Appleseed
(2004 movie)
This is actually one of the first animes I ever watched back when I first started putting a list together, but before I was driven to start writing reviews, which some of you might recall was started by Blue Gender. Since I've mostly been watching things alphabetically, you can kind of guess that most of the shows that start with "A" were either done from memory or were watched since I started writing reviews. Appleseed is one of a few that I've decided to rewatch prior to writing reviews for them, so I can refresh my memory about them. I have to admit that when I first watched Appleseed, I actually liked it quite a bit, enough so that it was actually the first anime I bought once I'd gotten all the Ghost in the Shell stuff. But, much like Elfen Lied (and Higurashi, incidentally), Appleseed has not aged well for me. I honestly don't know if this is because my tastes have changed or if watching more anime since has diminished my tolerance for certain clichés, but I'll try to be as fair as I can be.
What brought this on was recently watching Vexille, thanks to my roommate who bought the DVD for it on sale. The DVD cover brags about Vexille being brought to us by the same people who made Appleseed, which is the reason my roommate even bought it. Of course Vexille turned out to be horrible, lacking a coherent plot, well thought out characters or story, or an antagonist with a clear motivation. Instead, it mostly consisted of a series of action scenes that were very loosely tied together. I expressed my disappointment with that movie by comparing it to Appleseed, which I remembered having a much more coherent plot and better characterization and pacing. Apparently I was remembering through rosy-tinted glasses or something, because while Appleseed is better than Vexille, that really isn't saying much.
Appleseed apparently takes place at the tail end of a devastating world war, which has left most of the world a desolate wasteland that leaves one wondering where the combatants who are still fighting get their supplies from. The story follows protagonist Deunan Knute, a rather good looking female warrior with short blonde hair.
*sigh*
The movie begins with Deunan and some other poor saps following her as they fight it out with some robots or guys in mech suits (it's never made clear) and an eight-wheeled armored car that has the gun from the A-10 mounted on top of it. As you might guess, a bunch of light infantry packing rifles and RPGs don't stand much of a chance, though Deunan is blessed with the ability to defy physics and with guns that actually do something against her robotic aggressors. She's eventually cornered and surrounded in a way that makes me wonder if they were trying to capture her, even though they sure seemed to be trying their hardest to kill her just seconds before that. Fortunately for her, what looks like the love child between a C-130 and a V-22 comes along and drops off what we later find out to be guys in mech suits that kill the tanks and robo-dudes. Of course since they never bother saying anything to her along the lines of, "we're here to help," or "come with me if you want to live," Deunan does what most anyone would do and tries to get the hell out of dodge, only to be taken down by large metal crosses fired by their guns. Incidentally, these are actually real things, which much like bean bags fired from shotguns are designed to be a non-lethal weapon against crowds, and work by knocking the wind out of the person they hit, which unfortunately also tends to break bones and cause internal damage. In this case, however, they apparently just deliver tranquilizer, as explained by a very out of place and much too chipper Asian chick named Hitomi, who comments on Deunan's beauty.
This all happens at a very brisk pace, which the movie keeps up for the majority of its run. Soon after, we're introduced to Olympus, a shiny happy city in the middle of the ruins, which is described as being a "utopia". This is also where the problems with the pacing and focus on action rather than character start to become a lot more obvious, because after the title sequence is where the story is supposed to really begin, only the quick pacing kind of prevents a proper set-up. This is where my disappointment really comes in, because Deunan seemed like she could have been an interesting character, but she is never really explored beyond being shown to be a much better soldier than anyone in Olympus. We're very quickly introduced to other characters, to the city, and to the plot, with Deunan basically being made to be unrealistically resilient to being plucked out of the battle zone that's been all she's known for most of her adult life and placed in this pristine city and given a new problem to solve beyond her basic survival. All of this while being hit on by another woman who turns out to not actually be human, and being confronted by the fact that her old boyfriend, Briareos, whom she had presumed to be dead, was now sporting a fully robotic body that didn't even resemble a human being. In fact, she accepts everything very quickly, even though she really has no reason to do so. And the only real indication we're given that she's effected at all by the quick transition is a nightmare she has on her first night in Olympus and the fact she can't sleep on a bed, and even this is quickly brushed aside, much like we never really find out who was attacking her at the start of the movie or what their objectives were.
Anyway, the plot, such as it is, revolves around tension between bigoted humans and the bioroids that now run the city. Bioroids, as the name suggests, are artificial beings that have been designed to resemble humans while being programmed to act a certain way, but are biological in nature rather then mechanical as an android would be. The "utopia" apparently sprung up out of no where, thanks to the efforts of Deunan's mother and father, who also helped to create the bioroids. Bioroids are to help humans in addition to apparently being responsible for most of the administrative tasks of the city. As you might imagine, this doesn't sit well with many humans, but we're informed that because a bunch of old guys are interfaced with a supposedly infallible computer and that humans run the city's military, that everything is somehow "balanced" and everyone should just be cool with that. Of course I can see right through that, and since there's as much condescension as any early episode of TNG to go along with this exposition, so should everyone else. But then, there are a lot of silly things about this movie and its characters, such as how there seem to be an awful lot of Greek names being used, and how the majority of them are actually apt to the characters who bear these names. But then I guess this is easier than establishing and developing characters, so why not name the bad guys after the Greek god of the underworld and the father of the Titans, and while we're at it, let's name the computer after the Greek goddess representing Mother Earth. Of course Uranus and Gaia mated with each other and had many children together (the Titans), so there once can't really make many parallels off of the names. Uranus is mostly known for having a messed up family, mostly because he hated his own children, so I'm guessing that's why the big bad general who wants to kill all the bioroids has that name, and Hades is the god of the underworld, so that's bad, right, so why not give that name to his ambitious right hand man?
I guess the main problem I have with the antagonists we're given not long into the movie, aside from the fact that they turn out to be red herrings, is that they and every other bigoted human like them are made to be ridiculously over the top as far as their bigotry goes. This conveniently lets the movie overlook what might otherwise be a legitimate gripe humans might have with bioroids making up basically their entire government, in what is essentially an authoritarian oligarchy. So rather than forming a rebellion to overthrow the government, they take the genocidal route by destroying the one building that apparently not only makes all the bioroids, but also contains the special genetic material existing bioroids need to periodically have maintenance done with to keep living, uh, somehow. Conveniently, Hitomi missed her scheduled oil change, so now there's artificial tension to get the "appleseed" the title refers to. This is actually secret information Deunan's mother developed which would somehow allow bioroids to reproduce on their own, and thus now represents the only way bioroids can continue to exist. Apparently by this point we were supposed to have forgotten that all the bioroids are actually genetically siblings, because all of them are based off of DNA from Deunan's father. But aside from that, the information on how to make bioroids should not be gone, so really according to the way everything was established, it should be as simple as using another DNA sample from someone else and rebuilding the production line, but whatever, Deunan really likes Hitomi and actually cares about the bioroids even though they've done nothing but talk down to her about humanity's "nature" and all Hitomi has done is talk about how hot Deunan is and how much she wants to have human emotions. Of course the movie seems to give up at this point, so whatever.
Deunan finally finds out what happened to her mother, who died when she was young, but this has a rather anti-climactic ending, because while the military kills the rest of the ESWAT squad Deunan is with (none of whom we ever got to really know anyway), Deunan still gets away with the appleseed they wanted to destroy and the military surrenders immediately afterwards. This is the point that we find out who the real bad guys are – the old men hooked up to the city's computer. Anyone who hadn't seen that one coming shouldn't feel too bad, though, because to be fair the movie never gave any clue to this before it was revealed, instead throwing out multiple red herrings to distract the audience with, only to throw out basically everything the start of the movie established in a pathetic attempt to create a crisis. For instance, the "D-tank" we were informed is a safeguard for humanity to use against the bioroids by infecting all bioroids with a deadly virus should it ever be broken, is at the end of the movie stated to contain a virus which will make all humans sterile, because the old guys have decided that humans are bad, m'kay, and bioroids should inherit the planet because they'll treat it better and stuff. Of course whoever wrote this selectively remembered that the very logical computer had to be in complete agreement with the old guys for the option to release the virus to even be available, so we're quickly informed that they fooled the computer by actually making it possible for the attempted military coup to take place, thus convincing the computer to go along with the plan to make humans sterile, eventually making the species go extinct. Not two minutes later, the newly recovered Hitomi stumbles through the door, and explains that the computer wasn't fooled so much as the old guys turned it off and have been doing everything on their own, even though this will kill them, too. Since the big red button to unleash the virus is disabled by being shot, the old guys decide to have the giant insect-like tanks guarding the city from the outside world make their way to the building with the D-tank to just shoot it at point blank range with their giant rail guns. As you might expect, this plan does not succeed, and as an added bonus all the old guys die so there's no need to deal with them in any way in the rushed resolution.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I didn't find the story or characters all that believable, and that the plot seemed rather forced and rushed along to me. Pacing was far too quick for characters to be fleshed out or given believable motivations for what they were doing, and what little story there was seemed to mostly be there as filler and exposition to set up the many action scenes. The soundtrack didn't do this movie any favors either, as it consisted mostly of some kind of J-rock/dance club music that was probably meant to get the audience's blood pumping but instead served mostly to distract, at least in my case. The animation is ... different. Everything is computer generated, much like the Final Fantasy movies, but rather than going for a more photorealistic look, everything was given a kind of animation cell texture in an effort to make it look more like traditional anime. I also found this to be somewhat distracting at times, mostly because while the main characters used motion capture from real actors, most of the characters tended to move very unrealistically, and I couldn't help but feel like I was watching the cut-scenes for a video game.
I don’t want to make this movie out to be all bad or anything, and to be fair, if you like action that involves a lot of gunfights and mech suits, you'll probably like this movie. Mainly I'm disappointed, because there was the basis for a good story here that just never got realized. It would have been a lot more interesting to me had there been more focus given to Deunan's character and how she dealt with the revelation that the war she had been fighting for most of her life was pointless and yet still going on, how she'd basically been denied a life in the pristine city her father and mother had helped to create until the creepy old men and the bioroid governor running the place decided they had a use for her, and how the boyfriend she thought was dead was actually still alive, had been allowed to live in Olympus himself and become a leader of the elite police ESWAT, but never came to her rescue until told to do so by the aforementioned old guys and bioroid governor. Hell, just dealing with the fact that her boyfriend was a robot would have been interesting, especially if she found she couldn't deal with this change and between that and never coming for her, decided she wanted nothing to do with him. I guess we're just supposed to be excited by the idea of Deunan riding his robo-dick or something.
In any case, you can probably guess that I'm not going to be rating this very high. It isn't horrible, but it's not really what I'd consider good, either, as it lacks in plot, character, and story. Instead, I found myself rather bored while watching this, even during the action scenes, making the movie very "meh" in nature, in my opinion, anyway. If all you're looking for is some action, you might like it, but if you're looking for anything more than that, you'll probably be disappointed the same as I was. 5/10.
(2004 movie)
This is actually one of the first animes I ever watched back when I first started putting a list together, but before I was driven to start writing reviews, which some of you might recall was started by Blue Gender. Since I've mostly been watching things alphabetically, you can kind of guess that most of the shows that start with "A" were either done from memory or were watched since I started writing reviews. Appleseed is one of a few that I've decided to rewatch prior to writing reviews for them, so I can refresh my memory about them. I have to admit that when I first watched Appleseed, I actually liked it quite a bit, enough so that it was actually the first anime I bought once I'd gotten all the Ghost in the Shell stuff. But, much like Elfen Lied (and Higurashi, incidentally), Appleseed has not aged well for me. I honestly don't know if this is because my tastes have changed or if watching more anime since has diminished my tolerance for certain clichés, but I'll try to be as fair as I can be.
What brought this on was recently watching Vexille, thanks to my roommate who bought the DVD for it on sale. The DVD cover brags about Vexille being brought to us by the same people who made Appleseed, which is the reason my roommate even bought it. Of course Vexille turned out to be horrible, lacking a coherent plot, well thought out characters or story, or an antagonist with a clear motivation. Instead, it mostly consisted of a series of action scenes that were very loosely tied together. I expressed my disappointment with that movie by comparing it to Appleseed, which I remembered having a much more coherent plot and better characterization and pacing. Apparently I was remembering through rosy-tinted glasses or something, because while Appleseed is better than Vexille, that really isn't saying much.
Appleseed apparently takes place at the tail end of a devastating world war, which has left most of the world a desolate wasteland that leaves one wondering where the combatants who are still fighting get their supplies from. The story follows protagonist Deunan Knute, a rather good looking female warrior with short blonde hair.
*sigh*
The movie begins with Deunan and some other poor saps following her as they fight it out with some robots or guys in mech suits (it's never made clear) and an eight-wheeled armored car that has the gun from the A-10 mounted on top of it. As you might guess, a bunch of light infantry packing rifles and RPGs don't stand much of a chance, though Deunan is blessed with the ability to defy physics and with guns that actually do something against her robotic aggressors. She's eventually cornered and surrounded in a way that makes me wonder if they were trying to capture her, even though they sure seemed to be trying their hardest to kill her just seconds before that. Fortunately for her, what looks like the love child between a C-130 and a V-22 comes along and drops off what we later find out to be guys in mech suits that kill the tanks and robo-dudes. Of course since they never bother saying anything to her along the lines of, "we're here to help," or "come with me if you want to live," Deunan does what most anyone would do and tries to get the hell out of dodge, only to be taken down by large metal crosses fired by their guns. Incidentally, these are actually real things, which much like bean bags fired from shotguns are designed to be a non-lethal weapon against crowds, and work by knocking the wind out of the person they hit, which unfortunately also tends to break bones and cause internal damage. In this case, however, they apparently just deliver tranquilizer, as explained by a very out of place and much too chipper Asian chick named Hitomi, who comments on Deunan's beauty.
This all happens at a very brisk pace, which the movie keeps up for the majority of its run. Soon after, we're introduced to Olympus, a shiny happy city in the middle of the ruins, which is described as being a "utopia". This is also where the problems with the pacing and focus on action rather than character start to become a lot more obvious, because after the title sequence is where the story is supposed to really begin, only the quick pacing kind of prevents a proper set-up. This is where my disappointment really comes in, because Deunan seemed like she could have been an interesting character, but she is never really explored beyond being shown to be a much better soldier than anyone in Olympus. We're very quickly introduced to other characters, to the city, and to the plot, with Deunan basically being made to be unrealistically resilient to being plucked out of the battle zone that's been all she's known for most of her adult life and placed in this pristine city and given a new problem to solve beyond her basic survival. All of this while being hit on by another woman who turns out to not actually be human, and being confronted by the fact that her old boyfriend, Briareos, whom she had presumed to be dead, was now sporting a fully robotic body that didn't even resemble a human being. In fact, she accepts everything very quickly, even though she really has no reason to do so. And the only real indication we're given that she's effected at all by the quick transition is a nightmare she has on her first night in Olympus and the fact she can't sleep on a bed, and even this is quickly brushed aside, much like we never really find out who was attacking her at the start of the movie or what their objectives were.
Anyway, the plot, such as it is, revolves around tension between bigoted humans and the bioroids that now run the city. Bioroids, as the name suggests, are artificial beings that have been designed to resemble humans while being programmed to act a certain way, but are biological in nature rather then mechanical as an android would be. The "utopia" apparently sprung up out of no where, thanks to the efforts of Deunan's mother and father, who also helped to create the bioroids. Bioroids are to help humans in addition to apparently being responsible for most of the administrative tasks of the city. As you might imagine, this doesn't sit well with many humans, but we're informed that because a bunch of old guys are interfaced with a supposedly infallible computer and that humans run the city's military, that everything is somehow "balanced" and everyone should just be cool with that. Of course I can see right through that, and since there's as much condescension as any early episode of TNG to go along with this exposition, so should everyone else. But then, there are a lot of silly things about this movie and its characters, such as how there seem to be an awful lot of Greek names being used, and how the majority of them are actually apt to the characters who bear these names. But then I guess this is easier than establishing and developing characters, so why not name the bad guys after the Greek god of the underworld and the father of the Titans, and while we're at it, let's name the computer after the Greek goddess representing Mother Earth. Of course Uranus and Gaia mated with each other and had many children together (the Titans), so there once can't really make many parallels off of the names. Uranus is mostly known for having a messed up family, mostly because he hated his own children, so I'm guessing that's why the big bad general who wants to kill all the bioroids has that name, and Hades is the god of the underworld, so that's bad, right, so why not give that name to his ambitious right hand man?
I guess the main problem I have with the antagonists we're given not long into the movie, aside from the fact that they turn out to be red herrings, is that they and every other bigoted human like them are made to be ridiculously over the top as far as their bigotry goes. This conveniently lets the movie overlook what might otherwise be a legitimate gripe humans might have with bioroids making up basically their entire government, in what is essentially an authoritarian oligarchy. So rather than forming a rebellion to overthrow the government, they take the genocidal route by destroying the one building that apparently not only makes all the bioroids, but also contains the special genetic material existing bioroids need to periodically have maintenance done with to keep living, uh, somehow. Conveniently, Hitomi missed her scheduled oil change, so now there's artificial tension to get the "appleseed" the title refers to. This is actually secret information Deunan's mother developed which would somehow allow bioroids to reproduce on their own, and thus now represents the only way bioroids can continue to exist. Apparently by this point we were supposed to have forgotten that all the bioroids are actually genetically siblings, because all of them are based off of DNA from Deunan's father. But aside from that, the information on how to make bioroids should not be gone, so really according to the way everything was established, it should be as simple as using another DNA sample from someone else and rebuilding the production line, but whatever, Deunan really likes Hitomi and actually cares about the bioroids even though they've done nothing but talk down to her about humanity's "nature" and all Hitomi has done is talk about how hot Deunan is and how much she wants to have human emotions. Of course the movie seems to give up at this point, so whatever.
Deunan finally finds out what happened to her mother, who died when she was young, but this has a rather anti-climactic ending, because while the military kills the rest of the ESWAT squad Deunan is with (none of whom we ever got to really know anyway), Deunan still gets away with the appleseed they wanted to destroy and the military surrenders immediately afterwards. This is the point that we find out who the real bad guys are – the old men hooked up to the city's computer. Anyone who hadn't seen that one coming shouldn't feel too bad, though, because to be fair the movie never gave any clue to this before it was revealed, instead throwing out multiple red herrings to distract the audience with, only to throw out basically everything the start of the movie established in a pathetic attempt to create a crisis. For instance, the "D-tank" we were informed is a safeguard for humanity to use against the bioroids by infecting all bioroids with a deadly virus should it ever be broken, is at the end of the movie stated to contain a virus which will make all humans sterile, because the old guys have decided that humans are bad, m'kay, and bioroids should inherit the planet because they'll treat it better and stuff. Of course whoever wrote this selectively remembered that the very logical computer had to be in complete agreement with the old guys for the option to release the virus to even be available, so we're quickly informed that they fooled the computer by actually making it possible for the attempted military coup to take place, thus convincing the computer to go along with the plan to make humans sterile, eventually making the species go extinct. Not two minutes later, the newly recovered Hitomi stumbles through the door, and explains that the computer wasn't fooled so much as the old guys turned it off and have been doing everything on their own, even though this will kill them, too. Since the big red button to unleash the virus is disabled by being shot, the old guys decide to have the giant insect-like tanks guarding the city from the outside world make their way to the building with the D-tank to just shoot it at point blank range with their giant rail guns. As you might expect, this plan does not succeed, and as an added bonus all the old guys die so there's no need to deal with them in any way in the rushed resolution.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I didn't find the story or characters all that believable, and that the plot seemed rather forced and rushed along to me. Pacing was far too quick for characters to be fleshed out or given believable motivations for what they were doing, and what little story there was seemed to mostly be there as filler and exposition to set up the many action scenes. The soundtrack didn't do this movie any favors either, as it consisted mostly of some kind of J-rock/dance club music that was probably meant to get the audience's blood pumping but instead served mostly to distract, at least in my case. The animation is ... different. Everything is computer generated, much like the Final Fantasy movies, but rather than going for a more photorealistic look, everything was given a kind of animation cell texture in an effort to make it look more like traditional anime. I also found this to be somewhat distracting at times, mostly because while the main characters used motion capture from real actors, most of the characters tended to move very unrealistically, and I couldn't help but feel like I was watching the cut-scenes for a video game.
I don’t want to make this movie out to be all bad or anything, and to be fair, if you like action that involves a lot of gunfights and mech suits, you'll probably like this movie. Mainly I'm disappointed, because there was the basis for a good story here that just never got realized. It would have been a lot more interesting to me had there been more focus given to Deunan's character and how she dealt with the revelation that the war she had been fighting for most of her life was pointless and yet still going on, how she'd basically been denied a life in the pristine city her father and mother had helped to create until the creepy old men and the bioroid governor running the place decided they had a use for her, and how the boyfriend she thought was dead was actually still alive, had been allowed to live in Olympus himself and become a leader of the elite police ESWAT, but never came to her rescue until told to do so by the aforementioned old guys and bioroid governor. Hell, just dealing with the fact that her boyfriend was a robot would have been interesting, especially if she found she couldn't deal with this change and between that and never coming for her, decided she wanted nothing to do with him. I guess we're just supposed to be excited by the idea of Deunan riding his robo-dick or something.
In any case, you can probably guess that I'm not going to be rating this very high. It isn't horrible, but it's not really what I'd consider good, either, as it lacks in plot, character, and story. Instead, I found myself rather bored while watching this, even during the action scenes, making the movie very "meh" in nature, in my opinion, anyway. If all you're looking for is some action, you might like it, but if you're looking for anything more than that, you'll probably be disappointed the same as I was. 5/10.