than the CG from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. The visuals are amazing and I really enjoyed it. It was something unique (as far as I’ve seen) and it looked great.
The action sequences no doubt carry this movie. The plot is mediocre and parts of the story aren’t really explained but it does gradually improve from beginning to end. One thing that bothered me was that character development was virtually non-existent. But a lot of anime movies fall victim to this flaw since they condense a lot of material down to 1.5 hours.
But again, overall for an anime movie, this was really good.
