STUDIO: Warner Brothers
RELEASE DATE: March 11th, 2008
STARRING: Ai Kobayashi, Jurota Kosugi
WRITTEN BY: Kiyoto Takeuchi
DIRECTED BY: Shinji Aramaki
FEATURES: "Team-Up: John Woo and Shinji Aramaki"
"Revolution: Animating Ex Machina"
Filmmaker Commentary

Is Appleseed Ex Machina the future of anime? Not quite. It's probably a step in that direction and you can expect more and more releases to look like it, but I still feel like we're stuck in a transition period between hand-drawn anime and whatever comes next. Just as Beowulf marked a massive step forward in the world of motion-capture for traditional animation, Appleseed has a similar jaw-dropping technical expertise in its blend of motion-capture and computer-generated animation, but there's something about this technology that demands things like the 3-D of the theatrical experience of Robert Zemeckis' film to really work. Maybe because it's on the same TV that I've used to play video games for years, but watching movies like Appleseed Ex Machina, ones that are so dependent on their landmark visuals, I feel like I should pick up a controller and be ready to go when the cut scene ends. There's still a disconnect between this kind of CGI/mo-cap cinema and the audience that's not there in traditional animation and it only seems to be improving very slowly.

If you can put that overall problem aside, Appleseed Ex Machina is undeniably bad-ass. How could it not be? It's produced by John Woo and directed by the legendary Shinki Aramaki. It's an action-driven, visceral piece about special forces soldiers who are forced to preserve peace in a world gone mad (aren't all anime worlds gone mad?) They patrol Olympus, a futuristic city of both humans and clones (known as bioroids). The second of a planned-trilogy based on the manga by Masamune Shirow, Ex Machina tells the story of the soldiers from the 2004 film Appleseed, Deunan and Briareos, and a new character, Tereus, a bioroid made with Briareos' DNA, who are all trying to deal with an all-out attack using computer-generated technology (and a very weird love triangle.) Cyborg-related attacks are on the rise and the team learns that a virus has been sent through them that causes them to turn terrorist against the humans. From its first chapter on, Ex Machina favors action over plot, which will be a nice change of pace for casual viewers who have trouble following some of the technobabble common to anime but might turn off viewers looking for something a little richer.

Of course, the technical transfer for a movie like Appleseed must truly sparkle for the film to have any chance of succeeding and Warner Brothers doesn't skimp at all in that department. Ex Machina is available in three forms - single disc, two-disc standard, and Blu-Ray. The video and audio on the single-disc standard, which is what we were sent for review, are so good that it's hard to believe that the Blu-Ray could be that much better (and other critics who have reviewed the Blu-Ray confirm that the standard picture is nearly as good). The colors are sharp and crisp and there's zero line degradation. It almost looks TOO good (which adds to that video game feeling I spoke about earlier).

Having both the original Japanese track and the English dub in 5.1 is a great touch that doesn't often come with an anime release. While we always push for the original language track, this is one of the better dubs we've heard in a long time. If they were all this good, maybe the word 'dubbing' wouldn't make our skin crawl. Finally, Ex Machina comes with a 15-minute featurette about the collaboration with Woo and Aramaki, an 18-minute production featurette, and a commentary with one of the producers and an animation historian named Jerry Beck. Beck was one of the men who brought anime to these shores, producing Akira for Streamline Pictures. It's a voice from anime's past commenting on what looks like anime's future. Whether we like it or not.