Not strictly anime I know – but the marketing people think you guys might be interested in seeing this, and I can see why. Shane Acker and Tim Burton’s dark looking CGI movie 9 opens here in the UK on October 28th, and below you can catch the trailer in HD. A post apocalyptic Pinocchio-style tale of sentient rag-dolls, it kind of reminds me of Takashi Nakamura’s (Akira, Nausicaa) A Tree of Palme at first glance. Worth checking out.

I’m off on my travels again – not Japan this time, but the sun soaked Socialist republic of to Havana. Ten days of snorkelling, rum, fat Cuban cigars and blissfully internet free chilling awaits me. As a result there will be no updates here for a while – and my ninja-like accomplice Flotsky will be moderating comments here – and I’ll reply to them all when I get back. Apologies in advance.

But just as I’m leaving this town, I thought I’d leave you will with a little bit of homegrown goodness. As if Rory Doona and a certain well known anime blog weren’t enough evidence that Bristol is the anime culture epicenter of the UK, here’s a fantastic bit of giant Mecha CGI work from local artist Justin Dowling. Enjoy.

truth tv – giant bipedal weaponised military unit from Justin Dowling on Vimeo.

Some of you might remember my concern back in June when I first reported on Production IG’s planned visual update to Oshii’s 1995 classic Ghost in the Shell. Well, the Blu-ray of GiTS 2.0 (not to be confused with GiTS 2: Innocence, which will also be referred to a lot in this piece) hit Japanese stores a few weeks ago, and via sources that I’m not at liberty to identify I have managed to get my hands on a preview copy – months before the (still yet to be confirmed) UK release. So it was that I found myself, on the first morning of 2009, sitting down to watch one of my favourite movies of all time again, but instead of being filled with the usual satisfying feeling of anticipation, I was gripped with something nearer to dread.

The ‘problem’ – if it is really one at all – is the issue of progress. In the nine years between GiTS and GiTS 2: Innocence technology changed. In this time the tech teams at Production IG focused on becoming the masters at seamlessly merging CGI imagery with conventional hand drawn animation, with GiTS 2 being heralded as the pinnacle of this across the industry. And with these new technological changes came aesthetic ones; Oshii switched palettes from green and blue tones to more deep, orange ones, and the computer interfaces and displays that are such an important part of the GiTS environment became more sophisticated and refined as the software used to create them got cheaper, quicker and maturer. And while these displays had been the only thing to be rendered by computer in the first movie, the sequel employed CGI in nearly every scene.

Suddenly, you could run the two movies and – arguably – something didn’t look quite right. At times they looked like different worlds. The computer displays in GiTS started to look outmoded by today’s standards, let alone compared to the future they were meant to predict. Some of the cityscapes looked uninspiring – perhaps – in comparison to the epic computer rendered vistas of GiTS 2. Production IG had hit the same problem Lucas had hit with the Star Wars prequels – when you’re making heavy SFX based science fiction, your work is always going to look dated. Luckily then, that you can now go back and change it…

Before we talk about this anymore, lets have a look at the evidence. By far the biggest section of the film to have been altered is the well known, and often mimicked, opening sequence, with Major Kusanagi leaping off a skyscraper to assassinate a foreign diplomat. I’ve grabbed some images from both versions of the film for comparison.

The first thing you notice is the palette switch, as well as how the old computer maps that open the film have been completely re-designed and rendered.

Then it hits you, every external shot in the sequence – including the Major herself – have been recreated in CGI.

And this is where I first started to have problems with GiTS 2.0. CGI Kusanagi doesn’t look quite right. Well, she looks fine on her own, but inter-cut with the other characters – who are still hand drawn from the orignial – she looks jarring. Almost, at times, like you’re watching two different films.

From here you’re into the ‘cyborg birth’ opening sequence, which has also been completely redone, with much more sophisticated CGI and the same green-to-orange palette change, the again bring it more into line with the companion sequence in GiTS 2.

Later on in the film there’s also some CGI rendered helicopters and vehicles, although luckily the climactic spider tank battle sequence has survived untouched. There’s also a few minor dialogue changes, as well as a female voice actor for the Puppet Master, which makes a bit more visual sense and the plot a little easier to follow. But otherwise the rest of the movie has remained largely untouched.

Sitting writing this after watching GiTS 2.0 for the first time only a few hours ago, I’m still a little undecided as to how I feel about it. One major issue i have is that I always loved the original’s aesthetic, far more than I did it’s sequel’s. The video game style graphics, the green-blue palette…the whole film captured the 80′s cyberpunk vibe of Shirow’s original manga (all be it with a far darker, more serious tone) as well as developing on the themes and aesthetics of works like Bladerunner and Neuromancer that came before it. Don’t get me wrong, I like GiTS 2: Innocence, and I found the new palette that Oshii had brought over from Avalon appealing, but it was a different film to the original, a different world. And I was happy with that – time had passed in the real world, and I was happy to just accept it had passed in the GiTS world too. Things change, especially technology. Characters had clearly aged, so why couldn’t everything else had moved on as well?

Also the beauty of the original film for me was that it didn’t actually rely too much on futuristic design and visual effects to create it’s haunting atmosphere. The best science fiction works because it manipulates the familiar and believable, and what truly makes GiTS a masterpiece is the noir atmosphere, Oshii’s pacing, his slow pans, and the beautifully drawn Tokyo Hong Kong street scenes.

In fact watching it after returning from Tokyo, it’s remarkable how un-futuristic the architecture is in GiTS, with the sequel’s towering CGI mega-scrapers and smoggy vistas starting to look a little Fifth Element in comparison. It’s these things that give the original it’s feeling of edgy, ‘just around the corner’ realism, and if it’s any consolation, all of that is still here in 2.0.

Personally there are still a lot of unanswered questions for me. Why was this made? Is it just another IG tech demo? How much as Oshii actually involved? Wasn’t he busy making Sky Crawlers at the time, and is this really just a marketing exercise for that movie – it having been shown at the same time at some Japanese theaters?

Not that there’s nothing at all to recommend this release. As previously mentioned, the beautiful pacing and gentle street scenes are all still intact, and this is the best they’ve ever been seen. It’s a great transfer, and has clearly been cleaned up in places in the process, and it’s the better for it. Kenji Kawai‘s legendary score has also been given an audibly noticeable remaster, and sounds stunning all over again. I was only given the main feature, but the Japanese collectors release featured not only some interesting looking extras but also a copy of the original – although it’s unsure whether that has been given the same gorgeous visual polish in the transition to Blu-ray. Only time will tell what is included on any western releases.

Only one thing is certain – if you’re a GiTS fan then you can’t kid yourself – you’re going to want to see this. Whether you end up loving it, hating it, or – like me – wondering whether it was really necessary is something still to be determined.

ありがとうございます to The Laughing Man for securing me this review copy. The net is vast and infinite…

This one slipped past me apparently. Ether that or Production IG have been keeping it very, very tightly under wraps.

Either way, apparently July 12 will see a Japanese theatrical release of Ghost in the Shell 2.0; a new special edition of the 1995 classic featuring some re-done CGI visual effects and a whole new, remastered 6.1 soundtrack. Anime News Network has all the precise details, and the one thing that worried me most is in that list of names there is no mention of the film’s original director Mamoru Oshii. Presumably he’s been far too busy with Sky Crawlers – which this release seems to be aimed at promoting – to have got involved himself.

Looking at the comparison images, it looks like most of the visual work has been done to bring some of the original’s scenes more in line with the aesthetic of the 2004 sequel, Innocence. And so far it looks like it’s been done quite subtly and effectively- that’s if you don’t mind things being a bit darker and, erm, more orangey.

I can’t say it doesn’t worry me though. GiTS is a film very close to my heart, for many reasons. Plus, and this may just be particularly bad timing, but less than a week ago I was sitting with a very good friend of mine, watching an HD encode of Star Wars: A New Hope that I had, ahem, obtained. We were quite happily sat there ohhing and ahhing over how amazing it still looked after all these years, and how Lucas obviously once had an amazing eye for colour and lighting, when the first fully CGI’d newly shoehorned in scene jarred us out of our nostalgia. I swear, the second I saw that Jawa hanging off that rope from that lizard thing, a little part of me died.

And don’t even get me started on that Greedo bullshit.

I’d been sat on Vexille for a while before watching it, to be honest. After the disappointment I felt from seeing the last Appleseed movie, I wasn’t sure if I could face another cold looking, mecha based, entrely CGI anime. But there’s an important fact that kept slipping my mind about Vexille, and that revitalised my interest every time I remembered it – that its the second movie from director Fumihiko Sori.

Sori, for the uninitiated, is probably best known for directing the live action Japanese film Ping Pong back in 2002. A small, gentle, touching but often very funny movie about friendships and rivalries between table tennis obsessed teenage boys, it became a huge favourite in our household after we caught a showing of it at the Bath Film Festival a few years ago. It’s a movie that works completely because of characterization, dialogue and the emotional relationships between the central characters, and with this in mind I was hopeful that Sori might breath some life and depth into the mechanical looking Vexille, seeing that he had sole responsibility for writing, directing and editing.

For a start, Vexville has a far more promising and involved premise than Appleseed. It’s 2077, and the UN has imposed severe limitations on the development of AI, robotics and nanotechnology, fearing that their unmonitored use could pause a threat to human civilisation. This has, quite understandably, pissed off Japan, who are the world leaders in this field, and have adopted a policy of isolationism, and taken this to an extreme never quite seen before. While they still trade with the outside world – selling robot and weapon technology to the highest bidders, they have literally sealed off the country using a powerful electromagnetic thingamybob field, which blocks all communication and observation including satellite photography, and no foreigner has set foot on Japanese soil for over a decade. Enter the eponymous Vexille, a female UN anti-terrorist agent and her squad of hi-tech commandos, tasked with sneaking through and then disabling the magic field so that UN snoopers can have a good look at what’s really going on.

And it’s here that things do start to get a little interesting. Without spoiling the big reveal too much for you, Vexille from this point onwards depicts a Japan that has undergone a singularity. For those of you not familiar with the concept, and who can’t be arsed the read that wikipedia link, the singularity is a point in the future where technological acceleration, and specifically the development of artificial intelligence, get to a point where machines are more intelligent than man. It’s a very common theme in contemporary science fiction, and in many ways has been used to create a slightly more utopian backlash against the dystopian worlds presented in cyberpunk. While writers like William Gibson used cybernetics and AI to paint images of hyper-corporate, corrupt societies, singularity writers use them to create worlds where scarcity and poverty are history, and nanotechnology is used to clean up the environment that science had previously wrecked. I won’t bore you with my involved views on the concept, but needless to say I’m sceptical. As a scientific principal it seems sound – if you disregard the fact that AI research has failed, for decades, to make the developments it has promised. But as a social concept I’m far more sceptical, not just of the the singularity itself, but of utopias in general. And as a device in science fiction, well that’s where I really have issues. While some writers have handled the concept well, for many it seems to me that it’s become more a way of repositioning science (and as a result scientists) as mankind’s godlike saviours, after years of cyberpunk chipping away at it’s ivory tower. Too often it feels too much like the utopian pop SF of the 1950s, where everyone sat around waiting for their nuclear powered hovercars, robot butlers and daytrips to venus, instead of trying to deal with the social issues of the time.

Okay, rant over. Again, while trying to avoid spoilers, what Vexille does is present a Japan post singularity where things are as pretty far from a utopia as you can get. And while it’s not the first SF movie to take this angle – arguably both Terminator and The Matrix do the same thing – it does it in a far more contemporary way, using popular singularity fiction ideas like nanotechnology, uploading and the physical re-shaping of the environment to create its own dystopian hell. And largely it works, even when some of the ideas verge on the more fantastic and unbelievable. What I mean by works is that it’lll be enough to get up the backs of the likes of Ray Kurzweil and everyone else that’s sipped the trans/posthumanist Kool Aid, and that’s fine by me.

Sadly, despite this over-arching theme of the failed, de-humanising singularity, there’s not much else plot wise to get excited about. After the setting has been established we’re treated instead to a fairly predictable and largely uninspiring parade of action sequences, set pieces and high speed chases. Even more disappointingly, considering Sori’s pedigree, characters are largely two dimensional and the dialogue is uninspiring, and we find ourselves back in familiar Appleseed territory. I’m not sure why this is in particular an issue for purely CGI anime; whether it’s because the script has to work harder to offset the clinical visuals, or whether its because studios are still concentrating too much on the production technology than the writing, but it’s something that’s haunted the sub-genre since Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Unlike some critics, I don’t subscribe to the opinion that CGI anime will always be artistically inferior to it’s hand-drawn relatives, but on the evidence so far it is hard not to argue against it being cold and emotionless.

Which brings us to the visuals. I’d love to say that Vexille is another CGI tour-de-force, but sadly much of the time it fails to impress in this area too. There are some fantastic moments – especially the sprawling US city scenes and the wonderful fly-bys of the bustling Japanese shanty towns, but a lot of the time you can’t help feeling that you’ve seen it all before. The mecha designs, whilst being perhaps more realistic looking in an industrial design sense, seem flat and un-stylish compared to the Shirow created Landmates of Appleseed. And at other times it feels like it borrows imagery too heavily from films like Mad Max, Dune and even Star Wars without leaving its own personal touch. Don’t get me wrong – it’s by no means ugly or aesthetically unpleasing at any point, it just has a tendency to feel rather dull and flat.

So, is it worth seeing? Yeah, I guess so. If you’re interested in singularity theories but don’t want to dive into too much detail, and you’re not yet bored of high-tech CGI action, then give it a go. If you want proper characterisation and depth with your sci-fi anime, then look elsewhere. Personally, i’m starting to feel a little fed up with CGI mecha action, and believe me, that’s something I never really expected myself to say.